How were the Nazis able to carry out their plans for mass murder? What obstacles did they face? What restrained them? It is evident that from the outbreak of the war the Nazis were determined to remove Jews from Europe, although at that point they did not know how to achieve this goal. It was only after the attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941 that it became clear to them that it was possible to exterminate millions of people, primarily Jews. Nevertheless in some countries they were able to carry out more completely their campaign of murder than in others. What explained the differences in the efficiency of killing?

The fundamental difference was between East and West. The two parts of the European continent experienced different Holocausts – but not from the point of view of the Jewish victims, who were deported to ghettos or to extermination camps from all areas of Europe. In fact, Western European Jews were just as likely to die as their Eastern European coreligionists. However, the East witnessed horrors that the Nazis were not capable of performing in Western European countries. It would have been unthinkable in, say, Amsterdam to gather Jews, take them outside of the city, shoot them, and bury them in mass graves. There were no mass extermination camps or ghettos in Western Europe.