Dan Kim
History 12
Block A/E
13 November 2015
The Final Solution of Nazi Germany
Countless number of human rights were violated throughout Europe as a result of Nazi Germany’s Final Solution to the Jewish Question during World War II. Under the Führer and Chancellor of Nazi Germany, Adolf Hitler, the Nazi Party (National Socialist German Worker’s Party) introduced their response to the Jewish Question in the Nazi-Europe during World War II. In January of 1942, the Wannsee Conference (a meeting of higher ranked Nazi officials) was held, which finalized the declaration of the Nazi Final Solution on paper. The Final Solution, or the Holocaust, was a detailed plan and agreement to execute Jewish prisoners in a systematic and organized manner in
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Throughout his regime, the segregation between the so-called Aryans and the Jews intensified. Hitler utilized the Jewish people as scapegoats to bring an increase to his political and social supports, stirring up hatred towards the Jews within the German nation. Children were taught to despise Jews, and social views on the Jewish people and culture shifted towards a discriminatory attitude towards the Jews. Hitler himself even stated that “the personification of the devil as the symbol of all evil assumes the living shape of the Jew” in his autobiographical manifesto, titled “Mein Kampf”. This hierarchy was established in Germany, and the Jewish people were put at the bottom, being labelled as unworthy of life, due to their ‘inhuman’ nature. Ultimately, this intensified and met the extreme procedure of the organized genocide of the Final …show more content…
The introduction of the Final Solution by the Nazi party in 1942, during World War II, brought significant changes to the system and manners in which these concentration camps operated. A clear distinction between concentration and extermination camps formed, as the prisoners were being sent to the latter to be systematically murdered. Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Chelmno were among some of the extermination camps claiming high death tolls. Living conditions in such camps were detrimental and atrocious, and in these camps, were the prisoners living their last days until their inevitable deaths. The prisoners were scarcely aware of their upcoming deaths, as the officials attempted to disguise the extermination camps as merely another concentration camp. Seldom were there any outbreaks of panic due to this efficiency in hiding the Final Solution even to the victims of this orderly procedure. The successful organized killings of the prisoners in gas chambers, which showered the prisoners with Zyklon B, a cyanide-based pesticide, took the lives of over a million
Hitler believed that the German people were part of an 'Aryan race,' a superior group that should be kept pure to fulfill their mission of ruling the world. He felt that the Jewish people were 'sub-human,' when in actuality they were virtually the same as his 'Aryan race.' Not only did Hitler have a personal hatred toward the Jewish people, but he also blamed them for 'stabbing Germany in the back' after Germany's defeat in World War I. Hitler used them as scapegoats because they were a minority and were easy to put the blame on. 'Historians agree that the Holocaust resulted from a confluence of various factors in a complex historical situation. That anti-Semitism festered throughout the centuries in European culture is centrally important; the Jews were (and are) a minority civilization in a majority environment. In periods of crisis, instead of searching for the solution of
After the start of World War II, Adolf Hitler (1889-1945), the chancellor of Germany from 1933 to 1945, made a policy that came to be known as the “Final Solution. ”Hitler was determined to isolate Jews in Germany. As stated in the article, "The murder of six million Jewish men, women and children during the Second World War was a crime of unprecedented and unparalleled bestiality"(The Holocaust: The Jewish Tragedy). Another quote stated that, “Between 1933 and 1945, the Nazi regime created nearly 20,000 concentration camps.
