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Hitlers Final Solution In the Second World War, Adolph Hitler, the leader of the Nazi regime, had many problems to deal with. To handle the largest of these problems, he came up with his infamous Final Solution. What was his Final Solution, and which problem was it an attempt to solve? Moreover, how did he carry this solution out? Throughout time, humans have murdered each other in the worst ways imaginable.
The most horrifying type of murder is genocide: the complete extermination of an entire race of people. In the Second World War, Hitler decided that genocide was the only way to handle the problem of the Jewish people. He believed that the Jewish people were the cause of many societal problems and he resented them because of their financial success. Hitler made the Jewish people scapegoats for the people of Germany to blame for their overall unhappy state. The Jews were convenient to blame and soon they were hated by almost all of the German population. As the publisher of the Nazi newspaper Der Summer put it, The Jewish people ought to be exterminated root and branch.
Then the plague of pests would have disappeared in Poland at one stroke. () When the Nazi party took over Germany, Adolph Hitler was selected to be the leader of this new regime. Hitler immediately started to strip away the rights of the Jewish people living in Germany and its controlled territories. For example, in 1937, the Jews were banned from many occupations such as teaching, accounting, and dentistry. Other rights such as tax reductions and child allowances were taken from the Jews. Jewish students were even kicked out of German schools and forced to attend all-Jewish schools. This was all part of Hitlers very secret Final Solution.
Though this solution was not fully plotted, its essential purpose was Hitlers intention to kill every Jew. Hitler needed help devising a plan on how to accomplish this goal. What should the Nazi Party do to get rid of the Jews? This was the question that occupied Hitlers mind.
Hitler did not come up with the solution to the Jewish question himself, he had trustworthy people working on the solution for him. Hermann Goring was given the job of planning an extermination without drawing the worlds attention to the killing that would take place. At first, nobody knew about the plan to exterminate the Jews besides Hitler and his very close advisors. Slowly the news got out and other government people gradually became aware of what was going on. The whole Nazi government soon knew about the plan that Hitler was trying to carry out. The first major step towards the Final Solution came when Goring ordered the evacuation of all Jewish people to ghettos that were sealed off from the rest of the world.
There were many different ghettos that the Jewish people evacuated to, located throughout Nazi-controlled territories. Some, like the ghetto of Lodz, held 230, 000 Jews within their limits. Goring had every ghetto strategically placed near railroad lines so he could easily accomplish the final goal, which became to destroy the Jewish people. Once the Nazis had rounded up all of the Jewish people, they had each ghetto report its population, financial assets, and the occupation of every person held within.
The Nazis confiscated the Jews assets in order to finance the ghettos. During that time, the SS Einsatzgruppen, a Nazi paramilitary agency that gained power over other government agencies during the Nazi regime, were patrolling and killing the Jewish population in a systematic fashion as ordered by the SS chief adjutant Reinhard Heydrich. The SS would have Jews line up along side a large mass grave. They would then be cut down with machine gun fire, and their bodies would fall into the grave. The SS would then bury the evidence. When the SS leader Heinrich Himmler witnessed one of these executions, he ordered a new, humane method to be developed for killing.
These mass executions were the second step towards carrying out the Final Solution. Soon, a new form of execution was used on the Jewish people. They would be loaded into trailers and told they were being relocated. This trailer was a sealed compartment and was attached to the exhaust pipe of the truck that was towing it.
This way, the Jewish people would be dead after a short drive to the grave site, where their bodies would be thrown into a large ditch that had been pre-dug by Jewish slave labor. The truck would then return to the ghetto to get more Jews. When the ditch was filled, they would kill the slave laborers, throw them on top, and once again, bury or burn the evidence. This form of execution was deemed inefficient because at most, only 25 people could be killed per trip. Plus, there was the unpleasant task of carrying the bodies from the truck to the burial site. The next form of execution was the use of large gas chambers.
The first camp to experiment with the use of gas chambers was at Brandenburg, which was a former prison. Euthanasia of the sick and disabled was easily carried out here. Patients were lead into what appeared to be shower rooms, but were really hermetically sealed chambers connected to cylinders of carbon monoxide. The Nazis would turn on the gas and in a few minutes all of the people inside the large shower room would be dead. Families of the patients were then notified that their loved ones had died from either heart failure or pneumonia. The bodies were then cremated at a very large crematorium inside the prison.
When Hitler realized how efficient the prison was at Brandenburg, he ordered that many of the existing concentration camps be fitted with gas chambers. The town of Oswiecim (Auschwitz) in Poland was selected to be the main death camp for Jewish people. Rudolf Hoss was chosen to be the Kommandant of Auschwitz and to instructed to oversee the killing that went on there. As Himmler told Hoss, The Fuhrer has ordered the Final Solution of the Jewish question.
We, the SS, have to carry out this order I have therefore chosen Auschwitz for this purpose. () With this came the order for ghettos to be evacuated and the Jewish inhabitants be brought to Auschwitz to be put to death. By the end of the Second World War, Auschwitz could handle over 9, 000 bodies every day. At first, the Nazis used carbon monoxide as they had in the truck trailers to kill the Jews. Soon, experiments in 1941 found that Zyklon-B gas killed people much quicker than the carbon monoxide.
