Final Solution

This article is about the Nazi Germany policy. For other uses, see Final Solution (disambiguation).

In a February 26, 1942, letter to German diplomat Martin Luther, Reinhard Heydrich follows up on the Wannsee Conference by asking Luther for administrative assistance in the implementation of the "Endlösung der Judenfrage" (Final Solution to the Jewish Question).

The Final Solution (Template:Lang-de, pronounced [ˈɛntˌløːzʊŋ]) or the Final Solution to the Jewish Question (Template:Lang-de, pronounced [diː ˈɛntˌløːzʊŋ deːɐ̯ ˈjuːdn̩ˌfʁaːɡə]) was a German plan for the extermination of the Jews during World War II. This policy of deliberate and systematic genocide across German-occupied Europe was formulated in procedural terms by Nazi leadership in January 1942 at the Wannsee Conference near Berlin, and culminated in the Holocaust which saw the killing of two thirds of the Jewish population of Europe.

No aspect of the Holocaust has been studied and debated as intensively as the nature and timing of the decisions that led to the Final Solution. The program evolved during the first 25 months of war leading to the attempt at "murdering every last Jew in the German grasp." Most historians agree, wrote Christopher Browning, that the Final Solution cannot be attributed to a single decision made at one particular point in time. "It is generally accepted the decision-making process was prolonged and incremental." In the first phase of the mass murder of Jews, wrote Raul Hilberg, the mobile killers pursued their victims across occupied territories; in the second phase, affecting all of Europe, the victims were brought to the killers at the centralized extermination camps built for this purpose.

Background

The villa at 56–58 Am Großen Wannsee, where the Wannsee Conference was held, is now a memorial and museum.

The term "Final Solution" was a euphemism used by the Nazis to refer to their plan for the annihilation of the Jewish people. Historians, including Mark Roseman, have shown that the usual tendency of the German leadership was to be extremely guarded when discussing the Final Solution. Euphemisms were "their normal mode of communicating about murder".

From gaining power in January 1933 until the outbreak of war in September 1939, the Nazi persecution of the Jews in Germany was focused on intimidation, expropriating their money and property, and encouraging them to emigrate. After the Anschluss with Austria in 1938, special offices were established in Vienna and Berlin to "facilitate" Jewish emigration without covert plans for their forthcoming annihilation.

The outbreak of war and the invasion of Poland brought a population of three million Polish Jews under the control of the Nazi security forces, and marked the start of a far more savage persecution, including mass killings. Jews were forced into ghettos pending other arrangements. After the attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941 the German top echelon began to conceive of a plan to exterminate the Jews to achieve Lebensraum rather than through their forcible displacement. Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler was the chief architect of the plan, which came to be called "the Final Solution to the Jewish Question". On July 31, 1941, Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring wrote to Reinhard Heydrich (Himmler's deputy and chief of the RSHA), instructing Heydrich to submit concrete proposals for the implementation of the projected new goal.

Broadly speaking, the extermination of Jews was carried out in two major operations. With the onset of Operation Barbarossa in June 1941, mobile killing units of the SS and Orpo were dispatched to Soviet occupied territories of eastern Poland and further into the Soviet republics for the express purpose of killing all Jews. During the massive chase after the fleeing Red Army Himmler himself visited Białystok in the beginning of July 1941 and requested that, "as a matter of principle any Jew" behind the German-Soviet frontier "was to be regarded as a partisan". His new orders gave the SS and police leaders full authority for the mass murder behind the front-lines. By August 1941 all Jewish men, women and children were shot. In the second phase of annihilation, the Jewish inhabitants of central, western, and south-eastern Europe were transported by Holocaust trains to camps with newly-built gassing facilities. Raul Hilberg wrote: "In essence, the killers of the occupied USSR moved to the victims, whereas outside this arena, the victims were brought to the killers. The two operations constitute an evolution not only chronologically but also in complexity." Massacres of about one million Jews occurred before plans for the Final Solution were fully implemented in 1942, but it was only with the decision to annihilate the entire Jewish population that extermination camps such as Auschwitz II Birkenau and Treblinka were fitted with permanent gas chambers to kill large numbers of Jews in a relatively short period of time.

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, Hitler's death camps   

The decision to systematically kill the Jews of Europe "irrespective of geographic borders" had been made at the Wannsee Villa near Berlin on January 20, 1942. The conference was chaired by Heydrich, and attended by 15 senior officials of the Nazi Party and the German government. Most of those attending were representatives of the Interior Ministry, the Foreign Ministry, and the Justice Ministry, including Ministers for the Eastern Territories. The purpose of the conference was to discuss and co-ordinate plans outlined by Heydrich as how best to implement the "Final Solution of the Jewish question". A surviving copy of the minutes of this meeting was found by the Allies in March 1947; it was too late to serve as evidence during the first Nuremberg Trial but was used by prosecutor General Telford Taylor in the subsequent Nuremberg Trials.

