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The Final Solution Essay

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The Final Solution There are two main schools of thought amongst historians about the Final Solution and only one of them is right. The 'intentionalist' theory is that of one which places Hitler at the helm where he is seen to have had the intention from the beginning (even before his rise to power) to exterminate the Jews. International Jewry was blamed for the humiliation of Germany in the Treaty of Versailles, and German Jewry was accused of betraying Germany in World War I. The 'functionalist' theory is that where the 'Final Solution' was decided upon only after many failed attempts to force Jews to emigrate from Germany. After …show more content…

At the very beginning Hitler simply wanted lebensraum, "living space," for the pure German people. In the Nuremberg Laws of 1930, the Nazi party wanted to design a series of laws that assured the purity of German blood and German honour and basically stripped Jews of their rights so that they would move on. These laws were passed in 1935 and many others, ensured a move on Hitler's view of the Jewish race in Germany. No law passed ever stated the physical destruction of the Jewish race. In a letter to Adolf Gemlich in 1919, Hitler states that he stated that the Jewish problem would eventually be solved through a process of depriving the Jews privileges and classifying them as foreigners. This in its own right shows that early on in the movement Hitler only wanted to make the Jews feel un-wanted and rejected in the German way of life. In 1940, plans were devised by the Nazis to ship all Jews to Madagascar. This was called the 'Madagascan Plan' and involved moving every single Jew from Germany and her captured lands to Madagascar so as to rid them from Germany altogether. This was abandoned soon after the Wannsee Conference as it was deemed impractical for operation during wartime. Even in Hitler's book, Mein Kampf, we can see The Death Camps that led to the death of so many Jewish people was actually under the ultimate control of Heinrich

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