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It's something that I've thought about whenever there's been a scenario where the German invasion of the Soviet Union is postponed for whatever reason (France fights on from North Africa in 1940, the Entente halts the blitzkrieg in 1940...).

One theory that I've encountered is that even if Barbarossa was postponed indefinitely and Germany was still fighting France and Britain on the continent, for example, Hitler would still start the mass extermination of all the Jews under German control in 1941 or so. This is because when Barbarossa was a distinct prospect OTL, the Germans kept the Poles (and particularly the Polish Jews) alive as a potential forced labour source for building roads, farms, etc. in Russia. With such a scenario faded into the future, they'd be likely to decide to destroy all the "useless mouths" and exterminate all the Jews of Poland and probably deport everybody else to the General Government. That's a year ahead of OTL, and the SS & Einsatzgruppen would be concentrated in one country rather than spread across most of Europe. So the argument goes.

Another argument that I've encountered is that Pearl Harbor was the trigger, as America's entry into WWII meant that Hitler's hands were untied. He no longer had to make any serious pretenses. The Final Solution was always intended, but it took time to set up the apparatus. Simply put, the Germans didn't have the resources ready so early as in 1941 for mass extermination camps.

However, a third theory that I've encountered, and one that I think is closest to the truth, is that Operation Barbarossa and its speedy advance is what really set the ball rolling for the industrial-scale mass extermination. See, by June 1941 OTL thousands of Jews had already died due to disease and starvation in overcrowded ghettoes, as well as outright murder by the Germans. The first organized killing of Jews by German forces occurred in September-October 1939 in conjunction with Operation Tannenberg, during which at least 20,000 were killed, though most of the victims were members of the Polish intelligentsia. However, by June 1941 no program of systematic killing yet existed.

This changed with Barbarossa. By the end of 1941 the Germans were in control of hundreds of thousands of more Jews, in addition to the millions in Poland. It's estimated that the Baltic states, Belarus, Ukraine and most Russian territory west of the line Leningrad-Moscow-Rostov contained about three million Jews, including the hundreds of thousands who had fled Poland in 1939.

By the end of 1941 about 900,000 Jews had already been murdered in Eastern Europe, the "holocaust by bullet." Concrete steps towards the "Final Solution" were taken between September 16, 1941 and October 25, 1941. During their meeting on September 16 Hitler told Himmler that he wanted to "drive all the Jews from Germany." On October 10, Reinhard Heydrich announced that all German Jews would be transported to the Lodz, Riga and Minsk ghettoes, which were already overcrowded and breeding grounds for famine and disease. During this time Himmler met Odilo Globocnik, or "Globus" for short, the SS administrator of the Lublin area. After this meeting Himmler approved of the creation of the first extermination camp at Belzec in eastern Poland.

By October-November 1941 there was some form of decision of exterminating every single Jew in Europe. But there was still much bickering and in-fighting among the various bureaus and agencies responsible for Jewish affairs over how to proceed with the operation. The solution, of course, occurred at the Wannsee conference in January 1942, which proved to be a "bureaucratic breakthrough."

After this the Holocaust began in earnest. In March 1942 Belzec became the first fully-equipped death camp. By this date 530,000 Jews in Eastern Galicia had already been killed with gas vans. The most intense phase of the Holocaust occurred in the period of February-June 1942, during which an average of 30,000 Jews died per day, or about 4-4.5 million. By the end of 1943, before Auschwitz became the cornerstone of the Final Solution, about 75% of the Jews that had been gathered for extermination had already been killed.

So, in my opinion, though the aim of exterminating the Jews was always there, it was the invasion of the USSR that really spurred the Nazis into actively seeking methods of extermination, and until such an invasion occurred, there wouldn't have been an active extermination program, with the Nazis continuing to settle for the deportation-and-ghetto method instead. But I'm certainly open to other ideas.
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