The Road to the Final Solution

A Plan for the Destruction of the Jewish Population

The Final Solution

• After the June 1933 Nazi party rise to power, state-enforced racism resulted in anti-Jewish legislation, boycotts, Aryanization, and Kristalnacht.

• All of these initiatives were aimed at removing Jews from German society.

• It would only be at the beginning of WWII that the plan would evolve into extinguishing the Jews.

The Beginnings:• The massive Nazi initiative known as the Final Solution was aimed at

removing Jews from German society by means of their total annihilation.

• This extreme piece of legislation did not occur as a knee-jerk reaction to Judaism in Germany; rather, it evolved over a series of years.

• It was the result of a constant escalation stemming from the perpetual search for solutions which failed to solve ongoing problems in Germany (ex. poor economy).

• In the beginning, the only wish of the Nazi regime was for Jews to emigrate out of Germany completely to create racial purity within Germany and to create lebensraum (“living space”) for German nationals of Aryan blood.

• When Jews did not leave and problems mounted, they were blamed for the problems and targeted as the root of Germany’s unhappiness. – Were their options other than the complete annihilation of the Jews?

First Steps:• The first step toward a Final Solution became the complete

dehumanization of Jews.

• In order for people to accept what was about to become of the Jews and actively participate in the acts that Hitler deemed necessary to promote racial purity, they had to believe that Jews were bad.

• Hitler offered people a choice: live with the Jews or help exterminate them.

• The majority of German citizens didn’t care either way and were not interested in what was going on. Another large percent of the German populace didn’t want to see what was going on around them. Only a minority of the citizens participated with any measure of glee or enthusiasm.

• Regardless of which position a German citizen took, there is still a measure of “collective responsibility” that has to be acknowledged. After all, doing nothing is as much a response as actively participating.

First Steps (continued)• Deportations were the primary way in which German tried

to get rid of the Jews. However, no other European nations would take them in.

• As Nazi legislation limited the income and personal rights of Jews, they became increasingly unable to afford to escape.

• With the creation of the Nuremberg Laws, the rights of Jews were almost entirely stripped.

– All hope of escaping was soon to be lost.

– Jews made to wear badges in an effort to make Germans “feel embarrassed, to feel afraid to [have] any contact with the Jews.” (Adolf Eichmann)

The Wannsee Conference• January 20, 1942

• 15 high-ranking Nazi party and German government leaders

• Reinhard Heydrich (head deputy to Himmer’s SS): quoted as saying that the purpose of the meeting was to discuss the “final solution to the Jewish question in Europe.”

• “Final Solution”- code name for the deliberate, carefully planned destruction or genocide of the Jews. The Nazis used this vague term to hide their policy of mass murder from the rest of the world.

• Also at the conference, different subjects such as methods of killing, liquidation, ghettoization, and extermination were discussed.

Post Conference:• After Wannsee, new information was spread that

mobile killing centers were already slaughtering Jews in the occupied areas of the Soviet Union.

• These units or Einsatzgruppen were made up of police and SS men. They followed the regular army into occupied territories and rounded up Jews. The victims were either moved into ghettos or immediately killed.

• Many times the squad members marched their victims to open fields, forests, and ravines on the outskirts of conquered towns. There they shot them or gassed them in gas vans and then dumped the bodies into mass graves.

• The executioners were ordinary men who followed orders of their commanders.

• Many killers had wives and children back in Germany.

• Propaganda and training had taught many members of the killing squads to view their victims as enemies of Germany.

• They used euphemisms such as “special treatment” and “special action” to describe what they were doing.

• When it became clear that the psychological burden of killing was becoming too much, gassing vans were used to eliminate the shame of their actions.

• Eventually, extermination camps were built in an effort to efficiently erase the Jews and keep the minds of the captors at ease.

• To keep the Jewish population under control and dwindling in population, Hitler began the creation of concentration camps.

• Initially, they were designed to incarcerate political prisoners, criminals, and security risks.

• While conditions were horrible and death rates were high, there is no evidence that they were used for extermination.

• The death rates were so high due to malnutrition, typhus, and exhaustion.

• Eventually, the disposal of the corpses became a serious problem.

Two important precedents for the death camps deserve attention:

• The Aschaffenburg concentration camp– 1st camp to officially murder its prisoners in masse

• The Nazi Euthanasia Project – Not “dying with dignity”– Focused on “life unworthy of life”– Eliminated those who carried defective genetic

materials which might endanger the quality of the “Aryan” stock

– Doctors assisted with the destruction

Hippocratic Oath

I swear by Apollo Physician and Asclepius and Hygieia and Panaceia and all the gods and goddesses, making them my witnesses, that I will fulfill according to my ability and judgment this oath and this covenant:

To hold him who has taught me this art as equal to my parents and to live my life in partnership with him, and if he is in need of money to give him a share of mine, and to regard his offspring as equal to my brothers in male lineage

and to teach them this art - if they desire to learn it - without fee and covenant; to give a share of precepts and oral instruction and all the other learning to my

sons and to the sons of him who has instructed me and to pupils who have signed the covenant and have taken an oath according to the medical law, but

no one else.

