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==Phase one: killing squads of Operation Barbarossa==
==Phase one: killing squads of Operation Barbarossa==
{{main|Einsatzgruppen|Einsatzkommando}}
{{main|Einsatzgruppen|Einsatzkommando}}
The pre-emptive attack on the Soveit Union was launched once it has become obvious the USSR was gearing itself for war, using US lend-lease aid. [[Icebreaker_%28novel%29]]
The Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union codenamed [[Operation Barbarossa]], which commenced on 22 June 1941, set in motion a "war of destruction" which quickly opened the door to systematic mass murder of European Jews.<ref>{{harvp|Browning|2004|p= 216|ps=.}}</ref> For Hitler, [[Bolshevism]] was merely "the most recent and most nefarious manifestation of the eternal Jewish threat".<ref>{{harvp|Browning|2004|p= 224|ps=.}}</ref> On 3 March 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.<ref>{{harvp|Hilberg|1985|p= 281|ps.=}}</ref> In May 1941, [[Gestapo]] leader [[Heinrich Müller (Gestapo)|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."<ref name="Browning219">{{harvp|Browning|2004|p= [https://books.google.ca/books?id=d9Wg4gjtP3cC&q=worldview#v=snippet&q=worldview&f=false 219]|ps=.}}</ref>


On 18{{nbsp}}December 1941, Himmler asked Hitler, "What to do with the Jews of Russia?", to which Hitler replied, "als Partisanen auszurotten" ("exterminate them as partisans").<ref>{{cite book | last = Bauer
On 18{{nbsp}}December 1941, Himmler asked Hitler, "What to do with the Jews of Russia?", to which Hitler replied, "als Partisanen auszurotten" ("exterminate them as partisans").<ref>{{cite book | last = Bauer

Revision as of 16:24, 30 May 2016

This article is about the Nazi Germany policy. For other uses, see Final Solution (disambiguation).
Final Solution
Follow-up letter from SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich to Ministerialdirektor Martin Luther asking for administrative assistance in the implementation of the Final Solution to the Jewish Question, 26 February 1942
Also known asEndlösung der Judenfrage
LocationGerman-occupied Europe
Date1942–1944
Incident typeExtermination of Jews
PerpetratorsNazi Germany
ParticipantsSchutzstaffel (SS), Security Police (SiPo), Gestapo, Kriminalpolizei (Kripo), SD, and the Waffen-SS
GhettoWorld War II Ghettos in Nazi-occupied Europe; Jewish ghettos in German-occupied Poland and the Soviet Union

The Final Solution (German: (die) Endlösung, pronounced [ˈɛntˌløːzʊŋ]) or the Final Solution to the Jewish Question (German: die Endlösung der Judenfrage, 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,[1] and culminated in the Holocaust which saw the killing of 90 percent of Polish Jewry,[2] and two-thirds of the Jewish population of Europe.[3]

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.[4] "It is generally accepted the decision-making process was prolonged and incremental."[5] 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.[6]

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.[3] 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".[7]

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.[8]

The outbreak of war and the invasion of Poland brought a population of 3.5 million Polish Jews under the control of the Nazi and Soviet security forces,[9] and marked the start of a far more savage persecution, including mass killings.[5] In the German-occupied zone of Poland Jews were forced into hundreds of makeshift ghettos pending other arrangements.[10] After the attack against the USSR in June 1941 the German top echelon began to conceive of a plan to exterminate the Jews in order 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".[11] On 31 July 1941, Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring wrote to Reinhard Heydrich (Himmler's deputy and chief of the RSHA),[12][13] instructing Heydrich to submit concrete proposals for the implementation of the projected new goal.[14]

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.[15] 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."[6] 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.[11][16]

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.[16]

— 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 20 January 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.[17] The purpose of the conference was to discuss and co-ordinate plans outlined by Heydrich as how best to implement the "Final Solution". A surviving copy of the minutes of this meeting was found by the Allies in March 1947;[18] 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.[19]

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.[20]

Phase one: killing squads of Operation Barbarossa

Main articles: Einsatzgruppen and Einsatzkommando

The pre-emptive attack on the Soveit Union was launched once it has become obvious the USSR was gearing itself for war, using US lend-lease aid. Icebreaker_(novel)

On 18 December 1941, Himmler asked Hitler, "What to do with the Jews of Russia?", to which Hitler replied, "als Partisanen auszurotten" ("exterminate them as partisans").[21] Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer says that the remark is probably as close as historians will ever get to a definitive order from Hitler for the genocide carried out during the Holocaust.

