The Holocaust. When Did The Nazis Decide on The Final Solution - Essay Example

?Running head: The Holocaust When Did the Nazis Decide On The Final Solution? Insert Insert Grade Insert 18 June The Final Solution represents the Nazi endeavour to kill every Jew within Germany as an approach of the Nazi regime, which culminated into the holocaust. In essence, the final solution symbolizes the Nazi resolve to exterminate Jews from Germany but does not necessarily refer to a formal declaration. It remains unclear whether the Nazi administration declared the final solution. However, the regime employed a number of euphemisms to camouflage their real intentions of annihilating the Jewish population in the expansive Germany. On this account, therefore, the final solution is chief among the vague expressions used by the Nazi government to refer to the spontaneous killing and annihilation of the Jews (Inter alia & Bullock, 1961, 480). Incidentally, the Nazi regime perpetuated the rampant annihilation of Jews throughout its reign, and there was no precise instant when a specialized mission to eradicate Jews was made until 1941. Nevertheless, it is quite relevant to note that there could have been a basis for the resolve to eradicate the Jewish population in Germany by the rogue Nazi administration. For that reason, the final solution could have been a result of systematic considerations and deliberations that eventually settled on the eradication of the Jewish population. Such a sequence of deliberation would point towards the exact cause the Nazi administration endeavoured to achieve through the systematic murder of Jews (Shirer, 1989, 864-865). This paper takes historical account of the holocaust by contemplating on the events leading to the final solution that involved the brutal murder and annihilation of the Jewish population in Germany by the infamous Nazi regime. The Nazis commonly used euphemistic speech to disguise the correct nature of their crimes. They used the expression “Final Solution” to mean to their agenda to wipe out the Jewish people. It is not recognized when the organizers of Nazi Germany definitively settled on to execute the "Final Solution." The genocide of the Jews was the height of a decade of increasingly brutal discriminatory measures. Under the leadership of Adolf Hitler, the maltreatment and isolation of Jews was executed in stages (Hilberg, 2003, 55). After the Nazi party ascended to power in Germany in 1933, its government-sponsored prejudice led to anti-Jewish laws, economic embargos, and the aggression of the Kristallnacht pogroms, all of which intended to systematically cut off Jews from the general public and coerce them out of the country. After the September 1939 German incursion of Poland (the commencement of WWII), anti-Jewish program escalated to the incarceration and ultimate murder of European Jewry. The Nazis first instituted ghettos (enfolded areas intended to segregate and manage the Jews) in the Generalgouvernement (a region in central with eastern Poland controlled by a German national government) as well as the Warthegau (a region of western Poland seized to Germany). Polish along with western European Jews were extradited to these ghettos where they resided in overcrowded and unhygienic conditions with insufficient food. Following June 1941 German offensive of the Soviet Union, SS (in addition to police units acting as portable murder units) began enormous killing operations intended at entire Jewish groups (Cesarani, 1994, 78). These plated trucks had exhaust pipes rearranged to pump venomous carbon monoxide gas into potted spaces, murdering those sheltered within. They were planned to complement continuing shooting operations. On July 17, 1941, one month after the assault of the Soviet Union, Hitler commissioned SS leader Heinrich Himmler with an obligation for all security affairs in the inhabited Soviet Union. Hitler bestowed Himmler broad power to physically get rid of any perceived dangers to permanent German occupation. A fortnight later, on July 31, 1941, Nazi chief Hermann Goering sanctioned SS General Reinhard Heydrich to prepare for the accomplishment of an absolute solution of the Jewish problem. The Nazis decided on the Final Solution over a lengthy period of time as an organized endeavour to wipe out the Jewish population in Germany. In as much as the hatred against Jews prevailed during the beginning of the Nazi regime, the contemplation of a final solution was made over a period of time during which the Nazi regime had exhausted a number of segregation policies against the Jewish population (Browning, 2004, 67). In essence, the final solution was a comprehensive eradication mechanism that was primarily intended to ‘solve’ the Jewish problem. Therefore, the final solution perhaps represented the failure of the segregation mechanisms to deal with the perceived Jewish question. As a result, the final solution was a culmination of Nazis numerous efforts to address the Jewish issue and it symbolized the largely practical method of solving the problem. During the Nazi occupation of Russia and the incursion in Poland, the Nazi regime was only interested in the segregation and isolation of the Jews. At this point, the final solution was nowhere in the picture and the regime was more focused on controlling the activities of the Jewish population (Gilbert, 1989, 219). However, with the advent of time, the Nazi gradually became frustrated with the escalation of the perceived Jewish problem. This led to the establishment of the final solution. One of the significantly interesting, and stormily debated, features of the Holocaust regard the time that Hitler ordered it to commence. The perspective to commence the holocaust currently has been linked the resolution made in early to middle 1941, and that it materialized in early 1942. This notion is challenged by the fresh discovery of previously unavailable documents, recently exposed by German historian Christian Gerlach (Breitman, 1991. 