I will apply dietetic measures for the benefit of the sick according to my ability and judgment; I will keep them from harm and injustice.

I will neither give a deadly drug to anybody who asked for it, nor will I make a suggestion to this effect. Similarly I will not give to a woman an abortive remedy. In purity and holiness I will guard my life and my art.

I will not use the knife, not even on sufferers from stone, but will withdraw in favor of such men as are engaged in this work.

Whatever houses I may visit, I will come for the benefit of the sick, remaining free of all intentional injustice, of all mischief and in particular of sexual relations with both

female and male persons, be they free or slaves.

What I may see or hear in the course of the treatment or even outside of the treatment in regard to the life of men, which on no account one must spread abroad, I will keep

to myself, holding such things shameful to be spoken about.

If I fulfill this oath and do not violate it, may it be granted to me to enjoy life and art, being honored with fame among all men for all time to come; if I transgress it and swear falsely, may the opposite of all this be my lot.

These programs paved the way for the Holocaust in several important ways:

First-Legitimized government-sponsored killing

Second-Beginning stage in the corruption of German

medical professionals

•began with “mercy killings”

•escalated into full scale involvement of some in the mass extermination of Jews & others in death camps

Third-Developed technology which would later be applied to

mass murder

The Rationalization of Murder

• A clear distinction must be observed between the death camps, or killing centers, and the concentration camps.

• All of the concentration camps were death camps in that thousands of inmates did of starvation, being worked to death, exposure to the elements, epidemics, or simply being executed for alleged crimes.

• The classification between death camp and concentration camp is based on the primary function for which it was established.

The Nazi Concentration

Camps

Dachau was the first concentration camp established.

• In Munich (1933)• Ordered by Heinrich Himmler • Ruled by Commandant Theodor Eicke • Would serve as the model for all of the other

concentration camps• Became the murder school for the SS• First prisoners were political opponents of the regime,

communists, and social democrats.• Jews- followed these b/c of their political opposition

• At Dachau, the first crematoria were constructed for the disposal of corpses.

• There were also gas chambers constructed; however, there is NO evidence that they were ever used for extermination.

• Other methods such as gallows were used to rid the Nazis of ‘troublesome’ Jews.

There were nearly 9,000 concentration camps within Germany and its occupied

territories. Some of the most noted among them are:

• Mauthausen

• Bergen-Belsen

• Buchenwald

• Ravensbrück

• Terezin (Theresienstadt)

Mauthausen (Austria)Prisoners were forced to climb the 186 steps of the Wiener Graben with large blocks of granite on their backs.

Often the blocks would fall, crushing limbs and bodies of those following, sometimes killing.

The SS guards invented competitions betting on which prisoner would make it to the top first.

Mauthausen (cont.) • Those surviving the ordeal would then be forced to jump from the edge of the quarry to their death below. This particular spot at the edge of the quarry was known “The Parachute Jump”.

• “...in 1944 ....The SS led forty-seven Dutch, American, and English officers and flyers, barefooted, to the bottom. On their first journey up the 186 steps they forced the men to carry twenty-five kilogram stones on their backs. On each successive journey they increased the weight of the load. If a prisoner fell, he was beaten. All forty-seven died of the treatment”.

Mauthausen (cont.)

The Wailing Wall• Newly arrived prisoners

were subjected to an initiation ritual: standing at attention facing this wall while chained to iron rings; this for at least hours, and sometimes days.

• They were interrogated and brutally beaten.

• Today the wall is covered with numerous memorial tablets.

Bunker Hall• It is hard to imagine anything worse than being thrown into a concentration camp.

• Even in Mauthausen there was a deeper hell: an isolation unit. Here, in what was already the end of the line, there was another, darker place, the end of the line at the end of the line.

• If one broke the camp's often absurd rules, he could very well have been be thrown into the bunker.

The Gas Chamber

• The chamber in Mauthausen was built in the basement, below the sick quarters. It was completed and used by the spring of 1942. On the other hand, the sick quarters were only half completed at war's end.

• The SS would cram 120 persons into this chamber, seal the doors and pump in carbon monoxide. Inefficient as it was, the prisoners often died of suffocation rather than the gas.