By blaming the Jews for the economic crisis that Germany was suffering through as well as their defeat in WW1, Hitler targeted the Jews as the country’s main enemy. According to him, the Jewish were directly responsible for Germany’s problems. Hitler hated the Jews leading up to the Holocaust because he believed that the Jewish financiers were responsible for sending the world into its first World War, causing the deaths over 100,000 Germans. According to the Nazis the “Aryan race” was the best and strongest race. Jews were of another inferior race. In fact so inferior that they were not considered to be “people” by the
In the pre-war years, the Nazi Party wanted to find a solution to the “Jewish question” – meaning what to do with them (“Final Solution” Learning). On July 31, 1941, Heydrich submitted the “draft of the measures he proposed to undertake ‘to implement the desired final solution of the Jewish Question’” (“SS”). In the fall of 1941, the Nazi soldiers implemented the plan and began to effectuate it by experimental gassings in the Auschwitz extermination camp and then moving forth to surrounding camps (“Final Solution” Learning). Between then and 1945, the top SS soldiers continued to give the orders to torture, mass shoot, gas (especially in constructed extermination camps), enforce murderous labor, and other means (“Holocaust”). The ideas, which were thought of by Himmler, Eichmann, and Heydrich, are what allowed for this brutality to cause such a large scale genocide. Despite the eleven million
Adolf Hitler, chancellor and dictator of Germany from 1934 to 1945, was founder and leader of the Nazi Party. Under the leadership of Hitler, Nazi Germany created concentration camps to segregate Jews and many other minorities from German society. Though, the Jewish population was not great in Germany, individuals who had converted to another religion or had ancestors who were Jewish were also categorized by the Nazis as a Jew. The “Final Solution,” the genocide of more than six million Jewish people, consisted of gassing, shootings, starvation and random acts of terror. This is the most familiar scheme from the
Leanne Mere Period 5 8E Holocaust: Memory and Meaning Unit Essay 5/. During World War 2 Jewish people were dehumanized and oppressed by Hitler and the Nazi political party. In the early 1940’s, Hitler began his violent tactics to eliminate Jewish people. Many political propaganda blamed Germany’s loss during World War 1 on Jewish spies assisting the Allied powers. Hitler believed that there was a superior race in which Aryan was named. Being Aryan meant that you were tall, pale skinned, blonde haired and blue eyed pure blood Germans.
Once, Adolf Hitler said, “It’s not the truth that matters, but victory.” Obviously, this quote shows that Hitler’s mindset was directed towards winning, and not his moral values. He made false accusations about the innocent Jews, killing over six-million of them. These false accusations were simple, repeated, and, eventually, people believed it. The rise of Hitler and the Nazi Party affected how people viewed the Jews at the time. To begin, events in Adolf Hitler’s life lead to his viewpoints and affiliations. Secondly, the creation of the Nazi Party was critical to the formation of Germany’s point of view. Lastly, Jewish people had been used as scapegoats for the loss of World War I and Germany’s economic crisis.
The years of 1941 and 1942 paint a vivid description of ugly, taking place events too hard to take in, and the death of 6 million innocent people. The Final Solution in an excerpt from Witnesses to the Holocaust: An Oral History, where Sam Bankhalter and Hinda Kibort detail their horrifying account of Hitler’s rash and day to day life in the Nazi concentration camps where they were imprisoned. The Final Solution was a plan systematically matriculated by the Nazi to exterminate European Jews by placing them in work camps designed for certain death.
Having concentration camps with gas chambers weren’t enough for the Nazis brutal actions. As time passed for the victims, it only got much worse. The Nazi doctors began using the prisoners as subjects for unethical human experiments. They suffered to stay alive and many were left with unpleasant memories.