After the end of World War II, surviving archival documents provided a clear record of the Final Solution policies and actions of Nazi Germany. They included the Wannsee Conference Protocol, which documented the co-operation 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 attack on the Soviet Union in 1941. The evidential proof which documented the mechanism of the Holocaust were submitted at Nuremberg.

Phase one: killing squads of Operation Barbarossa

Main articles: Einsatzgruppen and Einsatzkommando

The Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union codenamed Operation Barbarossa, which commenced on June 22, 1941, set in motion a "war of destruction" which quickly opened the door to systematic mass murder of European Jews. For Hitler, Bolshevism was merely "the most recent and most nefarious manifestation of the eternal Jewish threat". On March 3, 1941, Wehrmacht Joint Operations Staff Chief Alfred Jodl repeated Hitler's declaration that the "Jewish-Bolshevik intelligentsia would have to be eliminated" and that the forthcoming war would be a confrontation between two completely opposing cultures. In May 1941, Gestapo leader Heinrich Müller wrote a preamble to the new law limiting the jurisdiction of military courts in prosecuting troops for criminal actions because: "this time the troops will encounter an especially dangerous element from the civilian population, therefore, have the right and obligation to secure themselves."

Himmler assembled a force of about 3,000 men from Security Police, Gestapo, Kripo, SD, and the Waffen-SS, as the so-called "special commandos of the security forces", known as Einsatzgruppen, to eliminate both communists and Jews in occupied territories. These forces were supported by 21 battalions of Orpo Reserve Police under Kurt Daluege, adding up to 11,000 men. The explicit orders given to the Order Police varied between locations, but for Police Battalion 309 in charge of the first mass murder of 5,000 Polish Jews during "Red Friday" in the Soviet-controlled Białystok, Major Weiss explained to his officers that Barbarossa is a war of annihilation against Bolshevism, and that his battalions would proceed ruthlessly against all Jews.

After crossing the Soviet demarcation line in 1941 what had been regarded as exceptional in Nazi Germany, became a normal way of operating in the east. The crucial taboo against the killing of women and children was breached not only in Białystok but also in Gargždai in late June. By July, significant numbers of women and children were being killed behind all front lines not only by the Germans but also by the local Ukrainian and Lithuanian auxiliary forces. Before the end of September 1941 the largest single massacre of Jewish men, women and children took place in the ravine of Babi Yar near Kiev when more than 33,000 Jews were systematically machine-gunned. In mid-October 1941, HSSPF South, under the command of Friedrich Jeckeln, had reported the indiscriminate killing of more than 100,000 people.

By the end of 1941, still before the Wannsee Conference, between 600,000 and 800,000 Jewish people had been murdered and entire regions were reported "free of Jews". By this time, awareness of the Final Solution policy in the east was spreading. Addressing his district governors in the General Government on December 16, 1941, Governor-General Hans Frank said, "But what will happen to the Jews? Do you believe they will be lodged in settlements in Ostland? In Berlin, we were told: why all this trouble; we cannot use them in the Ostland or the Reichskommissariat either; liquidate them yourselves!"

Final Solution in Reichskommissariat Ostland

Original map from Stahlecker drawn in 1941, summarizing murders committed by Einsatzgruppen in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus and Russia

See also: Reichskommissariat Ostland

Several scholars have noted that the Final Solution began in Reichskommissariat Ostland during a massive German attack against the Red Army. Dina Porat wrote: "The Final Solution – the systematic overall physical extermination of Jewish communities one after the other – began in Lithuania." The subject of the Holocaust in Lithuania has been analysed by Konrad Kweit who wrote: "Lithuanian Jews were among the first victims of the Holocaust [beyond the eastern borders of occupied Poland]. The Germans carried out the mass executions [...] signaling the beginning of the "Final Solution"."

