The Final Solution

More than fifty years ago, over a four year period more than eleven million people were killed. This was the outcome to the Jewish Question by Adolf Hitler and he termed it as the Final Solution. Holocaust is now termed as the most notorious even in history.

In the middle of 1941, the President of the German Parliament and second in command Hermann Goring sent a letter to Chief of Security Reinhard Heydrich under the orders of Hitler to form a general plan of the clerical, material and efficient ways to be taken in organizing the execution of the Final Solution. (Gerald Fleming, 1987) This solution was a plan to arrest and than kill all of the Jews settled in European countries. The idea was to brush throughout Europe from the western side to the eastern side and pick out all Jews and send them to selected inhibition camps situated in Poland known as ‘Ghettos’. The next step was to make them slaves until they will die because of natural causes. The rest of the Jewish people would be dealt with fittingly. The final decision to eliminate the Jews was made later in 1942 at the Wannsee Conference. Reinhard Heydrich met with selected officers in the suburb of Berlin. It was here where the idea of the preparation and execution of Jews was discussed. Out of the 30 copies of the meeting note only one survived the war which was found in Berlin by the United States war crime investigators. The main points of the conference were

1. Banishment of the Jews (figuratively) from the all parts of life of the German people.
2. Banishment of the Jews (actually). To speed up this process, the Reich Central Office for Jewish migration was established in 1939.

Other ideas that were discussed included a schedule of banishment; countries were listed in order from where the Jews would be cleared. Another idea was from the chief of Resettlement office, Otto Hofmann who said to use the process of sterilization in cases where Jews have married people from other religions and to keep these Jews in separate ghettos. Information was gathered from different countries about how many Jews are likely to be banished from each country (Mark Roseman, 2002). However there were some problems.

Assembling more than six million people from all over the continent to one place is not an easy task. It needs a vast amount of manpower, as well as housing, transportation, food and many more things. How could such a massive job be carried out in a proper manner? This was the main problem. The Nazis solved this problem at the Wannsee Conference by voting to eliminate all the Jews. This was already being carried out by a German task force known as Einsatzgruppen but now it was to become official, than came another dilemma: German soldiers were expressively disturbed by murdering children and women. The answer to this problem was to build extermination camps. These camps were not discussed in the conference but almost six of them were already constructed which included Majdanek, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Be%u0142%u017Cec, Sobibór, and Che%u0142mno. (Christopher R. Browning, 2007)

What was the reason behind Hitler’s Final Solution?

Why the Nazi were’s so involved in exterminating Jews not just from Europe but from Society. The answer only lies with Adolf Hitler. He was a bright presenter, and he was able to persuade Germany that Jews, Poles other Slaves and mixed groups were sub-humans, that they were a menace and had to be eradicated. He persuaded them that the Jews were richer and were influential than the rest. Because of this, the Jews became responsible for all of Germany’s tribulation which included the WW1 defeat, the 1920 Great Inflation and 1930s economic crisis. With the defeat in the Battle of Britain in 1940, a Madagascar Plan was devised to extradite Jews and others to Madagascar. This plan fizzled out. The Final solution was the solution that was planned to exterminate all these Jews and other undesirables. (David Williamson, 2004)

No one has yet been able to determine what ran through the mind of Adolf Hilter. We can only know that his plans and his actions had a shocking effect on millions of people. And regrettable he was the thinker of it all. The men working underneath him were the psychopaths who showed no regret when committing such heinous acts. Most shocking was that his short term goal which was to eliminate Jews settled in Europe was almost near to completion. Almost half of the Jews in Europe were killed during the course of WWII. Whether by torture, death squad, gas chambers or even by experimentation it was all part of Hitler’s plan.