[Historical note: The deportation of German, Austrian and Czech Jews begins. After Adolf Hitler's authorization in September 1941, German authorities began deporting German, Austrian, and Czech Jews from the Greater German Reich to ghettos, shooting sites, concentration camps, and killing centers, primarily in German-occupied Poland, the German-occupied Baltic States, and German-occupied Belarus, but also eventually to Theresienstadt in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. From October 15, 1941, until October 29, 1942, German authorities deport approximately 183,000 German, Austrian, and Czech Jews to ghettos, transit ghettos, killing centers, and killing sites in the Baltic States, in Belorussia, in the Generalgouvernement, and the Lodz ghetto.

The European rail network played a crucial role in the implementation of the Final Solution. Jews from Germany and German-occupied Europe were deported by rail to extermination camps in occupied Poland, where they were killed. The Germans attempted to disguise their intentions, referring to deportations as "resettlement to the east." The victims were told they were to be taken to labor camps, but in reality, from 1942 onward, deportation meant transit to killing centers for most Jews. Deportations on this scale required the coordination of numerous German government ministries, including the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA), the Transport Ministry, and the Foreign Office. The RSHA coordinated and directed the deportations; the Transport Ministry organized train schedules; and the Foreign Office negotiated with German-allied states to hand over their Jews.

Operation Reinhard begins
Heinrich Himmler tasks the SS and Police Leader in Lublin District, SS General Odilo Globocnik, with implementing what later becomes known as "Operation Reinhard," the physical annihilation of the Jews residing in the Generalgouvernement.

The Operation Reinhard team was ultimately responsible for the murder of approximately 1.7 million Jews, most of them Polish Jews. The overwhelming majority of victims in the Operation Reinhard killing centers-Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka-were Jews deported from ghettos in Poland. Once the killing centers were operational, German SS and police forces liquidated the ghettos and deported Jews by rail to those killing centers. The victims of Belzec were mainly Jews from the ghettos of southern Poland, and included German, Austrian, and Czech Jews held in the Piaski and Izbica transit ghettos in Lublin District. Jews deported to Sobibor came mainly from the Lublin area and other ghettos of the eastern Generalgouvernement; this killing center also received transports from France and the Netherlands. Deportations to Treblinka originated mainly from central Poland, primarily from the Warsaw ghetto, but also from the Districts Radom and Krakow in the Generalgouvernement, from District Bialystok, as well as from Bulgarian-occupied Thrace and Macedonia.]

(Two New Zealanders, Second Lieutenant Charles Hazlitt Upham and Sergeant Alfred Clive Hulme.)

(While no British destroyers were sunk, a British Flower class corvette was. HMS Fleur de Lys K-122 was torpedoed and sunk by U-206. Only three of the crew survived.)

(Well over three million Soviet prisoners!)