For Longerich, to see mass killing as the Final Solution was an acknowledgement by the Nazi leadership that there would not be a German military victory over the USSR in the near future. David Cesarani emphasises the improvised, haphazard nature of Nazi policies in response to changing war time conditions in his overview, Final Solution: The Fate of the European Jews 1933–49 (2016).
In 1936, the Bureau of Romani Affairs in Munich was taken over by Interpol and renamed the Center for Combating the Gypsy Menace.
Introduced at the end of 1937, the "final solution of the Gypsy Question" entailed round-ups, expulsions, and incarceration of Romani in concentration camps built at, until this point, Dachau, Buchenwald, Flossenbürg, Mauthausen, Natzweiler, Ravensbruck, Taucha and Westerbork.
After the Anschluss with Austria in 1938, Central Offices for Jewish Emigration were established in Vienna and Berlin to increase Jewish emigration, without covert plans for their forthcoming annihilation. The outbreak of war and the invasion of Poland brought a population of 3.5 million Polish Jews under the control of the Nazi and Soviet security forces, and marked the start of a the Holocaust in Poland.
He set the initial deadline for 31 December 1942. ==Phase two: deportations to extermination camps== When the Wehrmacht invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, the area of the General Government was enlarged by the inclusion of regions that had been annexed by the Soviet Union since the 1939 invasion.
During a speech given on 30 January 1939, on the sixth anniversary of his accession to power, Hitler said: Raul Hilberg, in his book The Destruction of the European Jews, was the first historian to systematically document and analyse the Nazi project to kill every Jew in Europe.
The classic instance is the invasion of Poland in 1939, when not even the most elementary consideration had been given to what should happen to Poland's Jews either in the shorter or longer term.
"It is generally accepted the decision-making process was prolonged and incremental." In 1940, following the Fall of France, Adolf Eichmann devised the Madagascar Plan to move Europe's Jewish population to the French colony, but the plan was abandoned for logistical reasons, mainly a naval blockade.
Two years later, with the launch of Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, the German top echelon began to pursue Hitler's new anti-Semitic plan to eradicate, rather than expel, Jews.
On 31 July 1941, Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring wrote to Reinhard Heydrich (Himmler's deputy and chief of the RSHA), authorising him to make the "necessary preparations" for a "total solution of the Jewish question" and coordinate with all affected organizations.
During the early stages of the invasion, Himmler himself visited Białystok at the beginning of July 1941, and requested that, "as a matter of principle, any Jew" behind the German-Soviet frontier was to be "regarded as a partisan".
By August 1941, all Jewish men, women, and children were shot.
They included the Wannsee Conference Protocol, which documented the co-operation of various German state agencies in the SS-led Holocaust, as well as some 3,000 tons of original German records captured by Allied armies, including the Einsatzgruppen reports, which documented the progress of the mobile killing units assigned, among other tasks, to kill Jewish civilians during the attack on the Soviet Union in 1941.
The evidential proof which documented the mechanism of the Holocaust was submitted at Nuremberg. ==Phase one: death squads of Operation Barbarossa== The Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union codenamed Operation Barbarossa, which commenced on 22 June 1941, set in motion a "war of annihilation" which quickly opened the door to the systematic mass murder of European Jews.
On 3 March 1941, Wehrmacht Joint Operations Staff Chief Alfred Jodl repeated Hitler's declaration that the "Jewish-Bolshevik intelligentsia would have to be eliminated" and that the forthcoming war would be a confrontation between two completely opposing cultures.
On 29 July 1941, at a meeting of SS officers in Vileyka (Polish Wilejka, now Belarus), the Einsatzgruppen had been given a dressing-down for their low execution figures.
In late August 1941 the Einsatzgruppen murdered 23,600 Jews in the Kamianets-Podilskyi massacre.
In mid-October 1941, HSSPF South, under the command of Friedrich Jeckeln, had reported the indiscriminate killing of more than 100,000 people. By the end of December 1941, before the Wannsee Conference, over 439,800 Jewish people had been murdered, and the Final Solution policy in the east became common knowledge within the SS.