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.[22] These forces were supported by 21 battalions of Orpo Reserve Police under Kurt Daluege, adding up to 11,000 men.[23] 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.[24]

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.[25] 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.[26] 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.[27]

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".[28] By this time, awareness of the Final Solution policy in the east was spreading. Addressing his district governors in the General Government on 16 December 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!"[29]

Original annotated map from Stahlecker's Report, summarizing murders committed by Einsatzgruppen in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus and Russia until January 1942
File:Belorussian SSR in 1940 after annexation of eastern Poland.jpg
Notably, the Stahlecker's map (top) had shown the Soviet Byelorussia according to bilateral terms of the Nazi-Soviet invasion of Poland, not the Byelorussian SSR (marked in pink), from before the Soviet annexation of Kresy. In this map, territory of prewar Poland inhabited by Polish Jews is marked in yellow.

Final Solution in Bezirk Bialystok and Reichskommissariat Ostland

See also: Reichskommissariat Ostland

Several scholars have noted that the Final Solution began in the newly formed district of Bezirk Bialystok.[30] The German army took over Białystok within days. On Friday, 27 June 1941, the Reserve Police Battalion 309 arrived in the city and set the Great Synagogue on fire with hundreds of Jewish men locked inside.[31] The burning of synagogue was followed by a frenzy of killings both inside the homes around the Jewish neighbourhood of Chanajki, and in the city park, lasting until night time.[32] The next day, some 30 wagons of dead bodies were taken to mass graves. As noted by Browning, the killings were led by a commander "who correctly intuited and anticipated the wishes of his Führer" without direct orders.[31] For reasons unknown, the number of victims in the official report by Major Weis was cut in half.[32]

An Israeli historian Dina Porat claimed that the Final Solution, i.e.: "the systematic overall physical extermination of Jewish communities one after the other – began in Lithuania" during the massive German chase after the Red Army across the Baltic states in Reichskommissariat Ostland.[33] The subject of the Holocaust in Lithuania has been analysed by Konrad Kweit from USHMM 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'."[34] About 80,000 Jews were killed in Lithuania by October (including in formerly Polish Wilno) and about 175,000 by the end of 1941 according to official reports.[33]

Final Solution in Reichskommissariat Ukraine

See also: Reichskommissariat Ukraine

Formed officially on 20 August 1941, the Reichskommissariat Ukraine had 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. One of the first indiscriminate massacres of men, women, and children took the lives of 23,600 Jews at Kamianets-Podilskyi on 26–28 August 1941 including 14,000–18,000 people expelled from Hungary. Likewise, between 9 July 1941 and 19 September 1941, the city of Zhytomyr was made Judenfrei in three murder operations conducted by German and Ukrainian police in which 10,000 Jews perished.[35] Long before the conference at Wannsee, 28,000 Jews were shot by SS and Ukrainian military in Vinnytsia on 22 September 1941, followed by the 29 September massacre of 33,771 Jews at Babi Yar.[35][36]

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 across the Soviet occupied Poland. 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 reportedly triggered by the NKVD prisoner 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.[37]

The killings have continued uninterrupted. On 12 October 1941 in Stanisławów, some 10,000–12,000 Jewish men, women, and children were shot at the Jewish cemetery by the German uniformed SS-men and Ukrainian Auxiliary Police during the so-called "Bloody Sunday" (de).[38] The scale of the massacre was unprecedented. It was the single largest massacre of Polish Jews in Distrikt Galizien prior to genocidal Aktion Reinhardt of 1942.[39] The shooters began firing at 12 noon and continued without stopping by taking turns. There were picnic tables set up on the side with bottles of vodka and sandwiches for those who needed to rest from the deafening noise of gunfire.[39]

