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1942: The "Final Solution"
 pg. 305 
 
A Jewish man scales the Warsaw Ghetto wall with a large bag of contraband food to be dropped to the waiting ghetto residents. Often children were used to smuggle food in their clothing. The German penalty for smuggling was death. Yet despite this, some Jews and Polish gentiles took the risk because the benefits--money and food for themselves and their families--seemed to outweigh the consequences.
Photo: Yad Vashem Archives
The Jews of Zychlin, Poland, were deported in March 1942. About 3500 Jews lived in the town when the Germans occupied it in 1939. One month before the 1942 liquidation, German police stormed the ghetto and killed hundreds of Jewish residents. On March 3 the remaining Jews were assembled in the marketplace, loaded on carts, and deported to the Chelmno death camp.
Photo: YIVO / United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Photo Archive
Vidkun Quisling

Vidkun Quisling, founder of the antisemitic political party Nasjonal Samling (NS, or National Unity), welcomed Germany's occupation of his own country on April 9, 1940. That evening his broadcast proclaimed a new Norwegian government. Quisling would be its prime minister.

This coup met Norwegian resistance, and did not entirely satisfy the Germans, who sidelined Quisling in favor of Josef Terboven, the German administrator who would govern Norway brutally throughout the war. Meanwhile, Quisling's persistence served some German interests; for example, he recruited Norwegian troops for the German military. On February 1, 1942, Terboven permitted Quisling to become Ministerpresident of a "national government." Quisling supported the subsequent deportation of Norwegian Jews to Auschwitz.

A Norwegian firing squad executed Quisling on October 24, 1945. His legacy is that his name has become a standard noun: A "quisling" is a traitor.
Photo: AP/Wide World

 February 1942: Thirty-three Jewish doctors in the Warsaw (Poland) Ghetto begin a study of the effects of starvation as they themselves slowly starve to death.
 February 1942: Jewish partisans in the Eastern Galicia region of Poland attack German troops in several locations.
 February 1942: Bricks and cut stone made by concentration-camp inmates are diverted from future official monuments and buildings to construct badly needed German arms factories.
 February 1, 1942: The SS Wirtschafts-Verwaltungshauptamt (Economic-Administrative Main Office; WVHA), led by Oswald Pohl, is established.
 February 13, 1942: At the Minsk (Belorussia) Ghetto, Nazis execute Jewish leaders deported from Hamburg, Germany, three months earlier.
 February 15, 1942: The first mass gassings of Jews at the Auschwitz, Poland, death camp begin.
 
1942: The "Final Solution"
 pg. 305 
The Holocaust Chronicle
© 2009 Publications International, Ltd.