Addressing his district governors in the General Government on 16 December 1941, Governor-General Hans Frank said: "But what will happen to the Jews? Do you believe they will be lodged in settlements in Ostland? In Berlin, we were told: why all this trouble; we cannot use them in the Ostland or the Reichskommissariat either; liquidate them yourselves!" Two days later, Himmler recorded the outcome of his discussion with Hitler.
On Friday, 27 June 1941, the Reserve Police Battalion 309 arrived in the city and set the Great Synagogue on fire with hundreds of Jewish men locked inside.
The Germans carried out the mass executions [...] signaling the beginning of the 'Final Solution'." About 80,000 Jews were killed in Lithuania by October (including in formerly Polish Wilno) and about 175,000 by the end of 1941 according to official reports. ===Reichskommissariat Ukraine=== Within one week from the start of Operation Barbarossa, Heydrich issued an order to his Einsatzgruppen for the on-the-spot execution of all Bolsheviks, interpreted by the SS to mean all Jews.
One of the first indiscriminate massacres of men, women, and children in Reichskommissariat Ukraine took the lives of over 4,000 Polish Jews in occupied Łuck on 2–4 July 1941, murdered by Einsatzkommando 4a assisted by the Ukrainian People's Militia.
Formed officially on 20 August 1941, the Reichskommissariat Ukraine—stretching from prewar east-central Poland to Crimea—had become operational theatre of the Einsatzgruppe C.
Within the Soviet Union proper, between 9 July 1941 and 19 September 1941 the city of Zhytomyr was made Judenfrei in three murder operations conducted by German and Ukrainian police in which 10,000 Jews perished.
In the Kamianets-Podilskyi massacre of 26–28 August 1941 some 23,600 Jews were shot in front of open pits (including 14,000–18,000 people expelled from Hungary).
Long before the conference at Wannsee, 28,000 Jews were shot by SS and Ukrainian military in Vinnytsia on 22 September 1941, followed by the 29 September massacre of 33,771 Jews at Babi Yar.
In Dnipropetrovsk, on 13 October 1941 some 10,000–15,000 Jews were shot.
In August 1942 in the presence of only a few German SS men over 5,000 Jews were massacred in Polish Zofjówka by the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police leading to the town's complete sweep from existence. ===Distrikt Galizien=== Historians find it difficult to determine precisely when the first concerted effort at annihilation of all Jews began in the last weeks of June 1941 during Operation Barbarossa.
On 12 October 1941, in Stanisławów, some 10,000–12,000 Jewish men, women, and children were shot at the Jewish cemetery by the German uniformed SS-men and Ukrainian Auxiliary Police during the so-called "" (de).
Notably, the extermination operations in Chełmno had begun on 8 December 1941, one-and-a-half-month before Wannsee, but Chełmno—located in Reichsgau Wartheland—was not a part of Reinhard, and neither was Auschwitz-Birkenau functioning as an extermination center until November 1944 in Polish lands annexed by Hitler and added to Germany proper. The conference at Wannsee gave impetus to the so-called second sweep of the Holocaust by the bullet in the east.
He set the initial deadline for 31 December 1942. ==Phase two: deportations to extermination camps== When the Wehrmacht invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, the area of the General Government was enlarged by the inclusion of regions that had been annexed by the Soviet Union since the 1939 invasion.
The killings of Jews from the Łódź Ghetto in the Warthegau district began in early December 1941 with the use of gas vans (approved by Heydrich) at the Kulmhof extermination camp.
By the time the European-wide Final Solution was formulated two months later, Heydrich's RSHA had already confirmed the effectiveness of industrial killing by exhaust fumes, and the strength of deception. Construction work on the first killing centre at Bełżec in occupied Poland began in October 1941, three months before the Wannsee Conference.
Germany's declaration of war on the United States on 11 December 1941, "meant that holding European Jews hostage to deter the US from entering the conflict was now pointless".
into the War is also crucial to the time-frame proposed by Christian Gerlach, who argued in his 1997 thesis that the Final Solution decision was announced on 12 December 1941, when Hitler addressed a meeting of the Nazi Party (the Reichsleiter) and of regional party leaders (the Gauleiter).
