The "Final Solution to the Jewish Question" was the Nazi operation to murder every single
Jew that they could find and that they get their hands on, including everything Jewish
that they could find and destroy.
Historians to this day are not sure of an
exact date when Hitler and the Nazi regime decided to embark on the Final Solution.
In fact, for years, for decades, historians were divided into two schools of thought, that
called themselves the Intentionalists and the Functionalists.
The Intentionalists argue that it was always the intention of Hitler and the Nazi regime
to murder the Jews, and it was built into the Nazi regime, based on Nazi ideology.
Whereas the functionalists argue [that] they reached the conclusion that they needed to kill the
Jews only at some point deep into World War II.
Now, one of the issues that prevented the resolution of this debate, was the fact that
there is no known Hitler order - neither written, nor a verbal command - that has been recorded
anywhere, that can tell us when Hitler reached that decision, although it is clear that it
was a Hitler decision.
Two central documents illustrate the debate.
On January 25th, 1939, the foreign ministry wrote a memorandum, and in that memorandum
it is very clear that the policy was emigration. All the Jews of the third Reich should leave Germany.
Five days later, in his infamous speech before
the Reichstag, the German parliament, Hitler seems to contradict what the foreign ministry
had just written, where he threatens that if there will be a war - the war that we know
he's already planning - then this will bring about not the victory of Jewry, but as he
says, the extermination of the Jewish race in Europe.
And in these two documents, we have an encapsulation of those decades of debate between the Intentionalists
and the Functionalists.
Nazi policies towards the Jews in the prewar
period were aimed at the total removal of Jews from German society, and ultimately their
removal from Germany and the Third Reich entirely. The Nazis embarked on economic measures against
the Jews, massive violence against Jews, destroying stores, and homes, and so on. They embarked
on measures that socially separated the Jews from society. They passed laws that took away
the Jews' rights and citizenship in society, ultimately aiming to get them all out.
With the outbreak of the war, their policies now addressed all the Jews of Europe.
And ultimately, this coalesced into the Final Solution to the Jewish Question.
With the German invasion of Poland on September the 1st, 1939, we see clear evidence that
Nazi Germany was now potentially genocidal. They immediately embarked on the murder of
tens of thousands of people inside of Poland, among them many thousands of Jews. They embarked
on separating the Jews from Polish society in the most radical way. Mass arrests, separation
physically, taking away all of their economic potential, rounding them up for forced labor,
massive relocations of populations on the scale of hundreds of thousands of people.
The Nazis began to concentrate Jews in many places into ghettos, as stepping stones towards
another policy, and they were looking for some sort of territorial solution to the Jewish question.
Where could they send these millions of Jews
now under their rule? They considered a reservation in the area of Lublin. They considered sending
all the Jews to the Island of Madagascar. Madagascar - where at that time 25,000 people
were living; that was the infrastructure, and they were going to send millions.
The consequences were clear.
Tens of thousands had already died. Many more
would die. But this was not yet the Final Solution to the Jewish Question.
The systematic murder of the Jews began with the German invasion of the Soviet Union on
June 22, 1941, Operation Barbarossa. Following literally on the heels of the invading German
army, four special units of the S.S and police, mobile task forces called in German "Einsatzgruppen"
entered the fray, spread out from north to south, and began systematically shooting Jews
into mass graves. By the end of the summer, tens of thousands of Jews had been shot.
Thus, by the fall of 1941, we have many tens of thousands of men, German, Austrian and local,
who are involved in the killing of the Jews of the Soviet Union.
We find, during the course of 1941, that an atmosphere of murder - a genocidal atmosphere -
had developed in Germany, both at the center of policy making in Berlin, and among the
men who were actually carrying out the murder in the Soviet Union.
Looking at the development of The Final Solution, we need to ask where and when do we see evidence
that the murder spread beyond the Soviet Union, and we find several tracks.
First of all, allies of Germany: Romania and Croatia.
Romania, for example, by the end of the murder operation,
had murdered on its own between 300,000 and 400,000 Jews, both Romanian Jews and Jews
in Ukraine, and with such brutality that even the murderers of Einsatzgruppe D complained
to Berlin about the Romanians' bloodthirsty murder. The Ustaše regime in Croatia identified
enemies: Serbs, Jews, and the Roma - or "Gypsies," as they're popularly known - and murder, without
German intervention, began in the summer of 1941.
Parallel to the murder that began in Romania and Croatia in the summer of 1941, we need
to also ask ourselves, where do we see evidence in Germany, among German leaders or men in
the field, of development towards a final solution? And there were parallel tracks:
One of those tracks begins in Lublin with the S.S. and police commander Odilo Globocnik.
We know that he created a think tank of intellectuals and his staff members by the end of the summer
of 1941, who began planning, and they reached an idea that suggested to Globocnik that within
Poland, if you want to kill Jews, what you need to do is not have the murderers chase
after the victims, but bring the victims to the murderers, and kill them in a sealed,
top-secret installation. What method would they use? This he borrowed from the euthanasia
project, the T4 operation in Germany, where he learned from them and from officers that
came from there to Lublin to meet with him, that gas chambers, using carbon monoxide exhaust
from an engine, would be an efficient, "clean," cheap way to kill the Jews. We also know that
a special unit of the S.S. was created in order to plan an alternate method of murder
that would operate alongside the mass shootings. And what they began to look into under the
command of S.S Colonel Walter Rauff, was gas vehicles, gas vans that would asphyxiate the
Jews as the vehicle would drive around. We know that on September 3rd of 1941, the
first experimental gassing at Auschwitz took place, where several hundred soviet prisoners
of war were murdered using Zyklon B gas, which became the method of murder at Auschwitz.
We also know that within Germany, discussions began, to deport the Jews of the third Reich
from Germany and Austria to the East. The East meant the Soviet Union, although the
first group that was sent out in October of 1941 was actually sent to the ghetto in Lodz;
the rest were sent towards Riga, and Minsk, and other places in the Soviet Union.
In Berlin, in July 1941, S.S General Reinhard Heydrich, Himmler's most important deputy
in dealing with Jewish policy, approached Hermann Goering, who was at that time the
second most powerful man in Germany, and asked him for authorization to follow through with
all the ideas they had in Germany regarding the Jews.
On January 20th, 1942, Reinhard Heydrich convened a meeting of government officials and S.S
and police officials in Wannsee, a suburb of Berlin, to discuss the coordination of
the "Final Solution." This meeting followed months of research; the approval, first by
Goering and then by Hitler, of the feasibility study that Heydrich and his men had prepared;
and the beginning of the construction of the death camps of Belzec and Chelmno that had
begun around November the 1st of 1941. Following Wannsee, more camps were constructed, such
as Sobibor and Treblinka; deportations began to Chelmno in December of 1941; deportations
began to the other camps in March of 1942; and by the end of 1942, Jews from all over
Europe had been brought to the camps, parallel to the shooting murders in the Soviet Union.
By the end of 1942, some four million Jews had already been murdered.
Thus, to sum up the development of the "Final Solution," we see that during the course of
the war, and particularly following the German invasion of the Soviet Union in the summer
of 1941, Nazi Germany developed and perfected its genocidal capabilities, which culminated
in a continent-wide operation that destroyed Jewish communities in their entirety,
and by the end of the war, had murdered some six million Jews.