Final Solution

"In a world of absurdity, we must invent

reason..." Elie Wiessel

Topics to Think About • How could “ordinary men” commit such horrible acts

against other human beings?• Why didn’t people stand up against the Nazi’s and help the

Jews?• How important was the Wannsee Conference?• Why was the Evian Conference a turning point against the

Jews?

• Terms• Wannsee Conference

• Evian Conference

• Final Solution

• Einsatzgruppen

The Forced Emigration of German Jews

• The first major step leading to the "Final Solution" was the attempt on the part of the Nazi regime to force Jews to emigrate out of Germany.

• Almost immediately after the unification with Austria the Nazi government set up an Office of Emigration in Vienna. Adolph Eichmann was placed in command of the center.

• There were more than 180,000 Jews in Austria in 1938. Eichmann began deporting Jews as efficiently as possible and by September of 1939, there were only about 60,000 remaining in Austria. But there were still hundreds of thousands of Jews in Germany and in Austria.

• The Emigration Center encountered serious difficulties finding countries around the world to open their doors to Jews. However, there was enough interest to cause President Roosevelt to call a meeting of some 32 nations to discuss the problem. They convened at Evian, France on July 6, 1938.

The Evian Conference

• In the summer of 1938, delegates from thirty-two countries met at the French resort of Evian.

• During the nine-day meeting, delegate after delegate rose to express sympathy for the refugees. But most countries, including the United States and Britain, offered excuses for not letting in more refugees.

• Responding to Evian, the German government was able to state with great pleasure how "astounding" it was that foreign countries criticized Germany for their treatment of the Jews, but none of them wanted to open the doors to them when "the opportunity offer[ed]."

The Evian Conference - Hitler's Green Light for

Genocide

U.S. and World Response

• Some American congressmen proposed the Wagner-Rogers Bill, which offered to let 20,000 endangered Jewish refugee children into the country, but the bill was not supported in the Senate.

• Antisemitic attitudes played a role in the failure to help refugees.

U.S. and World ResponseThe SS St. Louis, carrying refugees with Cuban visas, were denied admittance both in Cuba and in Florida. After being turned back to Europe, most of the passengers perished in the Holocaust.

• On September 1, 1939, Hitler's troops invaded Poland• In 1939 there were approximately 3.3 million Jews living

in Poland (about 10% of the Polish population.• The stunning victories of the German armies in the early

years of World War II brought the majority of European Jewry under Nazi control.

• Jews were deprived of human rights. Their property confiscated, most of them were herded into ghettos and concentration camps. The victories also increased Hitler's confidence that he could proceed with his plans with minimal opposition from the outside world

• The Germans aimed to control this sizable Jewish population by forcing Jews to reside in marked-off sections of towns and cities the Nazis called "ghettos" or "Jewish residential quarters." Altogether, the Germans created more than 400 ghettos in occupied territories. The largest ghetto was in Warsaw the Polish capital, where almost half a million Jews were confined.

• Many of the ghettos were enclosed by barbed-wire fences or walls, with entrances guarded by local and German police and SS members. During curfew hours at night the residents were forced to stay inside their apartments.

Warsaw ghetto wall under construction by Jewish forced laborers. Warsaw, Poland, October 1940.

• In the Polish cities of Lodz and Warsaw, trolley lines ran through the middle of the ghetto. Rather than reroute the lines, workers fenced them off, and policemen guarded the area to keep the Jews from escaping on the trolley cars. The passengers from outside the ghetto used the cars to get to work on weekdays, and some rode them on Sunday outings just to gawk and sneer at the ghetto prisoners.

Final Solution

• Life in the ghettos was hard: food was rationed; several families often shared a small space; disease spread rapidly; heating, ventilation, and sanitation were limited.

• Many children were orphaned in the ghettos.

• DISCUSSION QUESTIONS• 1 Imagine that you are a 12-year-old Jewish child who has

the opportunity to flee to the Aryan (non-Jewish) part of Warsaw. if you do so, under what condition would you consider returning to the Ghetto? How would you go about obtaining food? What actions would be permissible in your attempt to get food? Would you share it with others?

• 2 Imagine yourself a Pole, observing the Ghetto from the Aryan side. An escaped Jew approaches; would you give food, offer to hide the Jew, run away, or call the authorities to turn the Jew in?

• 3 The last three rabbis of the Ghetto meet. Because of their prominence they have been offered passage out of the Ghetto. Discuss what you would do in a debate about individual safety versus communal responsibility.

Questions Cont. • 4 Imagine a 20-year-old Jewish woman who reads a poster

in the Ghetto calling for armed resistance to the Nazis. This woman also is responsible for her elderly parents. How would you feel and what action would you take in her position?

• 5 You are asked to join the Judenrat (Jewish Council set up by the Nazis). How would you balance your conscience and responsibility?

Killing Squads• After the German army invaded the

Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, a new stage in the Holocaust began. Under cover of war and confident of victory, the Germans turned from the forced emigration and imprisonment of Jews to mass murder.