Final Solution in Reichskommissariat Ukraine

See also: Reichskommissariat Ukraine

Formed officially on August 20, 1941 the Reichskommissariat Ukraine has become operational theatre of the Einsatzgruppe C from the start of Operation Barbarossa. On 2 July 1941 Heydrich issued an order to the Einsatzkommandos for the on-the-spot execution of all Bolsheviks, interpreted by the SS to mean all Jews. On August 26-28, 1941 at Kamianets-Podilskyi the indiscriminate massacre of men, women and children took the lives of 23,600 Jews including 14,000-18,000 people expelled from Hungary. Likewise, between 9 July 1941 and 19 September 1941 Zhytomyr was made Judenfrei in three murder operations conducted by German and Ukrainian police in which 10,000 Jews perished. Long before the conference at Wannsee, on 22 September 1941 in Vinnytsia 28,000 Jews were shot by SS and Ukrainian military in a similar manner, followed by the 29 September massacre of 33,771 Jews at Babi Yar.

Final Solution in Distrikt Galizien

Dr. Samuel Drix (Witness to Annihilation), Jochaim Schoenfeld (Holocaust Memoirs), and several survivors of the Janowska concentration camp, who were interviewed in the film Janovska Camp at Lvov, among other witnesses, have convincingly argued that the Final Solution began in Lwów (Lemberg) in Distrikt Galizien of the General Government during the German advance. Statements and memoirs of survivors emphasize that, when Ukrainian nationalists and ad hoc Ukrainian People's Militia (soon reorganized as the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police) began to murder women and children rather than only male Jews, the "Final Solution" was begun. Witnesses have said that such murders happened both prior to and during the pogroms associated with the "Prison Massacre". The question of whether there was some coordination between the Lithuanian and Ukrainian militias remains open (i.e. collaborating for a joint assault in Kovno, Wilno, and Lwów). Historians still find it difficult to determine precisely when the first concerted effort at annihilation of all Jews began in the last weeks of June 1941 during Operation Barbarossa, despite the assertion of Dina Porat that the Lithuanian Jews, rather than the Galician Jews, had the dubious distinction of being the first victims of the Final Solution.

Phase two: death camps of General Government

See also: General Government

The construction work on the first killing centre at Bełżec in occupied Poland preceded the Wannsee Conference by three months. The new camp was operational by March the following year. By mid-1942, two more death camps had been built on Polish lands: Sobibór operational by May 1942, and Treblinka operational in July. From July 1942, the mass murder of Polish and foreign Jews took place under the auspices of Operation Reinhard. The total number of people killed in 1942 in Lublin/Majdanek, Bełżec, Sobibór and Treblinka was 1,274,166 by Germany's own account. Both Treblinka and Bełżec were equipped with powerful crawler excavators from Polish construction sites in the vicinity, capable of most digging tasks without disrupting surfaces. Although other methods of extermination, such as the cyanic poison Zyklon B, were already being used at other Nazi killing centres such as Auschwitz, the Aktion Reinhard camps used lethal exhaust gases from captured tank engines.

By 1943 the extermination of European Jewry was taking place. The programme of murdering all Jews was explicitly addressed by Heinrich Himmler in his Posen speeches made to the leadership of the Nazi Party on 4 October and during the Posen Conference of 6 October 1943 in occupied Poland. Himmler discussed why the Nazi leadership found it necessary to kill Jewish women and children along with Jewish men. The assembled leaders were explained that the Nazi state policy was "the extermination of the Jewish people" as such.

We were faced with the question: what about the women and children? – I decided to find a clear solution to this problem too. I did not consider myself justified to exterminate the men – in other words, to kill them or have them killed and allow the avengers of our sons and grandsons in the form of their children to grow up. The difficult decision had to be made to have this people disappear from the earth. For the organisation which had to execute this task, it was the most difficult which we had ever had. [...] I felt obliged to you, as the most superior dignitary, as the most superior dignitary of the party, this political order, this political instrument of the Führer, to also speak about this question quite openly and to say how it has been. The Jewish question in the countries that we occupy will be solved by the end of this year. Only remainders of odd Jews that managed to find hiding places will be left over. — Heinrich Himmler, October 6, 1943, Posen

Historiographic debate about the decision

Historians disagree as to precisely when Hitler personally (1) decided that the European Jews should be killed and (2) gave orders to that effect. The issue is commonly described as functionalism versus intentionalism: was the Holocaust gradually improvised, or was it the execution of a plan laid in advance?

Prior to the beginning of World War II, during a speech given on January 30, 1939 (the sixth anniversary of his accession to power), Hitler foretold the coming Holocaust of the Jews of Europe when he said:

Today I will once more be a prophet: If the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevization of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe!

Raul Hilberg, in his book The Destruction of the European Jews, was the first historian to systematically document and analyse the Nazi project to kill every Jew in Europe. The book was initially published in 1961, and issued in an enlarged version in 1985.

