In relation to WWII, what is "The Final Solution"?

Rudolf Hess and Adolf Hitler during the Reichstag session at which Hitler gave his last warning to the British Empire. Everett Collection Inc / Alamy Stock Photo

Before the get-go of World War Ii, effectually 9.v meg Jewish people lived in Europe. By the fourth dimension the state of war concluded, the Nazis had killed 6 million European Jews in concentration camps, or pogroms, or ghettos, or mass executions in what nosotros refer to today every bit the Holocaust. The Nazis used the term Endlösung, or Last Solution, as the "answer" to the "Jewish question." Merely when did this monstrous program become put in motion?

Adolf Hitler had provided clues to his ambition to commit mass genocide as early as 1922, telling journalist Josef Hell, "Once I actually am in ability, my get-go and foremost task will exist the annihilation of the Jews."

Simply how he would enact such a plan wasn't ever articulate. For a brief period, the Führer and other Nazi leaders toyed with the idea of mass deportation every bit a method of creating a Europe without Jews (Madagascar and the Chill Circle were 2 suggested relocation sites). Displacement nevertheless would've resulted in thousands of deaths, though perhaps in less direct ways.

When exactly Hitler settled on straightforward murder every bit a ways of removal has been harder to pinpoint. As Yale historian Timothy Snyder writes, "It cannot be stressed enough that the Nazis did non know how to eradicate the Jews when they began the war confronting the Soviet Marriage [in the summertime of 1941]… They could not be confident that SS men would shoot women and children in big numbers." Merely every bit Functioning Barbarossa, the proper name for the Nazi invasion of the U.Southward.S.R, proved during the mass shootings of June 1941 and the massacres at Kiev in September, the Order Police and Einsatzgrüppen were more than willing to commit mass murders. This meant Hitler could have the solution to the Jewish problem to its "furthest extremes," in the words of Philipp Bouhler, the senior Nazi official responsible for the euthanasia program that killed more than than 70,000 handicapped German people.

Co-ordinate to scholars Christian Gerlach and Peter Monteath, amidst others, the pivotal moment for Hitler'south decision came on December 12, 1941, at a surreptitious meeting with some l Nazi officials, including Joseph Goebbels (Nazi minister of propaganda) and Hans Frank (governor of occupied Poland). Though no written documents of the meeting survive, Goebbels described the meeting in his periodical on December thirteen, 1941:

"With respect of the Jewish Question, the Führer has decided to make a clean sweep. He prophesied to the Jews that if they over again brought about a world war, they would live to see their annihilation in information technology. That wasn't just a catchword… If the German people have now again sacrificed 160,000 dead on the eastern front, then those responsible for this encarmine conflict volition have to pay with their lives."

In addition to Goebbels'south diary entry, historians cite the notes of High german diplomat Otto Brautigam, who on December 18, 1941, wrote that "as for the Jewish question, oral discussions have taken place [and] have brought most description."

This meeting, which would be followed by the Jan 1942 Wannsee Conference (where the conclusion on exterminating all European Jews was farther reinforced), was hardly the start of violence against Jews. Attacks had been happening in Nazi Frg'due south occupied territories for years. What differentiated this period from earlier attacks was "an escalation of murder," says Elizabeth White, historian at the Us Holocaust Memorial Museum.

"At some signal I think, with the development of killing centers, [the Nazis] felt that they had the means and opportunity to realize the vision of a Jew-costless Europe now rather than wait until after Germany had won [the war]."

Australian historian Peter Monteath echoes that determination, writing in 1998 that the December 12 decision "made it clear that the principle of killing Jews in the occupied territories in the east was to be extended to all European Jews, including those in Frg and Western Europe."

In the decades that followed the Nuremburg Trials, in which Nazi officials, charged with crimes against peace and humanity, hid backside the excuse that they were just following orders, historians grappled with questions of blame and guilt. Had Hitler and top Nazi officials been solely responsible for the genocide? How complicit were lower-level Nazis and members of the Order Police?

"We had large gaps in our knowledge because most of the documentation almost how the genocide was carried out on the ground was captured by the Soviet Reddish Ground forces and wasn't available until after the Cold State of war," says White. The fall of the Soviet Spousal relationship led to a banquet of wartime bureaucratic records, allowing historians to realize how much leeway Nazi officials were given. It became readily clear that the number of Nazis involved in enacting the Final Solution was much larger than previously believed.

"The mode Hitler worked was he would make these pronouncements, and people would go off and figure out, what did he mean? How are we going to practice this?" says White. "You could piece of work towards the Führer by existence innovative and ruthless."

In other words, rather than giving explicit orders to each member of the Nazi party, Hitler fabricated numerous statements vilifying Jewish people and declaring the need to exterminate them.

After the December 12 meeting, these proclamations took a more than precise tone: the Nazis needed to kill all Jews, including German Jews and Western European Jews, and they needed to do so systematically. What had started as uncertain and sporadic violence chop-chop turned into wholesale slaughter, complete with gas chambers and concentration camps. Six weeks after, SS chief Heinrich Himmler, the Nazi official responsible for the implementation of the Final Solution, ordered the beginning Jews of Europe to Auschwitz.

The Holocaust had truly begun.

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Source: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/first-moments-hitlers-final-solution-180961387/

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