Also between 1937 and 1939, Jews were forced from Germany's economic life: the Nazis either seized Jewish business and properties outright or forced Jews to sell them at bargain prices. Threats against Jews were the stock-in-trade of Nazism. So too was open violence, and the destruction of hundreds of synagogues. And on January 1939, six years after the Nazis had come to power, Hitler declared publicly that in the event of a war, the results will not be victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe. Within a few weeks of the German invasion of Poland on September 1939, many hundreds of Jews had been murdered in the streets of a dozen towns, and thousands more had been savagely beaten up throughout German occupied Poland. Yet an even worse fate had been planed for the two million Polish Jews who were now under German rule. According to The Times, the Germans intended to deport more than a million Jews into a concentration area. These Jews would be brought from every country; then put under German rule: all one hundred eighty thousand Jews who were still living in Germany, all sixty five thousand from Austria, all seventy thousand from Czech, and all four hundred fifty thousand from the western province of Poland now taken over by Germany. In addition, nearly one in a half million Jews from Poland itself would be uprooted from their homes, and sent to this area. .
It was "clear" that the aim of the scheme was to set up a place for gradual extermination, and not what the Germans would describe as a Lebensraum or living space. At the same time, hundreds of thousands of Jews remained in the newly created Ghettos of Poland, or were sent to a labor camp on the soviet border, to build fortifications, while hundreds of thousands more Jews came under Nazi rule as the German armies conquered Denmark and Norway in April 1940, France, Belgium, Holland, and Luxemburg in June 1940 and Greece and Yugoslavia in April, 19401 Another feature of Nazi rule was the concentration camp; by the summer of 1941 there were more than a dozen of these camps and prison centers scattered throughout the Reich.