Phase two: death camps of General Government

See also: General Government and Extermination camp

When the Wehrmacht forces attacked the Soviet positions in eastern Poland during the initially successful Operation Barbarossa, the area of the General Government was enlarged by the inclusion of regions that had been occupied by the Red Army since 1939.[40] The killing of Jews of the Łódź Ghetto under the guise of "resettlement" began on 8 December 1941 at the Kulmhof extermination camp in Chełmno with the use gas vans approved by the RSHA. By the time the European-wide Final Solution was formulated two months later, Heydrich had already confirmed the effectiveness of industrial killing by exhaust fumes.[41]

The construction work on the first killing centre at Bełżec in occupied Poland preceded the Wannsee Conference by three months. The new facility was operational by March the following year.[42] By mid-1942, two more death camps had been built on Polish lands: Sobibór operational by May 1942, and Treblinka operational in July.[43] 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 estimation, not counting Auschwitz II Birkenau. 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.[44] 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.[45]

About two-thirds of the overall number of victims of the Final Solution were killed before February 1943,[46] which included the main phase of the extermination programme in the West launched by Eichmann on 11 June 1942 from Berlin.[47] The Holocaust trains run by the Deutsche Reichsbahn and several other national railway systems delivered condemned Jewish captives from as far as Belgium, Bulgaria, France, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Moravia, Netherlands, Romania, Slovakia, and even Scandinavia.[48][49] The nearly completed clandestine programme of murdering all deportees 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 explained why the Nazi leadership found it necessary to kill Jewish women and children along with the Jewish men. The assembled functionaries were told that the Nazi state policy was "the extermination of the Jewish people" as such.[50]

We were faced with the question: what about the women and children? – I have decided on a solution to this problem. I did not consider myself justified to exterminate the men only – in other words, to kill them or have them killed while allowing the avengers, in the form of their children, to grow up in the midst of our sons and grandsons. The difficult decision had to be made to have this people disappear from the earth. — Heinrich Himmler, 6 October 1943, Posen[51]

On 19 October 1943, five days after the prisoner revolt in Sobibór, Operation Reinhard was terminated by Odilo Globocnik on behalf of Himmler. The camps responsible for the killing of nearly 2,700,000 Jews were soon closed. Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka were dismantled and ploughed over before spring.[52] The operation was followed by the single largest German massacre of Jews in the entire war carried out on 3 November 1943; with approximately 43,000 prisoners shot one-by-one simultaneously in three nearby locations by the Reserve Police Battalion 101 hand-in-hand with the Trawniki men from Ukraine.[31] Auschwitz alone had enough capacity to fulfill the Nazis' remaining extermination needs.[53]

Historiographic debate about the decision

Part of a series on
The Holocaust
Jews on selection ramp at Auschwitz, May 1944
Responsibility
Nazi Germany
People
Organizations
Nazi ideologues
Early policies
Victims
Ghettos
Camps
Nazi extermination camps
Nazi concentration camps
Transit and collection camps
Belgium
France
Italy
Netherlands
Slovakia
Divisions
Extermination methods
Atrocities
Pogroms
Einsatzgruppen
"Final Solution"
End of World War II
Resistance
Ghetto uprisings
International response
Aftermath
Lists
Resources
Remembrance

Historians disagree as to when and how did the Nazi leadership decide that the European Jews should be exterminated. The controversy is commonly described as the functionalism versus intentionalism debate which began in the 1960s, and subsided thirty years later. In the 1990s the attention of mainstream historians moved away from the question of top executive orders triggering the Holocaust, and focused on factors which were overlooked earlier such as personal initiative and ingenuity of countless functionaries in charge of the killing fields. No written evidence of Hitler ordering the Final Solution has ever been found to serve as a "smoking gun" and therefore this one particular question remains unanswered.[54]

Hitler made numerous chilling predictions regarding the Holocaust of the Jews of Europe prior to the beginning of World War II. During a speech given on 30 January 1939, on the sixth anniversary of his accession to power, Hitler 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![55][56][57]

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.[58]

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".[59] 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".[60] 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.[61] 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.[62]

With respect to the "functionalism versus intentionalism" debate about a master plan for the Final Solution, or the lack thereof, Hilberg posits what has been described as "a kind of structural determinism".[58] Hilberg argues that "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.[63]

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.[64]

