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Introduction
The Holocaust is one of the most historically significant issues that characterized Hitlers regime until the end of World War II (WWII). According to Stone (2019), the Holocaust can be considered to be the most destructive and murderous event to ever take place in the history of human civilization. Genocides and mass murder were largely a political campaign against a population that was considered anti-national and a threat to the regime. There are two ways to approach the subject: the use of legal means by the Nazis to discriminate against the Jews and the creation and implementation of the final solution to the Jewish question. This essay will focus on the latter, where a description of its emergence and implementation is provided.
The Final Solution
The term final solution is a plan that was hatched by Hitler that involved deliberate and planned mass murder of the Jews in Europe. Even though the Jews had previously faced racism in the region, the revolutions between the two world wars exposed them to even more racism. The Jews played a part in the revolutions, mostly because they promised true equality for them. However, the stereotypes against them persisted and worsened with the series of defeats, especially in the East, where they were accused of being part of the Bolshevik conspiracy (Mosse, 2020). Even though all of Europe was worried about the Bolsheviks and Jews taking over the rest of Europe, it was Hitlers regime that actively sought to suppress the situation. The final solution to the Jewish question may have been borne out of hatred for the Jews, but most of Hitlers administration was keen to implement it.
The final solution came after a series of experimentations with anti-Jewish plans and policies, most of which involved relocating or displacing them. However, the Nazis European conquest saw a large part of Europe come under Nazi rule, which meant that the Nazis encountered even more Jews. During WWII, there was a change in how the Nazis understood the Jewish question, mostly due to the realization that emigration was no longer a viable solution. However, they still experimented with confinement, where the Jews could be sent to reservations in various German-occupied Poland, Africa, or even Siberia. The Ghettos isolated the Jews, where brutal treatment and degraded living conditions caused massive deaths. The implementation of the final solution began in 1941 in the form of systematic mass killings. This came after Germany attacked the Soviet Union in June 1941 (Calcaterra, 2022). As mentioned earlier, the great feat of the Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy may have forced Hitler and the Nazi regime to take such drastic measures after previous experiments failed to produce the desired results.
The argument is that the final solution emerged from a series of events involving attempts by the Nazis to tame the Jews. Hitler saw it as the ultimate solution, and his obsession with the final solution became such that it became a top priority for the Nazi SS and Einsatzgruppen, as well as the German Wehrmacht. According to Mosse (2020), the Nazi policy for the Jews, in the form of the final solution, was passed around by word of mouth. However, it became a written order on July 31, 1941, from Goring to Heydrich, which allowed the Nazis across the East and West. The first verbal order from Hitler for a practical execution of the final solution was made in the late spring of 1941, which tasked the SS with the execution (Mosse, 2020). At this stage, some observers note that anti-Jewish legislation had been put into practice. As mentioned earlier, the initial efforts focused on the isolation of the Jews from the rest of the population. This made the implementation of the final solution much easier since the executions could be done without causing much public attention.
With initial experiments on mass killing proving successful, the regime upped the scale. This involved some complex logistics, as described by Stone (2019), who states that the final solution depended on a careful mobilization and scheduling of the transportation and execution. In other words, the shuttling of millions of Jews across Europe was done with great efficiency with the help of the European railway networks. The carriages led to the death camps, where the victims were swiftly murdered. Additionally, the efficiency of the process and the logistical complexity were solved by using the Deutsche Reichsbahn (German National Railway). The Reichsbahn employed an estimated half a million civil workers, and up to 900000 individuals were made available for the job. Stone (2019) notes that all those involved knowingly participated in the murders, which means that recruitment was carefully done to include those people who fully supported the final solution.
At this point, an argument can be made that the implementation of the final plan could not have succeeded without the help of the IBM Corporation and the railway network. These claims are made by Stone (2019), who argues that the Reichsbahn transported the victims in special trains that maintained well-formulated schedules. The role of the IBM corporation was that it helped to ensure that the special trains operated and ran on time. Additionally, the IBM corporation provided a punch card system that was critical in sustaining the complex logistics. These facts help support the earlier assertion that the final solution was made possible by recruiting people who fully supported the plan.
It is important to acknowledge some of the key architects of the final solutions and the roles they played. SS General Reinhard Heydrich is one of the key architects who even have an operation named after him: Operation Reinhard. This operation can be described as an extermination of the Jews within the ghettos of the general government. The initial low rates of killing used the pretense of euthanasia, where the seriously ill and old Jews were killed. The plan was to reduce the number of prisoners, that were constantly growing. However, there was a top-down pressure to increase the rates of killing, which resulted in more experimentation and the development of less stressful killing methods and processes. SS General Reinhard was among those who developed some of the most efficient programs where efficiency in Operation Reinhard was increased to kill between 1.5 and 1.7 million Jews in a span of 20 months (Russel, 2019). In this case, it can be argued that such operations as Reinhard were critical in the implementation of the final solution.
Operation Reinhard remains among the most popular mass killing during the Holocaust. According to Stone (2019), Operation Reinhard, which took place between 1942 and 1943, is the largest single murder campaign associated with the Holocaust. Arguably, there were no other programs whose statistics matched the 1.7 million Jewish deaths. At the core of this operation was a series of death camps. The most famous death camps were the Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka. According to Russel (2019), the Belzec death camp served as a prototype for the subsequent centers, including Sobibor and Treblinka, all of which learned and improved on the framework upon which the Belzec was built. For instance, the success of the Belzec led to the recommendation that the Sobibor death camp should be built on a bigger piece of land, which meant it could handle more than the maximum of 20 train carriages at a time. Sobibor opened in 1942 and was managed by Franz Stangl with a recommendation from Globocnik. These figures are among those who sought to extend the legacy of Reinhard by improving his plans and commitment to the final solution.
Conclusion
In conclusion, it has been established that the final solution was the result of a set of experiments intended to address what was considered a Jewish problem. As mentioned earlier, the stereotypes and racism towards the Jews began before the revolutions and world wars, some of which the Jews were active participants. However, the Bolshevik revolution and the fears that the Jews were part of this conspiracy troubled all of Europe and caused Hitler and the Nais to become obsessed with controlling the Jews. The final solution came in the form of a verbal order followed by legal policies from Hitler to the SS generals. Additionally, its implementation depended heavily on such infrastructure as the railway network and support from various groups of people. However, it is such operations as Reinhard that put the plans to practice by developing the programs and infrastructure for mass killing.
References
Calcaterra, C. (2022). Administrative versus extermination: The Wehrmachts initiative toward executing the final solution between the Eastern and Western fronts. Grand Valley Journal of History, 8(1), 1-48.
Mosse, G. (2020). Toward the final solution: A history of European racism. The University of Wisconsin Press.
Russel, N. (2019). Understanding willing participants: Milgrams obedience experiments and the holocaust. Palgrave MacMillan.
Stone, L. (2019). Quantifying the Holocaust: Hyperintense kill rates during the Nazi genocide. Science Advances, 5(1), 1-10. Web.
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