83). The fresh documents comprise a diary admission by misinformation Minister Joseph Goebbels of December 12, 1941 and a segment of Reichsfuhrer-SS Heinrich Himmler's journal entry of December 18, 1941. Most professionals have decided that an act on the magnitude of the mass genocide, with the ensuing possible consequences, could not have proceeded devoid of Hitler's personal approval. Until now, no official decision from Hitler has been established, although there are convincing indications that a spoken decision was positively given (Arad, 1987, 45). The fresh discoveries cannot be referred to as a written decision, although they are definitely unequivocal substantiation that a clear verdict was made by Hitler. The new substantiation strongly proposes that Hitler resolved irreversibly, at the beginning of December 1941, to annihilate all of European Jewry. That equals with the expressions, "desired final solution" in Goering's order to Heydrich of July 1941, and assists to clarify why the Wannsee convention took place so long after the Goering order had been launched, that is, the ultimate order had still not been specified in July 1941 (Aly, 1999, 97). This does not denote that no order at all had been given at the time of the incursion of the Soviet Union. Certainly, it is certain that an order to murder Jews, commissars and other "uninviteds" had been given previous to the Soviet assault, and it could well imply that order that Hitler's secretary talks about. It almost certainly took the form of Hitler informing Himmler that, as part of the incursion, the people mentioned above would be methodically killed and that Himmler was indicted with execution of the order. It is most probably this order that Eichmann, Hoess and others denoted to in their various testimonies. Nevertheless, these people would have been conscious of Goering's order for the managerial work to be done in the direction of an "aspired" concluding solution. Everyone understood that a final solution - a decision to extinguish all of European Jewry - could merely be made by Hitler. And Hitler was famous for hesitating, at times with approximately disastrous consequences, when faced with momentous decisions; like the Roehm Purge, the Munich Crisis and whether to contest in the presidential election of 1932. It would be completely in keeping with Hitler's character if he hesitated numerous months subsequent to ordering the Einsatzgruppen gunfires - a kind of pre-final answer - before he could fetch himself to make the eventual decision (Gilbert, 1987, 19). Goering's order not withstanding, there was little substantial action that Heydrich could take in anticipation of an ultimate decision from the leadership. In conclusion, the final solution denotes the systematic approach by the Nazi regime to annihilate the Jewish population in Germany. Sources indicate that perhaps there was no official declaration regarding the eradicating of Jews in Germany by the rogue administration of Hitler. However, there are certain indications towards a conclusive verdict regarding the course of action to be taken on the Jewish population and this decision was personally made by Hitler. Obviously, there was tension in Germany over the Jewish population, but initially the German administration focused more on the isolation and segregation of Jews from the mainstream population. The final solution originated from the direct failure of the isolation mechanism to isolate the Jewish regime from mainstream. Therefore, the final solution emanated from the desperation of the Nazi regime to fully address the Jewish problem in totality. The resolution was, thus, conceived to offer a comprehensive answer to the Jewish problem as perceived by the Nazi regime. Bibliography Aly, G., 1999. "Final Solution": Nazi Population Policy and the Murder of the European Jews. London: Arnold. Arad, Y., 1987. Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka: The Operation Reinhard Death Camps. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Breitman, R., 1991. The Architect of Genocide: Himmler and the Final Solution. New York: Knopf. Browning, C., 2004. The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939-March 1942. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Cesarani, D., 1994. The Final Solution: Origins and Implementation. London: Routledge. Gilbert, M., 1989. The Holocaust: The Jewish Tragedy. Glasgow: Fontana / Collins. Gilbert, M., 1987. The Holocaust: A History of the Jews of Europe during the Second World War. Washington: H. Holt. Hilberg, R., 2003. The Destruction of the European Jews. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Inter alia, and Bullock, A., 1961. Hitler: A Study in Tyranny. New York: Bantam Books. Shirer, W L., 1989. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. New York: Simon and Schuster Read More