The Final Solution

Ideological aspects

Practical aspects

Another main element in the shaping of the Final Solution was the practical aspect. To large parts of the Nazi bureaucracy, especially the occupation powers in Eastern Europe, mass murder was the solution to serious practical problems. This was first of all the case with the overcrowded Polish ghettos, to which more (German) Jews were deported beginning in the autumn of 1941. To kill the Polish Jews – beginning with those incapable of working – was a practical solution to this real (but self-contrived!) problem.

On the eastern front, the German offensive had not been completed in the course of the autumn of 1941. The Red Army had not been defeated in another ‘Blitzkrieg’, and the German war machine had come to a stop as winter approached. In this situation it was deemed impossible to provision this enormous area. The provisioning of the German army had the highest priority, of course, followed by the local population. At the bottom of this ‘food hierarchy’ came the Jews. Jewish women, children and the elderly, in particular, were of no use to the Germans, and killing them thus became the solution to this ‘problem’.

Security aspects

According to the Nazis’ anti-Semitic ideology it was a logical notion to view all Jews as a potential threat against the Third Reich. The Jews, particularly in the German-occupied parts of the Soviet Union, were seen as a threat lingering behind the front. But the Nazis seem to have viewed the local Jews as cooperating with partisan- and resistance groups in other German-occupied countries around Europe as well. From a security point of view it was thus ‘logical’ to remove this threat against Germany by getting rid of the Jews. In Western Europe this happened by deporting the Jews to extermination camps and concentration camps, in Eastern Europe members of the so-called Einsatzgruppen shot thousands of Jews on the spot.

Economic aspects

Some historians have focused on the economic aspects of the Final Solution. According to these scholars, many German planners and bureaucrats simply viewed the Jews as completely superfluous. This attitude was particularly widespread in the Nazi regime’s many economic institutions. In the new Nazi Europe, which these bureaucrats were busy planning, there was no room for inferior races like the Jews. This cynical attitude also applied to the local Eastern European populations, but the Jews remained firmly at the bottom of this ‘population hierarchy’. What was to happen with these Jews? According to the planners, the easiest thing was to let them starve to death, but many viewed this as inhuman and very uncivilised. In their opinion it was much more effective, quick and humane, to have them murdered in the extermination camps.

Technical possibilities

How do you kill thousands of people in an effective way? Finding an answer to this question seemingly occupied the time of several high-ranking SS-officers in the autumn of 1941. The answer was: using gas. It is highly likely that finding the technical solution was of great importance in the shaping of the Final Solution as a systematic mass murder. The horrifying experiences from the so-called ‘Euthanasia Programme’, where thousands of physically and psychologically disabled Germans had been systematically murdered, were put to use in the extermination camps in the east. The experience with the gassing of the disabled was thus an important basis for the concretisation of the Final Solution.

The importance of the war

The progress of World War II played an important role in the shaping of the Final Solution on several levels. First of all, the fiasco of the German attack on the Soviet Union meant that earlier plans of deporting the Jews to barren areas in the Soviet Union had to be dropped. A so-called ‘territorial solution’ to the Jewish question, where the Jews would work themselves to death for the Germans in special reservations, was no longer plausible. What could then be done? The Nazis chose to kill the Jews.

Later, when things began to go very wrong for the Germans, many Nazis probably did not care much whether the Jews lived or died. In the summer of 1944, when the Third Reich was in desperate need of workers in order to keep up the armaments production, almost 500,000 Hungarian Jews were murdered. This was not the solution to a ‘practical problem’, but rather an ideologically motivated mass murder in a situation where the war seemed lost. This wish to ‘take the Jews with us in the fall’ or at least ‘secure Europe from the Jewish plague for the generations to come’ also pervades Hitler’s political will. In this document, written in the last days of the war immediately preceding Hitler’s suicide, the Fuehrer calls for the observation of the race laws as his most important legacy.

Summary

Many elements played a role in the shaping of the ‘Final Solution to the Jewish Question’ as a horrifying genocide of millions of people. Although some elements pulled in the opposite direction – most importantly the need for skilled Jewish workers – it was easy to combine ideological with practical goals in the Nazi regime. Killing the Jews was thus both an ideological and a practical solution to the ‘Jewish Question’. This question, all convinced Nazis agreed, had to be solved as quickly as possible.

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