It's important not to confuse the different terms related to the destruction by the Nazis of the european Jews during the Second World War. The « Holocaust » is not only the « Final Solution », and the « Final Solution » is not only Auschwitz and the gaz chambers...

Even if the main topic of the Wannsee conference held on January the 20th 1942 was to coordinate the « Final Solution » (Endlösung), this conference didn't give birth ex nihilo to the process in which the Nazis would attempt to exterminate the entire Jewish population of Europe, an estimated 11 million persons. In fact, there is not one date for this decision, and, mainly, it came as the climax of a whole process.

At the origins of the « Final Solution » is first of all an ideology, the Nazi ideology, preaching the supremacy of the Aryan race and therefore classifying certain groups of people as « unfitted ». Without further developpement, we can say that this took place in a Europe where anti-semitism did exist for a long time. Jewish persecution and segregation was installed in several steps. After it's accession to power in 1933, the Nazi Party started an anti-jewish policy, boycotts, progressive « aryanization » of the German society, in order to isolate the Jews and make them leave Germany. It's only after the invasion of Poland in 1939 that internement and deportation (that will further lead to extermination) was planned by the Nazis. In the global process of « Germanization » of western Poland to allow german population to settle this area, Nazis launched a mass ghettoization of the undesirable in the central territory of Poland (the « General Governement ») and in Warthegau (Poland area annexed to germany), such those occuring in mid october 1941, when 53000 Jews were moved to Minsk, Riga, when 5000 Gypsies were resettled in Łódź.

After the german invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, the Einsatzgruppen started to carry out mass murders against entire jewish communities