THE FINAL SOLUTION...

The term Final Solution is commonly used as part of any extensive discussion about the Holocaust during World War II.  The term refers to the Nazi plan to remove the Jewish population, not just from Germany, but from all of Europe, as the German goal was to take over as much of Europe as possible.  As far as the Nazis could determine, the "Jewish problem" could only be solved one way...total annihilation. 

As we have already started looking at, the Germans began ramping up their pressure on the Jewish population to leave Germany in a number of ways.  The Nuremburg Laws of 1935 started things off by putting serious restrictions (and consequences) on the Jews as far as how they could live their lives.  Then, in 1938, Kristallnacht stepped things up further as the Nazis began physically attacking the Jews following the killing of a Nazi party member by a Jewish youth.  Businesses were destroyed, synagogues were burned, people were killed, and thousands of Jews were rounded up and taken to concentration camps where they were pressured to promise to leave the country and, in many cases, turn over all of their possessions to the Nazi party on their way out the door.

But, believe it or not, things would get worse.

GHETTOS

In 1939, the Nazis began the wholesale relocation of the Jews to specific regions of various cities throughout Germany and German-occupied Poland called ghettos.  Roughly 1,000 of these districts were created by the Nazis so that they could isolate the Jews from the rest of the German population and keep them under constant suveilance and control.    Entire Jewish families were relocated to these ghettoes and were frequently forced to live with complete strangers in cramped, dirty, sometimes bombed-out, often fenced-in regions with the constant threat of death hanging in the air.  In the largest ghetto, the Warsaw ghetto, approximately 400,000 Jews were crowded into a section that was just 1.3 miles square; the Lodz Ghetto was the second largest, with between 150,000 and 200,000 residents.  The people in the photo above are from the Kielce Ghetto which had around 6,500 Jews.  Jews in these ghettos were required to wear either armbands or the Star of David symbols to signify that they were Jewish so they could be more easily identified by Nazi guards.  Schooling of the children in the ghettos was often banned.   There were shortages of food, medicine, and basic human necessities, so smuggling operations were not uncommon in the ghettos.  Sometimes, though not often, there were Jewish uprisings in the ghettos, with the Jewish citizenry gathering up whatever weapons they could and attempting to revolt against their Nazi captors.  These revolts rarely ended up well for the Jews, but sometimes people were able to escape the ghettos and gain at least temporary freedom. 

Lodz Ghetto

Warsaw Ghetto
To many Nazi leaders, the ghettos were becoming more of a problem than they were worth, so in 1941, the Nazis began tearing down the ghettos.  The Jews residing in the ghettos were either shot and then buried in mass graves on-site, or they were transported out, usually extermination camps. 

EXTERMINATION CAMPS



The first Nazi exetermination camp was called Chelmno.  This small camp used sealed vans as gas chambers, but with only 152,000 estimated kills at Chelmno, this method was slow and comparitively ineffective.  Later in Poland, the extermination camps either consisted of a trio known as the Operation Reinhard camps, which were Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka, or the most famous (infamous) of all the camps, Auschwitz-Birkenau.  The Operation Reinhard camps accounted for the killing of more than 1.5 million Jews between 1942 and 1943, but Aushwitz-Birkenau, the largest of all the extermination camps, managed to be worse.  By 1943, Aushwitz had four Zyklon-B gas chambers in full use and as many as 6,000 Jews were killed there every day. More than a million Jews, and tens of thousands of Gypsies, Poles, and others, were killed at Auschwitz-Birkenau alone.  It was also at Auschwitz-Birkenau that many of the Nazi experiments involving sterilization, genetics, and other biomedical fields, were carried out on the "fittest, healthiest" Jewish men, women, and children who were held captive there.

Imprisoned children at Auschwitz-Birkenau

Madjanek was another extermination center, although it also served as a holding facility/concentration camp.  While the numbers pale in comparison to any of the camps listed above, tens of thousands of Jews, mostly those who were too sick or weak to be of any use in labor cams, were killed in gas chambers at Madjanek.

A Guided Tour of Auschwitz-Birkenau
        
Dachau Concentration Camp Video


EINSATZGRUPPEN

Another method of killing the Jews was the Einsatzgruppen, or mobile killing squads.  Made up mostly of German SS and police units, these killing squads would follow the German military as they advanced the eastern frontline into Russia, and kill anyone behind the German lines who were Jewish, Russian P.O.W.'s, Communist party members, people in mental hospitals, or anyone viewed as a threat to Germany.  When Heinrich Himler, the leader of the SS, noted that all of the shooting had started to cause psychological problems among his men, the Einsatzgruppen began using mobile gas chambers created out of moving vans, such as those used at Chelmno.  It is estimated that by the spring of 1943, the Einsatzgruppen had killed more than 1 million Soviet Jews, as well as tens-perhaps-hundreds of thousands of others.