Browning believes that the "Final Solution as it is now understood—the systematic attempt to murder every last Jew within the German grasp"[4] took shape during a five-week period, from 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."[4] 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.[65]

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".[66]

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.[67][68]

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".[68] 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.[68]

A different time-frame was proposed by Christian Gerlach who argued in his 1997 thesis,[69] that the Final Solution decision was pronounced on 12 December 1941, when Hitler addressed a meeting of the Nazi Party (the Reichsleiter) and of regional party leaders (the Gauleiter).[70][a 1] The day after Hitler’s speech, on 13 December 1941 Joseph Goebbels wrote in his diary:[71]

Berlin, Reichstag session of 11 December 1941: Adolf Hitler declares war on the United States of America

With respect of the Jewish Question, the Führer has decided to make a clean sweep. He prophesied to the Jews that if they again brought about a world war, they would see their annihilation in it. That wasn't just a catch-word. The world war is here and the annihilation of the Jews must be the necessary consequence.[71][72]

Goebbels echoed his above statements, and combined them with the 30 January 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.[73]

After this decision, plans were made to put the Final Solution into effect. For example, on 16 December 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![74]

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".[75]

See also

Footnotes

  1. ^ Commenting on Gerlach, Christopher Browning writes: "What [Gerlach] interprets as Hitler's basic decision, I see as an official initiation of party leaders to a decision taken several months earlier." Browning, 2004, p.540.

