23 Flashcards
Overview of the Final Solution
From 1942 to early 1945, the Nazi regime implemented its so-called (inal Solution’ to the Jewish question? What had been rather confused and uncontrolled actions in 1940 and 1941, mixing mass killings with ghettoisation and deportations, were coordinated into a bureaucratic killing machine. Between 5 and 6 million people were systematically murdered. Most were Jews: from the Soviet Union after it was overrun by German forces: from the countries that were under Nazi occupation, such as Poland, France and Hungary; and from Germany itself. Countless other victims died in the same way: Soviet prisoners of war, Gypsies, the disabled and the dissidents regarded by the Nazis as ‘asocial elements, or ‘social undesirables? Even when the Third Reich faced defeat in 1944, the killings were accelerated, coming to an end only when invading Allied armies liberated the camps in 1945.
Origins of Final Solution be how was it affected by the war
The origins of the ‘Final Solution’ were complex and deep rooted. Hitler’s ideological goals were fixed before 1933; if the Nazis ever came to power, it was certain that the Jewish people faced harmful consequences. Reichkristallnacht in November 1938 opened the way for increasingly violent persecution. For the Holocaust to take place, however, the Second World War was an essential precondition. Hitler himself explicitly linked the war in Europe with the fate of the Jews. When the decision was taken, late in 1940, to turn the war eastwards against the Soviet Union, it was clear that this would be a war of racial annihilation.
By the end of 1941, the Nazi regime had to face the fact that the complete conquest of the Soviet Union had not been achieved and that final victory would have to wait until the summer of 1942 at the earliest. Some of the previous plans to send millions of deported Jews to be resettled on the island of Madagascar or in Siberia had to be abandoned. It was also clear by then that the vast numbers of Jews already deported to the General Government area of Poland were too many for the authorities there to cope with. It was the urgency of the problems facing the Nazi regime late in 1941 that led to radical new policies.