Hilberg's analysis of the steps that led to the destruction of European Jews states that it was "an administrative process carried out by bureaucrats in a network of offices spanning a continent". Hilberg divides this bureaucracy into four components or hierarchies: the Nazi Party, the civil service, industry, and the Wehrmacht or armed forces—but their cooperation is viewed as "so complete that we may truly speak of their fusion into a machinery of destruction". For Hilberg, the key stages in the destruction process were: definition and registration of the Jews; expropriation of property; concentration into ghettoes and camps; and, finally, annihilation. Hilberg gives an estimate of 5.1 million as the total number of Jews killed. He breaks this figure down into three categories: Ghettoization and general privation: over 800,000; open-air shootings: over 1,300,000; extermination camps: up to 3,000,000.

With respect to the "functionalism versus intentionalism" debate, Hilberg posits what has been described as "a kind of structural determinism". Hilberg argues "a destruction process has an inherent pattern" and the "sequence of steps in a destruction process is thus determined". If a bureaucracy is motivated "to inflict maximum damage upon a group of people", it is "inevitable that a bureaucracy—no matter how decentralized its apparatus or how unplanned its activities—should push its victims through these stages", culminating in their annihilation.

In his detailed account, The Origins Of The Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939 – March 1942, published in 2004, Christopher Browning argues that Nazi policy toward the Jews was radicalized twice: in September 1939, when the invasion of Poland implied policies of mass expulsion and massive loss of Jewish lives; and in spring 1941, when preparation for Operation Barbarossa involved the planning of mass execution, mass expulsion and starvation—to dwarf what had happened in Jewish Poland.

Browning believes that the "Final Solution as it is now understood—the systematic attempt to murder every last Jew within the German grasp" took shape during a five-week period, 18 September to 25 October 1941. During this time: the sites of the first extermination camps were selected, different methods of killing were tested, Jewish emigration from the Third Reich was forbidden, and 11 transports departed for Łódź as a temporary holding station. During this period, Browning writes, "The vision of the Final Solution had crystallised in the minds of the Nazi leadership and was being turned into reality." This period was the peak of Nazi victories against the Soviet Army on the Eastern Front, and, according to Browning, the stunning series of German victories led to both an expectation that the war would soon be won, and the planning of the final destruction of the Jewish-Bolshevik enemy.

Browning describes the creation of the extermination camps, which were responsible for the largest number of deaths in the Final Solution, as bringing together three separate developments within the Third Reich: the concentration camps which had been established in Germany since 1933; an expansion of the gassing technology of the Nazi euthanasia programme to provide killing mechanism of greater efficiency and psychological detachment; and the creation of "factories of death" to be fed endless streams of victims by mass uprooting and deportation that utilized the experience and personnel from earlier population resettlement programmes—especially the HSSPF and Adolf Eichmann’s RSHA for "Jewish affairs and evacuations".

Peter Longerich argues that the search for a finite date on which the Nazis embarked upon the extermination of the Jews is futile, in his book Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews (2011). Longerich writes: “We should abandon the notion that it is historically meaningful to try to filter the wealth of available historical material and pick out a single decision” that led to the Holocaust.

Timothy Snyder writes that Longerich "grants the significance of Greiser’s murder of Jews by gas at Chełmno in December 1941", but also detects a significant moment of escalation in spring 1942, which includes "the construction of the large death factory at Treblinka for the destruction of the Warsaw Jews, and the addition of a gas chamber to the concentration camp at Auschwitz for the murder of the Jews of Silesia". Longerich suggests that it "was only in the summer of 1942, that mass killing was finally understood as the realization of the Final Solution, rather than as an extensively violent preliminary to some later program of slave labor and deportation to the lands of a conquered USSR". For Longerich, to see mass killing as the Final Solution was an acknowledgement by the Nazi leadership that there would not be a German military victory over the USSR in the near future.

A different time frame had been proposed by Christian Gerlach, who argued in 1997 that the Final Solution decision was made by Hitler on December 12, 1941, when he addressed a meeting of the Nazi Party (the Reichsleiter) and of regional party leaders (the Gauleiter). In his diary entry of December 13, 1941, the day after Hitler’s private speech, Joseph Goebbels wrote:

Regarding the Jewish Question, the Führer is determined to clear the table. He warned the Jews that if they were to cause another world war, it would lead to their own destruction. Those were not empty words. Now the world war has come. The destruction of the Jews must be its necessary consequence. We cannot be sentimental about it. It is not for us to feel sympathy for the Jews. We should have sympathy rather with our own German people. If the German people have to sacrifice 160,000 victims in yet another campaign in the east, then those responsible for this bloody conflict will have to pay for it with their lives.