Citations

  1. ^ "Wannsee Conference and the Final Solution". United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Retrieved 30 March 2015.
  2. ^ The World Reacts to the Holocaust. JHU Press. 1996. p. 99. ISBN 0801849691. {{cite book}}: Cite uses deprecated parameter |authors= (help)
  3. ^ a b Holocaust Encyclopedia. "'Final Solution': Overview". United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Archived from the original on 2 March 2013. Retrieved 5 February 2016.
  4. ^ a b c Browning (2004), p. 424. harvp error: multiple targets (2×): CITEREFBrowning2004 (help)
  5. ^ a b Browning (2004), p. 213. harvp error: multiple targets (2×): CITEREFBrowning2004 (help)
  6. ^ a b Hilberg (1985), p. 273.
  7. ^ Roseman (2004), p. 87.
  8. ^ Roseman (2004), pp. 11–12.
  9. ^ Lukas, Richard (1989). Out of the Inferno: Poles Remember the Holocaust. University Press of Kentucky. pp. 5, 13, 111, 201.; also in Lukas, Richard (2012) [1986]. The Forgotten Holocaust: Poles Under Nazi Occupation 1939-1944. New York: University of Kentucky Press/Hippocrene Books. ISBN 0-7818-0901-0.
  10. ^ "German Invasion of Poland: Jewish Refugees, 1939". Holocaust Encyclopedia. Washington, DC: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
  11. ^ a b Browning, Christopher R. (2004). The Origins of the Final Solution : The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939 – March 1942. Comprehensive History of the Holocaust. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. pp. 36–110. ISBN 0-8032-1327-1. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
  12. ^ Roseman (2004), pp. 14–15.
  13. ^ Hilberg (1985), p. 278.
  14. ^ Göring, Hermann (31 July 1941). "Authorization letter of Hermann Göring to Heydrich, 31 July 1941" (PDF). House of the Wannsee Conference. Retrieved 3 June 2014.
  15. ^ Longerich, Peter (2012). Heinrich Himmler: A Life. OUP Oxford. pp. 525–533. ISBN 0199592322.
  16. ^ a b Feig, Konnilyn G. (1981). Hitler's death camps: the sanity of madness. Holmes & Meier. pp. 12–13. ISBN 0841906769. Konnilyn Feig is professor of history and political science at Foothill College.
  17. ^ Roseman (2004), pp. 65–67.
  18. ^ "Protocol of Conference on the final solution (Endlösung) of the Jewish question" (PDF). House of the Wannsee Conference. Retrieved 3 June 2014.
  19. ^ Roseman (2002), pp. 1–2. harvp error: multiple targets (2×): CITEREFRoseman2002 (help)
  20. ^ "Combating Holocaust Denial: Evidence Of The Holocaust Presented At Nuremberg". United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Retrieved 8 November 2013.
  21. ^ Bauer, Yehuda (2000). Rethinking the Holocaust. Yale University Press. p. 5. ISBN 978-0-300-08256-2. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
  22. ^ Browning (2004), p. 217. harvp error: multiple targets (2×): CITEREFBrowning2004 (help)
  23. ^ Browning (2004), p. 229. harvp error: multiple targets (2×): CITEREFBrowning2004 (help)
  24. ^ Browning (2004), p. 232. harvp error: multiple targets (2×): CITEREFBrowning2004 (help)
  25. ^ Browning (2004), p. 260. harvp error: multiple targets (2×): CITEREFBrowning2004 (help)
  26. ^ Browning (2004), p. 261. harvp error: multiple targets (2×): CITEREFBrowning2004 (help)
  27. ^ Browning (2004), pp. 291–292. harvp error: multiple targets (2×): CITEREFBrowning2004 (help)
  28. ^ Browning (2004), p. 244. harvp error: multiple targets (2×): CITEREFBrowning2004 (help)
  29. ^ Browning (2004), pp. 408–409. harvp error: multiple targets (2×): CITEREFBrowning2004 (help)
  30. ^ Markiewicz, Marcin. "Bezirk Białystok (in) Represje hitlerowskie wobec wsi białostockiej" [Bezirk Białystok (in) Nazi repressions against the Białystok countryside]. Komentarze Historyczne. Biuletyn Instytutu Pamięci Narodowej. Nr 35-36 (12/2003-1/2004). Biuro Edukacji Publicznej IPN. 68/96 in PDF. ISSN 1641-9561. Archived from the original on 11 June 2011. Retrieved 9 February 2016 – via direct download 873 KB from the Internet Archive. {{cite journal}}: |volume= has extra text (help) Also in: Roseman, Mark (2002). The Villa, the Lake, the Meeting: Wannsee and the Final Solution. Penguin Press. p. 111. ISBN 071399570X. During the Wannsee meeting, the number of Jews in Białystok (i.e. in Bezirk Bialystok) – subject to Final Solution – was estimated by Heydrich at 400,000. In Lithuania: 34,000. In Latvia: 3,500. In White Russia (excluding Bialystok) 446,484, and in USSR: 5,000,000. Estonia was listed in the minutes as being already Judenfrei (see Wannsee Protocol, Nuremberg). {{cite book}}: External link in |quote= (help)
