Over time, the Nazis became ever more overtly violent in their goal to eliminate the European Jewish population. They set up ghettos throughout Poland and eastern Europe to forcibly isolate Jews. As a result of these inhumane conditions Jews died from starvation and disease in great numbers.
In the summer of 1941, Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing squads) and collaborators perpetrated mass murder of Jewish men, women and children in territory that was formerly occupied by the Soviet Union, known as the “Holocaust by bullets.” At Babyn Yar (alternately spelled Babi Yar), in Ukraine, over 33,000 Jews were shot in only two days. It is estimated that over 2 million Jews were murdered by bullets.
This method of murder caused serious psychological effects for the perpetrators, which led the Nazis to look for a more efficient and less personal method of killing. Killing centres, such as Treblinka and Auschwitz, became facilities for the “Final Solution,” an assembly-line style of mass murder of Jews.