• The Einsatzgruppen, mobile killing units killed, either by shooting or by mobile gas vans, over 1,300,000 Jews.

• The mobile killing units acted swiftly, taking the Jewish population by surprise. The killers entered a town or city and rounded up all Jewish men, women, and children. They also took away many Communist party leaders and Roma or Gypsies.

• Victims were forced to surrender any valuables and remove their clothing, which was later sent for use in Germany or distributed to local collaborators. Then the killing squad members marched their victims to open fields, forests, and ravines on the outskirts of conquered towns and cities. There they shot them or gassed them in gas vans and dumped the bodies into mass graves.

Tactics: Einsatzgruppen

Jewish women, some holding infants, are forced to wait in a line before their execution by Germans and Ukrainian collaborators.

A German policeman shoots individual Jewish women who remain alive in the ravine after the mass execution.

• Jews forced into a ravine before they were executed. Zdolbunov, Soviet Union, October 14, 1942.

• Looking through possessions of Jews massacred at Babi Yar, a ravine near Kiev. Soviet Union, September 29-30, 1941.

• The killing squads murdered more than a million Jews and hundreds of thousands of other innocent people. At Babi Yar, near Kiev, about 34,000 Jews were murdered in two days of shooting.

• Only a few people in the general population helped their Jewish neighbors escape. Most people were afraid that they too might be killed.

• The executioners were "ordinary" men who followed the orders of their commanding officers. Many of the killers had wives and children back in Germany. Propaganda and training had taught many members of the mobile killing squads to view their victims as enemies of Germany.

• Some killers drank heavily to dull their thoughts and feelings. In addition, when they described their actions they used code words like "special treatment" and "special action" instead of "killing" or "murder" to distance themselves from their terrible crimes.

A group of children just before they were executed by a mobile killing squad. Soviet Union, wartime.

Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland

By Christopher Browning • In the early hours of July 13, 1942, the

recently drafted “ordinary men” of Reserve Police Battalion 101 entered the Polish village of Jozefow. By nightfall they had rounded up Jozefow's entire Jewish population, selected several hundred men as “work Jews,” and shot the rest — 1,500 women, children, and old people. In the next 16 months this unit of less than 500 men was responsible for the deaths of 83,000 Polish Jews

The Wannsee Conference and the "Final Solution"

• On January 20, 1942, fifteen high-ranking Nazi party and German government leaders gathered in a wealthy section of Berlin at a villa by a lake known as Wannsee for an important meeting

• Reinhard Heydrich, who was SS chief Heinrich Himmler's head deputy, held the meeting for the purpose of discussing the "final solution to the Jewish question in Europe" with key non-SS government leaders, including the secretaries of the Foreign Ministry and Justice, whose cooperation was needed.

• The "final solution" was the Nazis' code name for the deliberate, carefully planned destruction, or genocide, of all European Jews. The Nazis used the vague term "final solution" to hide their policy of mass murder from the rest of the world. In fact, the men at Wannsee talked about methods of killing, about liquidation, about "extermination."

Why was the Conference Important? • The Wannsee Conference, as it became known to history,

did not mark the beginning of the "Final Solution." The mobile killing squads were already slaughtering Jews in the occupied Soviet Union.

• Rather, the Wannsee Conference was the place where the "final solution" was formally revealed to non-Nazi leaders who would help arrange for Jews to be transported from all over German-occupied Europe to SS-operated "extermination" camps in Poland.

• Not one of the men present at Wannsee objected to the announced policy. Never before had a modern state committed itself to the murder of an entire people.

Wannsee ConferenceWomen, children, the old & the sick were

to be sent for ‘special treatment.’

The young and fit would go through a process called

‘destruction through work.’

Shooting was too inefficient as the bullets were needed for the war

effort

Jews were to be rounded up and put into transit camps called Ghettoes

The Jews living in these Ghettos were to

be used as a cheap source of labour.

On arrival the Jews would go through a

process called ‘selection.’

The remaining Jews were to be

shipped to ‘resettlement areas’ in the

East.

Conditions in the Ghettos were designed to be so bad that many

die whilst the rest would be willing to leave these areas in the

hope of better conditions

How was the Final Solution going to

be organised?

• After the Wannsee Conference in January 1942, the Nazis began the systematic deportation of Jews from all over Europe to six extermination camps established in former Polish territory -- Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Auschwitz-Birkenau, and Majdanek. Extermination camps were killing centers designed to

carry out genocide.

• Jews were forced to work in labor camps in order to help the Nazis.

• Those too old, young, sick, crippled, and the mentally retarded were immediately sent to concentration camps where they were put to death.

Jewish women at forced labor pulling hopper cars of quarried stones in the Plaszlow concentration camp, 1944.

Where were the Death Camps built?

Why do you think that they located them here?

• For More on the Conference

• http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/ghettos/al-diary.html

• http://isurvived.org/TOC-I.html