Goebbels echoed his above statements, and combined them with the January 30, 1939 speech by Hitler, in an article which Goebbels wrote in 1943, entitled "The War and the Jews":

None of the Führer's prophetic words has come so inevitably true as his prediction that if Jewry succeeded in provoking a second world war, the result would be not the destruction of the Aryan race, but rather the wiping out of the Jewish race. This process is of vast importance, and will have unforeseeable consequences that will require time. But it can no longer be halted. It must only be guided in the right direction.

After this decision, plans were made to put the Final Solution into effect. For example, on December 16, 1941, at a meeting of the officials of the General Government, Hans Frank referred to Hitler's speech as he described the coming annihilation of the Jews:

As for the Jews, well, I can tell you quite frankly that one way or another we have to put an end to them. The Führer once put it this way: if the combined forces of Judaism should again succeed in unleashing a world war, that would mean the end of the Jews in Europe... At present I am involved in discussions aimed at having them moved away to the east. In January there is going to be an important meeting in Berlin to discuss this question... It is scheduled to take place in the offices of the RSHA in the presence of Obergruppenführer Heydrich. Whatever its outcome, a great Jewish emigration will commence. But what is going to happen to these Jews? Do you imagine there will be settlement villages for them in the Ostland? In Berlin we were told: Why are you making all this trouble for us? There is nothing we can do with them here in the Ostland or in the Reich Commissariat. Liquidate them yourselves!

Journalist Ron Rosenbaum, in his book Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil, found that the phrase "final solution" had been used much earlier. An investigative report by the Münchener Post, a socialist newspaper that was an early opponent of Hitler, found as early as 1931 Nazi Party and SA documents using the phrase as part of a description of plans for what became the Nuremberg Laws and a suggestion that "for the final solution of the Jewish question it is proposed to use the Jews in Germany for slave labor or for cultivation of the German swamps administered by a special SS division".

See also

• Korherr Report
• Distancing language
• Madagascar plan
• Porajmos (or Samudaripen) – Romani genocide

References

• Baumslag, Naomi. Murderous Medicine — Nazi Doctors, Human Experimentation, and Typhus, Praeger Publishers, (an imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc.), 2005. ISBN 0-275-98312-9
• Breitman, Richard, The Architect of Genocide: Himmler and The Final Solution, Alfred A. Knopf Inc., New York, 1991. ISBN 0-394-56841-9
• Browning, Christopher R. (with contributions by Jürgen Matthäus) The Origins of the Final Solution, William Heinemann, London, 2004. ISBN 0-434-01227-0
• Dawidowicz, Lucy. The War Against the Jews, 1975, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, ISBN 003013661X.
• Gerald Fleming, Hitler and the Final Solution, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1984.
• Gerlach, Christian. The Wannsee Conference, the Fate of German Jews, and Hitler's decision in principle to exterminate all European Jews, The Journal of Modern History. Chicago: December 1998.Vol.70, Iss. 4; pg. 759, 54 pgs.
• Anetta Głowacka-Penczyńska, Tomasz Kawski, Witold Mędykowski, Tuvia Horev (ed.), The First to be Destroyed: The Jewish Community of Kleczew and the Beginning of the Final Solution, Academic Studies Press, Boston, 2015, ISBN 9781618112842
• Hilberg, Raul (1985). The Destruction of the European Jews : The Revised and Definitive Edition. New York: Holmes and Meier. Wikipedia. ISBN 0-8419-0832-X – via Google Books, Snippet view.
• Longerich, Peter (2010). Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews. Oxford: University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-280436-5.
• Longerich, Peter. The Unwritten Order — Hitler's Role in The Final Solution, Tempus Publishing Limited, Stroud, 2003.
• Roseman, Mark (2002). The Villa, The Lake, The Meeting: Wannsee and the Final Solution. Allen Lane. ISBN 0-713-99570-X.
• Schultheis, Herbert / Wahler, Isaac E.: Bilder und Akten der Gestapo Wuerzburg ueber die Judendeportationen 1941–1943. Bad Neustadt a. d. Saale 1988. ISBN 978-3-9800482-7-9 (German-English Edition)

External links

• Website of the House of the Wannsee Conference
• The Development of the Final Solution – lecture from Dr. Havi Dreifuss – Yad Vashem
• Elimination of the Jewish National Home in Palestine: The Einsatzkommando of the Panzer army Africa, 1942 by Klaus-Michael Mallmann and Martin Cüppers
• Death Decree – Göring directive officially launches the Final Solution

Animated maps

• An animated map "The Final Solution"