one by Nazis. Dawidowicz says that "where compensation was paid to Jews, the German gov ernment would arrange to confiscate those payments. Jews would also be made liable to repair the damages" (Dawidowicz 138). Throughout the period, the concentration camps were being formed, and thou sands of Jews had died, committed suicide, or had been murdered. Now what makes all this preliminary is that systematic murder in facilities designed for that purpose had not yet begun. By 1939, as Dawidowicz comments, "Everything relating to the Jewish ques tion, it seemed, had been disposed of, except the Jews them selves" (Dawidowicz 139).
At the Wannsee Conference of 1942, the disposition mechanism was set in motion. There were some exceptions for what may be termed "special cases," and the details of implementing the idea were many, but the basic idea was that "Europe was 'to be combed through from west to east' for Jews, who would be evacuated 'group by group, into so-called transit ghettos, to be transpor ted from there farther to the East'" (Dawidowicz 183). The perio
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