Less Zyklon-B was needed to kill the same number of people as carbon monoxide. Cyanide gas was also used in the later years of the war. On 20 January, 1942, the Nazi leaders met at the Wannsee Conference to coordinate how to finish carrying out the Final Solution. This conference also let many of the military leaders of the Nazi party know the details about the plan for the Jews. At the conference, the fate of over eleven million Jews was discussed. Evacuations of Jews to designated areas and where they were to be exterminated was planned among the military leaders.
Plans for every countrys Jewish population in Europe were laid out. The SS did not want the Jews to reappear after the exterminations were finished because a few Jews had survived. To get rid of the evidence of the genocide that was happening, the Nazis had slave labor units dig up the mass graves throughout Europe and burn the bodies, or what was left of the bodies, effectively destroying all of the evidence of the mass killings. These special units worked throughout the year of 1943. The same would happen when a concentration camp was shut down or moved: everything would be burned, bulldozed, and cleaned.
Trees would then be planted, making it seem as if nothing had ever been there. This is one reason that it was very hard to confirm the mass executions that were reportedly going on in Europe. When the Jews arrived at the death camps, their valuables were immediately confiscated. This included all gold, silver, or items of any worth.
These items were then sent to soldiers on the front lines to reward them for their hard work. By September 26, 1942, over 800 boxcars had left Auschwitz with confiscated items headed towards the SS Headquarters of the Economic Administration. Soldiers even sorted through the bodies of the freshly gassed Jews looking for gold teeth, which they would pull out of the bodys mouth with a set of pliers. The hair was even cut off the heads of the women and was used to stuff mattresses and cushions. Clothes and artificial limbs were also taken from the Jews before they were put to death. The Nazis would then send the clothes to German families, and give the artificial limbs to German soldiers who needed them.
To get the Jews to the concentration camps, the SS loaded them onto boxcars pulled by trains. This is the reason the ghettos were place near railroad tracks. Although when the ghettos were first made, the purpose for them being so near the railroad tracks was to make it very easy for the SS to transport the Jewish prisoners wherever was needed, Hitler knew that eventually he would move the Jews in masses from certain areas of Europe. The death camps became the locations he intended to move the Jewish population to. The location of these ghettos made it simple to quickly move a huge number of Jews from one area of Europe to another, so they could be gassed and cremated. Many of the Jews died on the way to the camps due to lack of oxygen, lack of water, and lack of food.
These bodies were usually thrown out of the boxcars when the train stopped. When the Jews arrived at the concentration camps, they were either killed immediately or made to work in a forced labor camp until they were to weak to work any longer, and then they were executed. The Nazis encountered almost no resistance when they loaded the boxcars with Jews to send them to their deaths. This was because none of the Jewish people knew what awaited them at the end of the line. The Jews were told that they were simply being relocated. A lot of the time, the Jews were even allowed to bring a few items to reassure them that they were sincerely being moved to another part of Europe where they could go on with their lives.
In the end, the Nazis would kill the Jews and steal their possessions. Rarely did a Jew escape this death, so word about the death camps never made it to the isolated ghettos. By the end of the Second World War, many nations had become allies with Germany and were helping Hitler carry out his Final Solution. These nations even killed many of the Jews themselves using the machine gun technique. Romania, Italy and Hungary all participated and aided the Germans basically of their own free will. The reason the Allies did not try to stop or interfere with Hitlers Final Solution was mostly because they did not have any proof he was carrying it out.
The Allies knew Hitler was moving people in large amounts, but they did not know where or why. The first inspection of a concentration camp was in June of 1944. The Red Cross inspected Theresienstadt, a camp that was thoroughly prepared by the Nazis before their arrival. The Red Cross gave the camp a good report. This hindered the rumors of mistreatment and mass execution in the Nazi-controlled areas. The Allies were very slow to catch on to what Hitler was doing.
It took over five years of terror for the Jews before they were finally liberated from the horrible death camps and concentration camps. The camps were slowly liberated one by one as the Allied forces pushed from both sides of Germany. In the concentration camps, soldiers from the Allied nations found thousands of almost-dead, starving Jews among piles of dead bodies. Even in the last hours of the war, the Nazis tried to carry out Hitlers Final Solution. As the Allies approached Auschwitz, the guards forced the 25, 000 Jews to evacuate the compound and walk over 100 miles in the snow, barefooted. Eventually these prisoners were liberated, but many died on the long trek.
They were either shot or died of exhaustion. In conclusion, The Nazi regimes solution to the problem of what to do with the Jews was to try and kill every last one of them. Hitler called this ungodly plan the Final Solution. His attempt to eradicate the Jews is the worst case of attempted genocide ever committed in history.
By the end of World War Two, about six million Jews were killed by the Nazis in Hitlers attempt to carry out his Final Solution. Works Cited Keegan, John. The Second World War. New York: Viking Penguin Group, 1990. Gilbert, Martin. The Holocaust.
New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1986. The World Wars. Britannica CD, vers, 2. 02. CD-ROM.
Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc. 1995 SS. Britannica CD, vers, 2. 02. CD-ROM. Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc. 1995 The History Place. 20 May 1999
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Research essay sample on Second World War Form Of Execution
