The Final Solution (German: (die) Endlösung, German pronunciation: [ˈɛntˌløːzʊŋ]) was Nazi Germany's plan during World War II to exterminate the Jewish people in German-occupied Europe, which resulted in the most deadly phase of the Holocaust, the destruction of Jewish communities in continental Europe. According to historians at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, "The Nazis frequently used euphemistic language to disguise the true nature of their crimes. They used the term "Final Solution" to refer to their plan to annihilate the Jewish people." From 1938 until June 1941, the Nazis set out to get rid of the Jews in Germany and its occupied territories. When they were unable to expel most of the Jews, they forced them into ghettos pending other solutions. After the invasion of the Soviet Union, in 1941 the Nazi government turned to the plan to exterminate European Jews. Heinrich Himmler was the chief architect of the plan, which came to be called the Final Solution of the Jewish question (German: die Endlösung der Judenfrage, German pronunciation: [diː ˈɛntˌløːzʊŋ deːɐ̯ ˈjuːdn̩ˌfʀaːgə]).[1] Massacres of about one million Jews occurred before the plans of the Final Solution were fully implemented in 1942, but it was only with the decision to eradicate the entire Jewish population that the extermination camps were built and industrialized mass slaughter of Jews began in earnest. This decision to systematically kill the Jews of political Europe (inclusive of the Jews in Vichy North Africa) was made either by the time of or at the Wannsee Conference, which took place in Berlin, in the Wannsee Villa on January 20, 1942, shortly after the Babi Yar massacre. The conference was chaired by Reinhard Heydrich, acting under the authority given to him by Reichsmarschall Göring in a letter dated July 31, 1941. Göring instructed Heydrich to devise "...the solution of the Jewish problem..." During the conference, there was a discussion by the group of Nazi officials as how best to handle the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question". A surviving copy of the minutes of this meeting[2] was found by the Allies in 1947, too late to serve as evidence during the first Nuremberg Trials. By the summer of 1942, Operation Reinhard began the systematic extermination of the Jews, although hundreds of thousands had already been killed by death squads and in mass pogroms. Heinrich Himmler's speech at the Posen Conference of October 6, 1943, for the first time, clearly elucidated to all assembled leaders of the Reich that the "Final Solution" meant that "all Jews would be killed".[3] At the end of the war, captured German documents provided a record of the policies and actions of Nazi Germany. The Wannsee Conference Protocol, which documented the cooperation of various German state agencies in the SS-led Holocaust, and the Einsatzgruppen Reports, which documented the progress of the mobile killing units assigned, among other tasks, to kill Jewish civilians during the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, were among the documents central to the Holocaust submitted at Nuremberg. "Hitler exterminated the Jews of Europe. But he did not do so alone. The task was so enormous, complex, time-consuming, and mentally and economically demanding that it took the best efforts of millions of Germans... All spheres of life in Germany actively participated: Businessmen, policemen, bankers, doctors, lawyers, soldiers, railroad and factory workers, chemists, pharmacists, foremen, production managers, economists, manufacturers, jewelers, diplomats, civil servants, propagandists, film makers and film stars, professors, teachers, politicians, mayors, party members, construction experts, art dealers, architects, landlords, janitors, truck drivers, clerks, industrialists, scientists, generals, and even shopkeepers—all were essential cogs in the machinery that accomplished the final solution." —Konnilyn G. Feig http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_solution Image: Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-N0827-318 / CC-BY-SA [CC-BY-SA-3.0-de (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/de/deed.en)], via Wikimedia Commons

• published: 20 Mar 2014
• views: 254