  31. ^ a b c Browning, Christopher R. (1998) [1992]. Arrival in Poland (PDF). Penguin Books. 28, 160-169 / 298 in PDF. Archived from the original (PDF) on 19 October 2013. Retrieved 7 May 2013 – via direct download 7.91 MB complete. Also as: PDF cache archived by WebCite. {{cite book}}: |work= ignored (help); External link in |quote= (help); Invalid |ref=harv (help)
  32. ^ a b "Białystok – History". Virtual Shtetl Museum of the History of Polish Jews. pp. 6–7. Retrieved 9 February 2016. {{cite web}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
  33. ^ a b Porat, Dina (2002). "The Holocaust in Lithuania: Some Unique Aspects". In Cesarani, David (ed.). The Final Solution: Origins and Implementation. Routledge. p. 161. ISBN 0-415-15232-1 – via Google Books.
  34. ^ Kwiet, Konrad (1998). "Rehearsing for Murder: The Beginning of the Final Solution in Lithuania in June 1941". Holocaust and Genocide Studies. Vol. 12, no. 1. pp. 3–26 – via Oxfordjournals.org. and Kwiet, Konrad (4 December 1995). The Onset of the Holocaust: The Massacres of Jews in Lithuania in June 1941. J. B. and Maurice Shapiro Senior Scholar-in-Residence at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (Annual lecture). Published under the same title but expanded in Bonnell, Andrew, ed. (1996). Power, Conscience and Opposition: Essays in German History in Honour of John A Moses. New York: Peter Lang. pp. 107–21.
  35. ^ a b Yad Vashem (2016). "Goering orders Heydrich to prepare the plan for the Final Solution of the Jewish Problem". The Holocaust Timeline 1940-1945. The Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority.
  36. ^ Desbois, Patrick (2009). "Places of Massacres by German Task Forces between 1941 - 1943" (PDF). Germany: TOS Gemeinde Tübingen.
  37. ^ Weiss, Jakob (2011). "Introduction". The Lemberg Mosaic. New York: Alderbrook Press.
  38. ^ Löw, Andrea (10 June 2013). "Stanislawów (now Ivano-Frankivsk)". United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Archived from the original on 20 May 2014. Retrieved 29 January 2016. From The USHMM Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933–1945.
  39. ^ a b Pohl, Dieter. Hans Krueger and the Murder of the Jews in the Stanislawow Region (Galicia) (PDF). pp. 12–13, 17–18, 21 – via Yad Vashem.org. It is impossible to determine what Krueger's exact responsibility was in connection with 'Bloody Sunday' [massacre of 12 October 1941]. It is clear that a massacre of such proportions under German civil administration was virtually unprecedented.
  40. ^ Ethnic Groups and Population Changes in Twentieth-century Central-Eastern Europe: History, Data, Analysis. M.E. Sharpe. 2003. pp. 216-. ISBN 9780765606655. {{cite book}}: Cite uses deprecated parameter |authors= (help)
  41. ^ Mathias Beer (translated from the German) (2015). "The Development of the Gas-Van in the Murdering of the Jews". The Final Solution. Jewish Virtual Library. "Die Entwicklung der Gaswagen beim Mord an den Juden," Miszelle. Vierteljahrshefte fuer Zeitgeschichte, 37 (3), pp. 403-417. Retrieved 28 January 2016.
  42. ^ "Historia Niemieckiego Obozu Zagłady w Bełżcu" [History of the Belzec extermination camp] (in Polish). Muzeum-Miejsce Pamięci w Bełżcu [National Bełżec Museum & Monument of Martyrology]. Retrieved 24 January 2016.
  43. ^ McVay, Kenneth (1984). "The Construction of the Treblinka Extermination Camp". Yad Vashem Studies, XVI. Jewish Virtual Library.org. Retrieved 3 November 2013.
  44. ^ "Belzec". The Holocaust Encyclopedia. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Archived from the original on 7 January 2012. Retrieved 24 January 2016.
  45. ^ Carol Rittner, Roth, K. (2004). Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust. Continuum International Publishing Group. p. 2. ISBN 978-0-8264-7566-4.
  46. ^ Paula Lerner (2007). "Statistical Report on the "Final Solution," known as the Korherr Report of 23 March 1943" (PDF). Die Endlösung by Gerald Reitlinger. 7. Nazi Germany, 1933–1945. German History in Documents and Images, GHDI.
  47. ^ Leni Yahil (1991). The Holocaust: The Fate of European Jewry, 1932-1945. Oxford University Press. p. 389. ISBN 0195045238.
  48. ^ Prof. Ronald J. Berger, University of Wisconsin–Whitewater (2002). Fathoming the Holocaust: A Social Problems Approach. Transaction Publishers. pp. 57–58. ISBN 0202366111. Bureaucrats in the Reichsbahn performed important functions that facilitated the movement of trains. They constructed and published timetables, collected fares, and allocated cars and locomotives. In sending Jews to their death, they did not deviate much from the routine procedures they used to process ordinary train traffic.
  49. ^ "Holocaust: The Trains". Aish.com Holocaust Studies. 31 December 1969. Archived from the original on 22 February 2014. {{cite web}}: Cite uses deprecated parameter |authors= (help)
