The Final Solution
From the
beginning of the war in 1939, until the summer of 1941, tens of thousands of
Jews were murdered due to the effects of the German occupation policy. Upon the
German invasion of the Soviet Union, the Nazis introduced the plan for the
systematic murder of European Jewry known as "the Final Solution of the
Jewish Problem". Beginning on June 22, 1941, death squads (Einsatzgruppen)
consisting of SS and German police, in conjunction with German army units,
began the systematic annihilation of the Jews of Eastern Poland and the Soviet
Union- at first mainly men, but later women and children too. In the southern
regions of the occupied Soviet Union tens of thousands of Jews were murdered by
Romanian army units. In the autumn of 1941, the systematic murder of Jews began
in Yugoslavia. Alongside the
death squads there were cases where local antisemites also took part in the
killing. Meanwhile, the Nazis began planning to extend their annihilation
policy to additional areas throughout Europe. The first extermination camp,
Chelmno, began operating in December 1941 where hundreds of thousands of Jews
from Western Poland (the Wartegau, which had been annexed to Germany),
were killed.
The Wannsee Conference held in Berlin in January 1942 served as a milestone in
the evolution of the Final Solution. Senior Nazi officials discussed the
implementation of the Final Solution in its Pan-European context with various
agencies coordinating actions in order to set it in motion.
Three extermination camps were built in the
"Generalgouvernement" area (occupied Poland): Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka. It
was in these extermination camps that the vast majority of Polish Jews were
murdered during 1942 and the first months of 1943 as well as Jews of other European
nationalities. In late 1943, Jews from these regions who had survived the
previous deportations were sent to their death, primarily to the Majdanek
extermination camp.
Beginning in
1942, Jews from all over Europe were deported mainly to the Auschwitz-Birkenau
concentration and extermination camps. This complex became the primary site for
the annihilation of European Jewry after the other extermination camps were
closed. Activity at Auschwitz reached its peak in the summer of 1944, where
hundreds of thousands of Jews from the Lodz Ghetto, Slovakia, and especially
Hungary were murdered there. The last victims of the Final Solution were about
a quarter of a million Jewish camp prisoners who died on the death marches.
These marches were the mass evacuation of prisoners from Poland and the Baltic
states to Germany due to the Red Army's advance.
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