The day after Hitler's speech, on 13 December 1941 Joseph Goebbels wrote in his diary: Cesarani notes that by 1943, as the military position of the German forces deteriorated, the Nazi leadership became more openly explicit about the Final Solution.
This policy of deliberate and systematic genocide starting across German-occupied Europe was formulated in procedural and geopolitical terms by Nazi leadership in January 1942 at the Wannsee Conference held near Berlin, and culminated in the Holocaust, which saw the killing of 90% of Polish Jews, and two-thirds of the Jewish population of Europe. The nature and timing of the decisions that led to the Final Solution is an intensely researched and debated aspect of the Holocaust.
In the first days of January 1942 in Kharkiv, 12,000 Jews were murdered, but smaller massacres continued in this period on daily basis in countless other locations.
In August 1942 in the presence of only a few German SS men over 5,000 Jews were massacred in Polish Zofjówka by the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police leading to the town's complete sweep from existence. ===Distrikt Galizien=== Historians find it difficult to determine precisely when the first concerted effort at annihilation of all Jews began in the last weeks of June 1941 during Operation Barbarossa.
It was the single largest massacre of Polish Jews in Generalgouvernement prior to mass gassings of Aktion Reinhard, which commenced at Bełżec in March 1942.
Between April and July 1942 in Volhynia, 30,000 Jews were murdered in death pits with the help of dozens of newly formed Ukrainian Schutzmannschaft.
In July 1942 the Completion of the Final Solution in the General Government territory which included Distrikt Galizien, was ordered personally by Himmler.
He set the initial deadline for 31 December 1942. ==Phase two: deportations to extermination camps== When the Wehrmacht invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, the area of the General Government was enlarged by the inclusion of regions that had been annexed by the Soviet Union since the 1939 invasion.
By mid-1942, two more death camps had been built on Polish lands: Sobibór operational by May 1942, and Treblinka operational in July.
From July 1942, the mass murder of Polish and foreign Jews took place at Treblinka as part of Operation Reinhard, the deadliest phase of the Final Solution.
The total number of people killed in 1942 in Lublin/Majdanek, Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka was 1,274,166 by Germany's own estimation, not counting Auschwitz II Birkenau nor Kulmhof.
In two weeks of July 1942, the Słonim Ghetto revolt, crushed with the help of Latvian, Lithuanian, and Ukrainian Schutzmannschaft, cost the lives of 8,000–13,000 Jews.
The second largest mass shooting (to that particular date) took place in late October 1942 when the insurgency was suppressed in the Pińsk Ghetto; over 26,000 men, women and children were shot with the aid of Belarusian Auxiliary Police before the ghetto's closure.
Numerous other uprisings were quelled without impacting the pre-planned Nazi deportations actions. About two-thirds of the overall number of victims of the Final Solution were killed before February 1943, which included the main phase of the extermination programme in the West launched by Eichmann on 11 June 1942 from Berlin.
The new gas chambers at Bunker I were finished around March 1942 when the Final Solution was officially launched at Belzec.
In July 1942, Bunker II became operational.
In May 1944, Auschwitz-Birkenau became the site of one of the two largest mass murder operations in modern history, after the Großaktion Warschau deportations of the Warsaw Ghetto inmates to Treblinka in 1942.
Longerich suggests that it "was only in the summer of 1942, that mass killing was finally understood as the realization of the Final Solution, rather than as an extensively violent preliminary to some later program of slave labor and deportation to the lands of a conquered USSR".
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By the time the mass killings of Operation Reinhard ended in 1943, roughly two million Jews in German-occupied Poland had been murdered.
During the suppression of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (the largest single revolt by Jews during World War II), 13,000 Jews were killed in action before May 1943.
Numerous other uprisings were quelled without impacting the pre-planned Nazi deportations actions. About two-thirds of the overall number of victims of the Final Solution were killed before February 1943, which included the main phase of the extermination programme in the West launched by Eichmann on 11 June 1942 from Berlin.
