Final Solution: Difference between revisions

The Final Solution of the Jewish Question (German Endlösung der Judenfrage) refers to the German Nazis' plan to address the "Jewish problem" through systematic relocation and later extermination through genocide during World War II. The term was coined by Adolf Eichmann, a top Nazi official who supervised the genocidal campaign.

Heinrich Himmler was the main architect of the slaughter which would eventually exterminate three-quarters of all European Jews. On July 31, 1941, under instructions from Adolf Hitler, Nazi official Hermann Göring ordered SS general Reinhard Heydrich to "submit to me as soon as possible a general plan of the administrative material and financial measures necessary for carrying out the desired final solution of the Jewish question."

The Nazis concentrated Jewish populations in ghettos, and later in concentration camps, in order to assist in their exploitation and subsequent extermination.

The Wannsee conference, which took place in Berlin, in the Wannsee Villa on January 20, 1942, was a discussion held by a group of Nazi officials to decide on the "final solution of the Jewish question". The meeting is noted as the first discussion of the "final solution" among Nazi leaders. The records and minutes of this meeting were also found intact by the Allies at the end of the war and served as valuable evidence during the Nuremberg Trials.

Much of the world now refers to the results of the "final solution" as the Holocaust, while many Jews and other people prefer the Hebrew term Shoa (השואה), or "calamity", due to the etymological origins of the term 'holocaust' as a 'completely burnt sacrificial offering'.

Not all of the Jews were eliminated, not even from Berlin. When the Soviet Army occupied Berlin in 1945, a fully functioning Jewish community a few thousand strong, complete with synagogue, was still in existence in the German capital.

One of the most renowned and discussed victims of the "final solution" was the teenage girl Anne Frank, due to the diary she wrote before she died in the German concentration camp Bergen-Belsen. The diary was published after the war by her father, who had survived the Holocaust.