Thursday July 31, 1941. Goering, Heydrich, and the final solution.

Herman Goering ordered Reinhard Heydrich to make final preparations to solve the "Jewish question".

It's sometimes claimed that the Germans never put anything regarding the Holocaust in writing, which is incorrect. This is one such example and the order was later used in Goering's post-war trial.  Goering didn't contest its authenticity, but claimed it had been mistranslated and that it addressed a "possible solution" rather than a "final solution", hardly much of a defense.

In reality, there exists plenty of documentary evidence about the German slaughter of the Jews.

Soviet wartime poster, the caption reads something like "Red Army soldier, all hope is on you."

The Germans were still advancing, of course, but they were beginning to encounter stiff Soviet resistance and were not advancing as rapidly as they had been.  It should have been clear that the war in the East was not simply a repeat of prior German advances.  Nonetheless, the Germans had fully lauched into a campaign of ethnic slaughter were seemed to presuppose a victory they hadn't secured.

On the same day Sweden, which had wrung its hands over an earlier request it agreed to, refused permission to Germany to allow a second German infantry division to cross Swedish territory by rail.  In the same region, the Finns completed the reconquest of the Karelian Isthmus and began the process, although not yet implementing it, of going into defensive lines.  The Finns refused a request to attack Leningrad and, moreover, they had already endured a refusal by 2,000 Finnish troops to cross beyond the 1939 border. While they'd gotten past that, the Finns were in the process of wrapping up their offensive operations as they retook their pre Winter War borders.

The Germans restructured their forces in North Africa, reflecting the expansion of their operations.  Rommel was put in charge of the newly created Panzer Armee Afrika and Ludwig Cruwell given command of the Afrika Korps.