Using the term "Final Solution" is already being collaborator with the Nazi system.
We are talking about the mass murder of the Jews.
So the right question to ask is how the mass extermination of Jews came about?
It was an improvisation.
The intent of the Nazis of the German authorities was to get rid of the Jews.
First of all, to get rid of the Jews of Germany.
They didn't know how to get rid of the Jews, they only knew that
they want to get rid of them.
So, they imposed many restrictions on the Jews of Germany in order
to make them leave the country.
This was step number one.
You can't call it "Final Solution", you can't call it even the
mass extermination of the Jews.
It was a way to get rid of the German Jews.
Then they started the war and they had to think about what's going to happen
not only with the German Jews, but also with the Jews under German occupation.
They wanted to get rid of the Jews also from those places.
They didn't know exactly how to do it and they didn't have a real plan.
They had only an intent to get rid of the Jews.
So, it depended very much on a process which was the war itself.
And this is why the whole process of decision making leading up
to the mass extermination of the Jews was an improvisation.
The more Jews they had under their rule, the more urgent the question became how
to deal with getting rid of the Jews.
The mechanism of the war itself, the idea that in war you are ready
to lose lives or to sacrifice lives, mainly the lives of others,
makes the idea of mass extermination also of the major enemy, which
is the Jew makes it possible.
This is how it developed.
Now there are certain points, along this process leading up
to the mass extermination of the Jews which were decisive.
One of them was really the start of the war against the Soviet Union.
It was a new war with new rules, no restrictions under the terms
of war, according to the Hag agreement or the Geneva agreements.
So this was a framework which enabled also a more radical attitude towards the Jews.
And a decision making leading up to extermination not only of individual
Jews, not only to a certain group of Jews, but of the Jews as such.
There was a certain point, and this point was the impossibility to win the
war against Soviet Russia somewhere between August and September 1941.
Until then, if somebody asked what is going to happen to the German Jews?
The answer was coming down from Hitler, from Himmler, from Heydrich,
we'll have to wait until the war is finished and then we'll find
a solution a final solution.
They didn't know exactly when this time it's going to come and they didn't
know exactly what kind of a final solution they are going to practice.
They decide about a solution during the war, not after the war.
And this was the improvisation that was made for the German Jews
in September 1941.
This improvisation led the elite of German politics from Hitler to Himmler
to others, to decide that Jews have to be deported from Germany to the east.
They didn't know exactly how the eastern front is going to develop, but they wanted
first to get rid of the Jews in Germany.
Getting rid of the Jews in Germany meant that they had to do something with the
Jews, outside Germany in the ghettos to which they were sending the Jews.
So they had to think about amore radical policy toward the other Jews.
So if I try to summarize the radicalization of what Hans Momsen
called "Kumulative Radikalisierung", cumulative radicalization.
Led the German decision makers, somewhere between July, August,
August and September, October 1941,
to look for a more radical solution that they were thinking of before.
To practice it already during the war and this is why they on
the one hand, radicalized their extermination or the fight
or the war against the Jews in the east,
that is first of all in Soviet Russia and also in Germany
itself against the German Jews.
In between they had the Polish Jews, the Jews of the General Government,
and radicalization had to happen there too.
So, it is cumulative radicalization leading up to a more extreme.
That is to the most extreme way of getting rid of the Jews, which
is extermination of the Jews.
This is how I explained the coming about of the mass extermination, systematic
mass extermination of the Jews, which was called by the Nazis the "Final Solution".
Which is of course a euphemism, because you look for a solution for a problem.
And I think it was a problem, the Jewish problem only from the point of
view of the antisemites, not from the point of view of an historian who is
looking backwards in retrospective to see what happened to the Jews of Europe.