Hitler's prophecy for the destruction of the Jews moved closer to realization with a new Nazi plan devised in January 1942. Almost as soon as the Einsatzgruppen had gone into operation in the Soviet territories in June 1941, it became apparent that the mobile killing squads were too unwieldy to accomplish Hitler's goal of a Jew-free Europe. So on January 20, 1942, senior German officials met at Wannsee in suburban Berlin to establish the administrative procedures that would expand the murder machine. The Germans' solution to the Jewish problem would escalate beyond killing hundreds of thousands of Jews through mass starvation, sporadic pogroms, widespread disease, and back-breaking labor; they were poised to murder millions in specially designed, efficiently operating extermination centers.

Camps for mass gassings had already been set up in Chelmno, north of Lodz, and at Birkenau, part of the Auschwitz facility in Silesia. In the first half of 1942, the major extermination centers, Belzec, Sobibor, Birkenau, Maidanek, and Treblinka, began operation. The mobile killing squads were not finished yet either. They made a second sweep through the Crimean, adding another half-million Jews to their tally.