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Site of the Wannsee Conference. On January 20, 1942, a meeting of high-level Nazi officials representing the SS and police, the party, and various government ministries took place at a villa on Lake Wannsee near Berlin. What later became known as the "Wannsee Conference" was convened by Head of the Security Police and the Security Service of the SS Reinhard Heydrich to discuss coordination of efforts for the implementation of the the genocidal plan for the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question.”

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The capital of Poland and the largest city in the country before World War II, Warsaw was home to the largest Jewish community in Europe with approximately 350,000 people. Warsaw was occupied by the Nazis on September 29, 1939 and fell under the administration of the Generalgouvernement. The Warsaw Ghetto was the largest ghetto in Nazi-occupied Poland. In October 1940 and some 400,000 Jews from Warsaw and surrounding communities were condensed into an area of 1.3 square miles. In the spring of 1943, Nazi attempts to liquidate the ghetto and deport the remaining inhabitants were met with armed resistance from a group of Jewish fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. After a month of fighting, the Nazis burned the ghetto block by block to end the insurgency. In 1944, Warsaw was the site of a Polish uprising led by the Polish Home Army, which was brutally crushed by the Nazis. By the time of its liberation by Soviet troops on January 17, 1945, the city center of Warsaw had been razed to the ground and its prewar population of 1.3 million had been reduced to c. 174,000.