#12: Wannsee and the Final Solution
With the "success" of both the killing squads in the east and the starvation in the ghettos in German-occupied Poland, a new prospect presented itself to Hitler, Himmler and the SS: blood need not be shed in any German street, or risk taken of local protests at violence done to the Jews of Germany. Instead, those German Jews who had not managed to emigrate before the outbreak of war would be deported to the east: either to the ghettos on Polish soil, where they would be left to suffer and starve with the local population, or to killing sites in the east. Tens of thousands of Jews had been murdered between June and October 1941 in the Ratomskaya ravine on the outskirts of Minsk, in the Rumbula forest outside Riga, and in the nineteenth century Tsarist forts surrounding the city of Kovno -- principally the Ninth Fort. German Jews would be sent to these destinations: they would never be seen again in the streets of Greater Germany, and their distant fate could be kept a secret.