What did Hitler ultimately decide to do with the Jewish population of Europe?

Rudolf Hess and Adolf Hitler during the Reichstag session at which Hitler gave his last alert to the British Empire. Everett Drove Inc / Alamy Stock Photo

Before the start of World War 2, around nine.five million Jewish people lived in Europe. By the fourth dimension the war ended, the Nazis had killed six million European Jews in concentration camps, or pogroms, or ghettos, or mass executions in what we refer to today every bit the Holocaust. The Nazis used the term Endlösung, or Terminal Solution, as the "answer" to the "Jewish question." But when did this monstrous plan get put in motility?

Adolf Hitler had provided clues to his ambition to commit mass genocide as early as 1922, telling journalist Josef Hell, "Once I really am in power, my first and foremost task will exist the annihilation of the Jews."

But how he would enact such a plan wasn't e'er clear. For a brief menstruum, the Führer and other Nazi leaders toyed with the thought of mass deportation as a method of creating a Europe without Jews (Republic of madagascar and the Arctic Circle were 2 suggested relocation sites). Displacement still would've resulted in thousands of deaths, though perhaps in less direct ways.

When exactly Hitler settled on straightforward murder as a means of removal has been harder to pinpoint. As Yale historian Timothy Snyder writes, "It cannot be stressed enough that the Nazis did not know how to eradicate the Jews when they began the war against the Soviet Marriage [in the summer of 1941]… They could not be confident that SS men would shoot women and children in large numbers." Just as Operation Barbarossa, the proper name for the Nazi invasion of the U.s.a.S.R, proved during the mass shootings of June 1941 and the massacres at Kiev in September, the Order Law and Einsatzgrüppen were more than willing to commit mass murders. This meant Hitler could take the solution to the Jewish problem to its "furthest extremes," in the words of Philipp Bouhler, the senior Nazi official responsible for the euthanasia programme that killed more than lxx,000 handicapped German people.

Co-ordinate to scholars Christian Gerlach and Peter Monteath, among others, the pivotal moment for Hitler's decision came on December 12, 1941, at a hole-and-corner meeting with some 50 Nazi officials, including Joseph Goebbels (Nazi minister of propaganda) and Hans Frank (governor of occupied Poland). Though no written documents of the meeting survive, Goebbels described the meeting in his periodical on December thirteen, 1941:

"With respect of the Jewish Question, the Führer has decided to make a make clean sweep. He prophesied to the Jews that if they once more brought about a world state of war, they would live to see their annihilation in it. That wasn't but a catchword… If the German people accept now once more sacrificed 160,000 dead on the eastern front end, then those responsible for this encarmine conflict volition have to pay with their lives."

In add-on to Goebbels's diary entry, historians cite the notes of High german diplomat Otto Brautigam, who on December xviii, 1941, wrote that "as for the Jewish question, oral discussions take taken place [and] take brought about description."

This meeting, which would be followed past the Jan 1942 Wannsee Conference (where the conclusion on exterminating all European Jews was farther reinforced), was hardly the start of violence against Jews. Attacks had been happening in Nazi Deutschland'southward occupied territories for years. What differentiated this catamenia from earlier attacks was "an escalation of murder," says Elizabeth White, historian at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

"At some betoken I think, with the development of killing centers, [the Nazis] felt that they had the means and opportunity to realize the vision of a Jew-free Europe now rather than expect until after Frg had won [the state of war]."

Australian historian Peter Monteath echoes that decision, writing in 1998 that the December 12 decision "made it clear that the principle of killing Jews in the occupied territories in the eastward was to be extended to all European Jews, including those in Frg and Western Europe."

In the decades that followed the Nuremburg Trials, in which Nazi officials, charged with crimes against peace and humanity, hid behind the alibi that they were merely post-obit orders, historians grappled with questions of blame and guilt. Had Hitler and height Nazi officials been solely responsible for the genocide? How complicit were lower-level Nazis and members of the Gild Law?

"We had big gaps in our knowledge because most of the documentation about how the genocide was carried out on the ground was captured by the Soviet Red Ground forces and wasn't available until after the Cold War," says White. The fall of the Soviet Union led to a feast of wartime bureaucratic records, allowing historians to realize how much elbowroom Nazi officials were given. Information technology became readily clear that the number of Nazis involved in enacting the Final Solution was much larger than previously believed.

"The way Hitler worked was he would make these pronouncements, and people would go off and figure out, what did he mean? How are nosotros going to exercise this?" says White. "You could work towards the Führer by being innovative and ruthless."

In other words, rather than giving explicit orders to each member of the Nazi party, Hitler made numerous statements vilifying Jewish people and declaring the need to exterminate them.

After the December 12 meeting, these proclamations took a more precise tone: the Nazis needed to impale all Jews, including German Jews and Western European Jews, and they needed to do so systematically. What had started as uncertain and desultory violence quickly turned into wholesale slaughter, complete with gas chambers and concentration camps. Vi weeks later, SS chief Heinrich Himmler, the Nazi official responsible for the implementation of the Final Solution, ordered the first Jews of Europe to Auschwitz.

The Holocaust had truly begun.

Adolf Hitler European History Germany History of Now Holocaust

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Source: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/first-moments-hitlers-final-solution-180961387/

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