Encyclopedia > Final Solution of the Jewish Question
The Final Solution (GermanEndlösung) refers to the GermanNazis' plan to address the "Jewish problem" through systematic relocation and later extermination through genocide during World War II. The term was coined by Adolf Eichmann, a top Nazi official who supervised the genocidal campaign.
Heinrich Himmler was the main architect of the slaughter which would eventually exterminate three-quarters of all European Jews. On July 31, 1941, under instructions from Adolf Hitler, Nazi official Hermann Göring ordered SS general Reinhard Heydrich to "submit to me as soon as possible a general plan of the administrative material and financial measures necessary for carrying out the desired final solution of the Jewish question."
The Nazis concentrated Jewish populations in ghettos, and later in concentration camps, in order to assist in their exploitation and subsequent extermination.
The Wannsee conference, which took place in Berlin, in the Wannsee Villa on January 20, 1942, was a discussion held by a group of Nazi officials to decide on the "final solution of the Jewish question". The meeting is noted as the first discussion of the "final solution" among Nazi leaders. The records and minutes of this meeting were also found intact by the Allies at the end of the war and served as valuable evidence during the Nuremberg Trials.
Much of the world now refers to the results of the "final solution" as the Holocaust, while many Jews and other people prefer the Hebrew term Shoa (השואה), or "calamity", due to the etymological origins of the term 'holocaust' as a 'completely burnt sacrificial offering'.
One of the most renowned and discussed victims of the "final solution" was the teenage girl Anne Frank, due to the diary she wrote before she died in the German concentration campBergen-Belsen. The diary was published after the war by her father, who had survived the Holocaust.
Mass killings of over one million Jews occurred before the plans of the FinalSolution were fully implemented in 1942, but it was only with the decision to eradicate the entire Jewish population that the extermination camps were built and industrialized mass slaughter of Jews began in earnest.
The consensus is that the outlines of the FinalSolution arose gradually throughout the summer and fall of 1941.
The FinalSolution of the JewishQuestion in the Holocaust
The largest instance of organized Jewish resistance was the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, from April to May of 1943, as the final deportation from the Ghetto to the death camps was about to commence, the ZOB and ZZW fighters rose up against the Nazis.
On October 7, 1944, the Jewish Sonderkommandos (those prisoners kept separate from the main camp and involved in the operation of the gas chambers and crematoria) at Auschwitz staged an uprising.
Klaus Barbie, "the Butcher of Lyon", captured and deported 44 Jewish children hidden in the village of Izieu, killed Resistance leader Jean Moulin, and was in total responsible for the deportation of 7,500 people, 4,342 murders, and the arrest and torture of 14,311 resistance fighters were in some way attributed to his actions or commands.