The Final Solution (Endlösung) was the Nazi bureaucratic name for the murder of every Jew in Europe. The phrase appears in the German documents of the period as a euphemism. The civil servants and SS officers who used it knew what it meant. The Final Solution was not the policy of forced emigration that had preceded it. It was the policy of killing every Jewish man, woman and child the regime could reach, anywhere on the European continent.
The pages in this section cover the deciding and the doing of the Final Solution. They are about the small number of months in late 1941 and early 1942 in which the policy was settled at the top of the regime, and about the years from 1942 to 1944 in which it was carried out. The killing apparatus that resulted, the six extermination camps in occupied Poland and the wider deportation system that fed them, was the largest single industrial mass killing operation in human history.
What is here
The Wannsee Conference and the Final Solution covers the meeting of senior civil servants on 20 January 1942 at which Heydrich communicated the new policy and secured the cooperation of the Reich ministries that would have to implement it. Wannsee was not where the decision was made. It was where the decision was passed down through the bureaucracy.
The Six Death Camps covers Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Bełżec, Sobibór, Chełmno and Majdanek, the six camps that the regime built or adapted specifically for the killing of Jews on arrival. Each was a different operation. Each had a different commandant, a different layout, a different killing method, and a different body count. Together they killed around three million people, the great majority Jews.
The Death Camps 1942 to 1944 covers the operational history of the killing programme, year by year, from the first gassing experiments at Auschwitz in autumn 1941 through the peak years of 1942 and 1943 to the final phase in 1944.
What is not here
The wider concentration camp system, including the conditions inside the camps, the prisoner experience, the medical experiments and the prisoner revolts, is covered in The Concentration Camps section under The Killing Begins. The killing of Soviet Jews by the Einsatzgruppen, which preceded and ran in parallel with the death camp killings, is covered in The Killing Begins under The Einsatzgruppen and the Specific Atrocities pages. The deportations from each occupied country are covered under Beyond the Camps. The pages here are specifically about the Final Solution as a decided and implemented policy: the meeting that settled it, the camps that carried it out, and the operational record of the killing programme during its peak years.
Why this section is here
The Final Solution is the centre of the Holocaust as the term is generally understood. It is the part for which the camps were built, the trains scheduled, the gas ordered, the bureaucracy refined. It is also the part that the deniers most often attempt to argue away, because it is the part most thoroughly documented and most concretely set out in the regime’s own paperwork. The pages in this section deal with that documentation directly.
Sources
- Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 2 vols, HarperCollins, 1997 and 2007
- Christopher Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, University of Nebraska Press and Yad Vashem, 2004
- Peter Longerich, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews, Oxford University Press, 2010
- Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1936 to 1945: Nemesis, Allen Lane, 2000
- Trial transcripts and judgment, Trials of War Criminals before the Nuernberg Military Tribunals under Control Council Law No. 10, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1949 onwards