  50. ^ Letter written by Albert Speer who attended Posen Conference.Connolly, Kate (13 March 2007). "Letter proves Speer knew of Holocaust plan". London: The Guardian. Retrieved 29 May 2014.
  51. ^ Bradley F. Smith & Agnes Peterson (1974), Heinrich Himmler. Speeches Frankfurt/M., p. 169 f. OCLC 1241890; "Himmler's Speech in Posen on 6 October 1944". Holocaust Controversies Reference Section. Archived from the original on 27 January 2016. Retrieved 28 February 2015.; also (with differing translation) in "Heinrich Himmler". United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Archived from the original on 14 December 2013. Retrieved 28 February 2015.
  52. ^ Feig, Konnilyn G. (1981). Hitler's death camps: the sanity of madness. Holmes & Meier Publishers. p. 30. ISBN 0841906750 – via Remember.org book excerpt in full screen. On November 4, 1943, Globocnik wrote to Himmler from Trieste: "I have on Oct. 19, 1943 completed Action Reinhard and closed all the camps." He asked for special medals for his men in recognition of their "specially difficult task." Himmler responded warmly to 'Globos' on November 30, 1943, thanking him for carrying out Operation Reinhard. {{cite book}}: External link in |via= (help) Also in: Holocaust Encyclopedia. ""Final Solution": Overview". Washington, DC: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Archived from the original on 2 March 2013.
  53. ^ Arad, Yitzhak (1987). Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka. The Operation Reinhard Death Camps. Bloomington, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. p. 640. ISBN 0-253-21305-3 – via Google Books preview. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
  54. ^ Bankier, David; Mikhman, Dan (2008). Holocaust Historiography in Context: Emergence, Challenges, Polemics and Achievements. Berghahn Books. p. 330. ISBN 9653083260.
  55. ^ Hitler, Adolf (30 January 1939). "Extract from the Speech by Hitler, 30 January 1939". YadVashem.org.
  56. ^ "Adolf Hitler on the Jewish Question". 30 January 1939.
  57. ^ "Hitler Speaks before the Reichstag (German Parliament)". United States Holocaust Museum.
  58. ^ a b Browning, Christopher (10 May 1987). "The Revised Hilberg". Museumoftolerance. Retrieved 2 June 2014.
  59. ^ Hilberg (1985), p. ix.
  60. ^ Hilberg (1985), p. 56.
  61. ^ Hilberg (1985), p. 354.
  62. ^ Hilberg (1985), p. 1219.
  63. ^ Hilberg (1985), pp. 998–999.
  64. ^ Browning, Christopher R. (2007). The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939-March 1942. U of Nebraska Press. p. 213. ISBN 0803203926 – via Google Books.
  65. ^ Browning (2004), pp. 426–427. harvp error: multiple targets (2×): CITEREFBrowning2004 (help)
  66. ^ Browning (2004), p. 354. harvp error: multiple targets (2×): CITEREFBrowning2004 (help)
  67. ^ Longerich, Peter (2010). Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews. OUP Oxford. p. 6. ISBN 0192804367 – via Google Books.
  68. ^ a b c Snyder, Timothy (23 June 2011). "A New Approach to the Holocaust". The New York Review of Books. Retrieved 30 March 2015.
  69. ^ Gerlach, Christian (1999) [1997]. Kalkulierte Morde: die deutsche Wirtschafts- und Vernichtungspolitik in Weissrussland 1941 bis 1944. Hamburg: Hamburger Edition. pp. 1018–36. OCLC 764039257. Originally presented as the author's doctoral thesis at TU Berlin.
  70. ^ Aly, Götz. "December 12, 1941". Translated by McFee, Gord. Holocaust-history.org. Archived from the original on 2 August 2013. Retrieved 3 February 2016. The original appeared in the German edition of Berliner Zeitung on December 13, 1997.
  71. ^ a b McDonough, Frank (2008). The Holocaust. Palgrave Macmillan. p. 57. ISBN 1137020482.
  72. ^ Gord McFee. "When did Hitler decide on the Final Solution?". Holocaust-history.org. Archived from the original on 2 June 2015. Research in this area is hampered by the fact that no written Hitler-Order launching the Final Solution has ever been found, and that if there ever was one, it most likely was destroyed.
  73. ^ Bytwerk, Randall. "Joseph Goebbels page". German Propaganda Archive. Calvin College.
  74. ^ Gerlach, Christian (December 1998). "The Wannsee Conference, the Fate of German Jews, and Hitler's Decision in Principle to Exterminate All European Jews". The Journal of Modern History. 70 (4): 790. doi:10.1086/235167. Reprinted in Bartov, Omer, ed. (2000). The Holocaust: Origins, Implementation, Aftermath. London: Routledge. pp. 106–140. ISBN 0-415-15035-3.
  75. ^ Rosenbaum, Ron (1998). Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil. Harper Books. ISBN 0-06-095339-X.

References

External links

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