The extermination campaign was systematic across occupied Eastern Europe, focusing on Jewish populations. Warsaw saw its ghetto established in October 1940, trapping over 400,000 people in conditions marked by starvation, disease, and recorded instances of cannibalism. The Sarny massacre in August 1942 executed an estimated fourteen thousand Jews and one hundred Roma, involving the Axis and collaborators like the Todt organization.

Debate centers on resistance versus compliance. Some threads contrast the organized armed struggle, like the United Anti‐Fascist Bloc in Białystok, with the recorded forced surrenders, such as the Vilna ghetto's final actions under Jacob Gens and Josef Glazman. A more scathing point reveals the active complicity of local structures: Jewish police and Judenrat administrators in Białystok and Warsaw played direct roles in carrying out selections and deportations under the guise of maintaining order.

The overwhelming pattern is one of institutionalized mass murder implemented by Axis forces, heavily reliant on local collaborators. While armed resistance occurred, the depth of systemic complicity—where local administrators participated in the logistics of killing and selection—is the clearest thread running through accounts from Białystok, Warsaw, and Sarny.