The nearly completed clandestine programme of murdering all deportees was explicitly addressed by Heinrich Himmler in his Posen speeches made to the leadership of the Nazi Party on 4 October and during a conference in Posen (Poznan) of 6 October 1943 in occupied Poland.
The assembled functionaries were told that the Nazi state policy was "the extermination of the Jewish people" as such. On 19 October 1943, five days after the prisoner revolt in Sobibór, Operation Reinhard was terminated by Odilo Globocnik on behalf of Himmler.
The operation was followed by the single largest German massacre of Jews in the entire war carried out on 3 November 1943; with approximately 43,000 prisoners shot one-by-one simultaneously in three nearby locations by the Reserve Police Battalion 101 hand-in-hand with the Trawniki men from Ukraine.
In August, another 10,000–13,000 Polish Jews from Silesia perished, along with 16,000 French Jews declared 'stateless', and 7,700 Jews from Slovakia. The infamous 'Gate of Death' at Auschwitz II for the incoming freight trains was built of brick and cement mortar in 1943, and the three-track rail spur was added.
The day after Hitler's speech, on 13 December 1941 Joseph Goebbels wrote in his diary: Cesarani notes that by 1943, as the military position of the German forces deteriorated, the Nazi leadership became more openly explicit about the Final Solution.
Notably, the extermination operations in Chełmno had begun on 8 December 1941, one-and-a-half-month before Wannsee, but Chełmno—located in Reichsgau Wartheland—was not a part of Reinhard, and neither was Auschwitz-Birkenau functioning as an extermination center until November 1944 in Polish lands annexed by Hitler and added to Germany proper. The conference at Wannsee gave impetus to the so-called second sweep of the Holocaust by the bullet in the east.
The spring of 1944 marked the beginning of the last phase of the Final Solution at Birkenau.
In May 1944, Auschwitz-Birkenau became the site of one of the two largest mass murder operations in modern history, after the Großaktion Warschau deportations of the Warsaw Ghetto inmates to Treblinka in 1942.
It is estimated that until July 1944 approximately 320,000 Hungarian Jews were gassed at Birkenau in less than eight weeks.
In total, between April and November 1944, Auschwitz II received over 585,000 Jews from over a dozen regions as far as Greece, Italy, and France, including 426,000 Jews from Hungary, 67,000 from Łódź, 25,000 from Theresienstadt, and the last 23,000 Jews from the General Government.
Auschwitz was liberated by the Red Army on 27 January 1945, when the gassing had already stopped. ==Historiographic debate about the decision== Historians disagree as to when and how the Nazi leadership decided that the European Jews should be exterminated.
A copy of the minutes of this meeting was found by the Allies in March 1947; it was too late to serve as evidence during the first Nuremberg Trial, but was used by prosecutor General Telford Taylor in the subsequent Nuremberg Trials. After the end of World War II, surviving archival documents provided a clear record of the Final Solution policies and actions of Nazi Germany.
The controversy is commonly described as the functionalism versus intentionalism debate which began in the 1960s, and subsided thirty years later.
The book was initially published in 1961, and issued in an enlarged version in 1985. Hilberg's analysis of the steps that led to the destruction of European Jews revealed that it was "an administrative process carried out by bureaucrats in a network of offices spanning a continent".
The book was initially published in 1961, and issued in an enlarged version in 1985. Hilberg's analysis of the steps that led to the destruction of European Jews revealed that it was "an administrative process carried out by bureaucrats in a network of offices spanning a continent".
In the 1990s, the attention of mainstream historians moved away from the question of top executive orders triggering the Holocaust and focused on factors that were overlooked earlier, such as personal initiative and ingenuity of countless functionaries in charge of the killing fields.
into the War is also crucial to the time-frame proposed by Christian Gerlach, who argued in his 1997 thesis that the Final Solution decision was announced on 12 December 1941, when Hitler addressed a meeting of the Nazi Party (the Reichsleiter) and of regional party leaders (the Gauleiter).
of Nebraska Press / Yad Vashem 2007. ==External links== Website of the House of the Wannsee Conference The Development of the Final Solution—lecture from Dr.
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