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
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- published: 20 Mar 2014
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