Even with such massive extermination the German leaders were unsatisfied and demanded a more efficient and permanent answer to the problem. The directive to exterminate all the Jews in Europe was issued on July 31, 1941. In December of that year, a law banning Jews from leaving any German territories was put into effect. Then finally, on January 20, 1942, Reinhard Heydrich came up with what was termed "the final solution to the of the Jewish question." He proposed a plan to erect six camps built for killing large numbers of people. The Germans built six such camps in the two years to follow, Belzec, Majdanek, Treblinka, Sobibor, Auschwitz, and Chelmno. Chelmno was the first of the camps to be built. It used large trucks into which they crammed as many Jews as possible who choked on the trucks own exhaust fumes. Most of the other camps had permanent gas chambers, which killed by the fumes of a stationary engine. Although Auschwitz used Zyklon B, a type of hydrogen cyanide. These venues of death were host to over 3 million Jews who lost their lives. (Wyman)
This site has many different facts about the Holocaust and the questions that were asked about it. The site has topic titled: Jews and Judaism, question about the Holocaust, how the Holocaust took place, The Nazis, the Holocaust and Muslims, Jews, Muslims and Christians, and The Holocaust Denial. Anti-Semitism is a synonym for the hatred of Jews and anti-Semitic means anti-Jewish. The “Final Solution” refers to the German’s plan to murder all of the Jews in Europe. This term was Used at the Wannsee Conference, which was held in Berlin Germany January 20, 1942, which German officials debated its implementation. The German Nazis used this term, the “Final Solution”, to hide the plan that the Germans were to kill all the Jews in Europe. The Germans
Beginning in the year 1933, life became difficult for all non-Aryans living in Europe. That was the year Adolf Hitler became the chancellor of Germany. His anti-Semitic principles served as the basis of the Nazi party and its supporters. Although their ideas were opposed by many, the Nazis managed to carry out The Final Solution with the goal of ridding Europe of Jews, gypsies, Soviets, and homosexuals. One prominent figure was Heinrich Himmler who constructed the “Final Solution”: a written document that stated the steps needed to be taken in order to establish a pure Aryan race. This “solution” consisted of isolating Jews in ghettos, sending non-Aryans to concentration and extermination camps, and forcing them to undergo starvation, thirst, shootings, and extended suffering. The various steps within this document each served a different purpose and implemented a new kind of suffering upon the prisoners. New family roles were established and new outlooks on life and religion were brought about due to the scares they experienced. The Holocaust transformed the lives of many through the daily hardships in its ghettos, concentration and extermination camps, and demolished post-war Europe.
In the Nazis’ estimation, Jews would eventually be expelled from the Reich; this plan eventually developed into the Final Solution, in which Jews were murdered en masse. However, while Nazi edicts were imposed on all German Jews and while all captured Jews faced the same ultimate fate, their experiences of the Holocaust were unique. During the 1920s and 1930s, the lives of most Jewish men and
The third phase of the holocaust was known as the final stage. In 1942 at a meeting held in Wannsee Poland, Hitler’s top officials agreed to begin a new phase of the mass murder of Jews. In addition to mass slaughter and starvation they would add a third method of killing. This third method was committing murder by poisonous gas. As deadly as overwork, starvation, beatings, and bullets were, they did not kill fast enough to satisfy the Nazis. The Germans built six death camps in Poland. The first, Chelmno began operating in 1941, before the meeting at Wannsee. Each camp had several large gas chambers in which as many as 12,000 people could be killed a day. Auschwitz was the largest of the death camps. The Jews were told to undress because they would be taking a shower. They
World War II was a major conflict that affected the world, leaving behind several casualties, broken cities, and death. Under Adolf Hitler’s control, Nazi Germany sought to conquer and control Europe as a dominant race. Hitler singled out and blamed the Jewish population and “labeled them the cause of all of the nation’s ills” (Upshur, 863). From the beginning, the German Jews were deprived of jobs, stripped of their civil rights, and forced to mark themselves and their buildings with the Star of David. Soon after, the Jews were being attacked by mobs, murdered and forced to emigrate. The Nazis final attempt to rid Germany, and the world, of the Jewish populations, was by capturing the Jews and imprisoning them in labor camps, or Concentration Camps. Hitler did not stop there, anyone who hid Jews or opposed the Nazis was executed or brought to the camps as well. Hitler’s attempt to purify the German race by weeding out the inferior people was an act of Scientific Racism (Upshur, 863). His ideas and ideology of the German nation helped to justify his actions, but conquering and controlling Europe was his main goal.