Leading to World War II , nearly all Jewish firms in Nazi Germany had either collapsed under financial pressure and declining profits , or had been forced to sell out to the Nazi German government as part of the " Aryanization " policy inaugurated in 1937 . As the war started , massacres of Jews took place originally as part of Operation Tannenberg against the Polish nation . The much larger and methodical mass killings of Jews began with the onset of Operation Barbarossa . Led by '' Einsatzkommandos '' and the Order Police battalions , the destruction of European Jews took place with the active participation of local Auxiliary Police including Belarusian , Estonian , Latvian , Lithuanian , and Ukrainian '' Schutzmannschaften ''
Operation Tannenberg
Operation Tannenberg
History of the Jews during World War II