what was hitlers final solution to the "jewish problem?"
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Earlier the start of Earth War Two, around ix.5 1000000 Jewish people lived in Europe. By the time the war concluded, the Nazis had killed 6 1000000 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 Final Solution, as the "reply" to the "Jewish question." But when did this monstrous plan 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 power, my first and foremost task volition be the annihilation of the Jews."
But how he would enact such a program wasn't ever clear. For a brief menstruum, the Führer and other Nazi leaders toyed with the idea of mass deportation as a method of creating a Europe without Jews (Republic of madagascar and the Arctic Circle were two suggested relocation sites). Deportation still would've resulted in thousands of deaths, though perhaps in less directly 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 exist stressed enough that the Nazis did not know how to eradicate the Jews when they began the state of war against the Soviet Marriage [in the summertime of 1941]… They could not exist confident that SS men would shoot women and children in large numbers." But as Operation Barbarossa, the name for the Nazi invasion of the U.s.a.Due south.R, proved during the mass shootings of June 1941 and the massacres at Kiev in September, the Gild Police and Einsatzgrüppen were more willing to commit mass murders. This meant Hitler could accept the solution to the Jewish problem to its "furthest extremes," in the words of Philipp Bouhler, the senior Nazi official responsible for the euthanasia plan that killed more than 70,000 handicapped German people.
Co-ordinate to scholars Christian Gerlach and Peter Monteath, amongst others, the pivotal moment for Hitler'southward decision came on Dec 12, 1941, at a secret meeting with some fifty Nazi officials, including Joseph Goebbels (Nazi minister of propaganda) and Hans Frank (governor of occupied Poland). Though no written documents of the coming together survive, Goebbels described the meeting in his journal on December 13, 1941:
"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 globe war, they would live to see their anything in it. That wasn't just a catchword… If the German people take at present again sacrificed 160,000 dead on the eastern front, then those responsible for this bloody disharmonize volition accept to pay with their lives."
In addition to Goebbels'due south diary entry, historians cite the notes of German language diplomat Otto Brautigam, who on Dec 18, 1941, wrote that "as for the Jewish question, oral discussions accept taken place [and] have brought about clarification."
This coming together, which would be followed by the Jan 1942 Wannsee Conference (where the conclusion on exterminating all European Jews was further reinforced), was hardly the starting time of violence against Jews. Attacks had been happening in Nazi Germany's occupied territories for years. What differentiated this period from before attacks was "an escalation of murder," says Elizabeth White, historian at the The states Holocaust Memorial Museum.
"At some point I recall, with the development of killing centers, [the Nazis] felt that they had the means and opportunity to realize the vision of a Jew-free Europe now rather than wait until after Deutschland had won [the war]."
Australian historian Peter Monteath echoes that conclusion, writing in 1998 that the December 12 determination "made information technology 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 Germany and Western Europe."
In the decades that followed the Nuremburg Trials, in which Nazi officials, charged with crimes against peace and humanity, hid behind the alibi that they were just post-obit orders, historians grappled with questions of arraign and guilt. Had Hitler and elevation Nazi officials been solely responsible for the genocide? How complicit were lower-level Nazis and members of the Social club Police?
"We had big gaps in our knowledge because most of the documentation about how the genocide was carried out on the ground was captured by the Soviet Red Army and wasn't bachelor until after the Cold War," says White. The fall of the Soviet Union led to a feast of wartime bureaucratic records, assuasive historians to realize how much leeway Nazi officials were given. Information technology became readily clear that the number of Nazis involved in enacting the Terminal Solution was much larger than previously believed.
"The way Hitler worked was he would make these pronouncements, and people would become off and effigy out, what did he mean? How are we going to practise this?" says White. "You could work towards the Führer by being innovative and ruthless."
In other words, rather than giving explicit orders to each fellow member of the Nazi party, Hitler made 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 impale all Jews, including German Jews and Western European Jews, and they needed to practise so systematically. What had started as uncertain and sporadic violence rapidly turned into wholesale slaughter, complete with gas chambers and concentration camps. Six weeks afterward, 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.
Source: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/first-moments-hitlers-final-solution-180961387/