1939-1942: Persecution and Segregation

Between 1939 and 1942, the Holocaust escalated dramatically as Nazi Germany expanded its control across Europe during World War II. Nazi discrimination expanded beyond Jews to target other groups, including Roma and the Sinti, disabled individuals, male homosexuals, Poles, Soviets incarcerated as POWs, and others deemed racially or politically "undesirable." In occupied Eastern Europe, the Nazis forced Jews into overcrowded, sealed ghettos under inhumane conditions, leading to starvation, disease, and death. During this period, the Nazis also launched the T4 Program, a secret campaign to systematically murder people with disabilities through forced euthanasia, labeling them as "life unworthy of life." These actions marked a deadly escalation in the regime's efforts to enforce its ideology of racial purity and control through terror. Following the invasion of Poland in 1939, millions of Jews came under Nazi rule and were forced into overcrowded ghettos, facing starvation, disease, and violence. This ghettoization was a key step in isolating and controlling Jewish populations before mass deportations to extermination camps.