The call "final solution” was the name given by the Nazis to the genocide plan put into practice against the Jews throughout the Second World War, at the Holocaust. The plan was mainly aimed at the policy of total eradication of the population of Jews in Europe, however, it is important to remember that, in the Holocaust, in addition to Jews, they were executed Gypsies, Jehovah's Witnesses, homosexuals, the mentally ill and blacks.
Creation of the "Final Solution"
The extermination plan against Jews promoted by the Nazis during World War II was drawn up after Hermann Göring approved its creation on July 31, 1941. This plan, called the "final solution", was created by Reinhard Heydrich and Heinrich Himmler and aimed at the total eradication of Jews from Europe. It proposed that all Jews who could not work for the Nazis would be killed immediately, and those who were able would be forced to work until exhaustion killed them.
The plan proposed by Heydrich and Himmler was based on some proposals that Hitler tried to put into practice in Eastern Europe until mid-1941, but which had failed. First, there was the
hunger plan, in which the Nazis tried to impose the death of 30 million people by starvation. Then there was the plan to total extermination of the Jews after the victory over the Soviet Union (as planned by Hitler himself). Finally, the aim was to transform the Soviet Union into a exploration colony German.Einsatzgruppen: the death squads
The architects of the Holocaust: Heindrich Himmler (left) and Reinhard Heydrich (center) in 1940 photo*
After obtaining formal authorization from Hitler (transmitted by Göring), Himmler has already imposed his plan into practice. At first, Himmler suggested that the simplest method of dealing with the situation was through the shooting. Himmler was critical of Hitler's earlier plans that suggested killing Jews slowly by starvation and proposed deportation plans (the Nazis even considered deporting the Jews from Europe to Madagascar).
So, to put into practice his project of shooting, Himmler called the Einsatzgruppen for that mission. The order given in July 1941 was that the Einsatzgruppen it was supposed to kill all the Jews of the western Soviet Union (men, women and children). The imposition of this order led to the Einsatzgruppen C (responsible for the Ukraine region) to kill about 60,000 Jews between August and September 1941|1|.
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The performance of the Einsatzgruppen it happened across the western part of the Soviet Union. One of the most emblematic cases was the extermination of Jews in Kiev, where in about 36 hours Nazi death squads shot around 33,000 people. This took place in September 1941. The Nazi extermination policy was responsible for the death of an estimated one million Jews in Eastern Europe by December 1941|2|.
However, the order given to the shooting of children and women generated numerous psychological problems in the members of the Einsatzgruppen. The answer was to create a method of extermination that was more impersonal and could kill more people in less time: the gas chambers.
gas chambers
The gas chambers were created with the aim of increasing the volume of executions carried out. In addition, because it was performed impersonally, it reduced the cases of psychological disorders caused in the Einsatzgruppen. The first gas chambers were tested against Soviet prisoners in adapted train cars. The death was by poisoning by carbon monoxide.
The chambers were soon added to Nazi concentration camps. Concentration camps had been created by Jews back in the 1930s. With the war and the conquest of several regions in Europe, the Nazis expanded the idea and created several other concentration camps, mainly in Eastern Europe.
With the establishment of the Final Solution, the concentration camps began to receive Jews from all parts of Europe. The main concentration camps were set up in Poland, and prisoners were taken by train. The term used by the Nazis was resettlement, but as historian Timothy Snyder says, this term was a euphemism for mass extermination.
The gas chambers started to use the pesticide Zyklon B. You main concentration camps and extermination were Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Sobibor and Belzec, all of them located in Poland.
About three million Jews are estimated to have died in the shootings and gas chambers. Another three million died as a result of abuse, exhaustion, hunger, disease, and so on. Historians estimate that about 2/3 of Europe's Jews were killed by the actions of the Nazis.
|1| SNYDER, Timothy. Lands of Blood: Europe between Hitler and Stalin. Rio de Janeiro: Record, 2012, p. 247.
|2| Idem, p. 270
*Image credits: Everett Historical and Shutterstock
By Daniel Neves
Graduated in History
Would you like to reference this text in a school or academic work? Look:
SILVA, Daniel Neves. "Final Solution: The Nazi Plan to Exterminate the Jews in Europe"; Brazil School. Available in: https://brasilescola.uol.com.br/historiag/solucao-final-plano-nazista-exterminio-dos-judeus-na-europa.htm. Accessed on June 27, 2021.