• “Consequently, when the doors were opened to remove the bodies, it was found that the dead were covered not only with excrement and blood, but their eyes protruded from their heads and their bodies stiffened into grotesque positions.”

The Judas Opening

A peep hole for the curious, the professional killers, the sadists and the perverse. A place to gloat over the deaths of others; to

wield such power, indeed to have such power. Why? To feel above it all, like a brooding Greek god on Mt. Olympus: superior, alive, invulnerable, perhaps even for a few moments, immortal?

• Among many other pseudo-scientific "experiments", SS doctors removed organs from living people, bottled and stored them on shelves in the dissecting room.

• They skinned prisoners with interesting tattoos and sold them as book covers, gloves, luggage and lamp shades.

• One physician selected two prisoners with near perfect teeth and used their heads as paperweights on his desk.

The Latch • It is always surprising to see the degree of care and meticulous attention to detail, even elegance, the SS exacted in their goal of surrounding, punishing and killing innocent people.

• This latch, however, is on the entrance gate to the main camp at Mauthausen.

Bergen-Belsen

• Bergen-Belsen was a concentration camp near Hanover in northwest Germany, located between the villages of Bergen and Belsen.

• Built in 1940, it was a prisoner-of-war camp for French and Belgium prisoners.

Bergen-Belsen (cont.)• It was designed to hold

10,000 prisoners, however, by the war’s end more than 60,000 prisoners were detained there, due to the large numbers of those evacuated from Auschwitz and other camps from the East.

• Tens of thousands of prisoners from other camps came to Bergen-Belsen after agonizing death marches.

Trouble at Belsen • Conditions in the camp were good by concentration camp standards, and most prisoners were not subjected to forced labor. However, beginning in the spring of 1944 the situation deteriorated rapidly.

• Belsen was transformed. Prisoners of other camps too sick to work were brought, though none received medical treatment.

Tragedy at Belsen• As the German Army retreated in the face of the advancing Allies, the concentration camps were evacuated and their prisoners sent to Belsen.

• The facilities in the camp were unable to accommodate the sudden influx of thousands of prisoners and all basic services - food, water and sanitation - collapsed, leading to the outbreak of disease.

• Anne Frank and her sister, Margot, died of typhus in March 1945, along with other prisoners in a typhus epidemic.

The Fall of Belsen

As the first major camp to be liberated by the allies, the event received a lot of press coverage and the world saw the horrors of the Holocaust. Sixty-thousand prisoners were present at the time of liberation. Afterward, about 500 people died daily of starvation and typhus, reaching nearly 14,000. Mass graves were made to hold the thousands of corpses of those who perished.

Lord of Belsen

• Joseph Kramer– "Beast of Belsen“

– His prescription for the uncontrollable epidemic of diarrhea was starvation. 'If you don't eat, you don't shit.'

– When railroad cars and convoys were unavailable, he dispatched the prisoners on long marches. The weakest, unable to keep going, were left to die or were shot. The roads were littered with thousands who had succumbed.

– tried and found guilty by a British military court

– Forty-five staff members were tried, fourteen were acquitted.

– Kramer was hanged.

Herta Bothe • The notorious Herta Bothe became a camp guard and soon acquired a reputation as a sadist who beat prisoners without mercy.

• Shot weak female prisoners carrying food containers from the kitchen to the block with her pistol.

• Often beat sick girls with a wooden stick. • charged with having committed war

crimes

• got imprisonment for 10 years

                                           

        Juana Bormann •“The woman with the dogs”

• took sadistic pleasure in setting her wolfhounds on prisoners to tear them to pieces

•I could earn more money …

•found guilty and convicted of war crimes; executed

Buchenwald• one of the largest

concentration camps established by the Nazis

• Originally designed for male prisoners (political prisoners)

• Females were not introduced until 1944

• The official goal of Buchenwald was the destruction of the prisoners by work. Thousands of prisoners were murdered in Buchenwald by work, torture, beatings, or simply starvation and lack of hygiene.

Ilse Koch• the Bitch of Buchenwald• fond of riding her horse

through the camp naked, whipping any prisoner who attracted her attention

• Her hobby was collecting lampshades, book covers, and gloves made from the skins of specially murdered concentration camp inmates, and shrunken human skulls.

• Sentenced to life imprisonment• Committed suicide in a

Bavarian prison

                                           

       

Extract from the Nuremberg Trial.

Mr. Dubost (French prosecutor): Could you please tell us about the tattooed skin?Witness Bachalowsky: Yes.Mr. Dubost: Please tell us what you know.Witness Bachalowsky: In Buchenwald, human tattooed skin was placed in Block 2. This block was called the "pathological block".

Mr. Dubost: Could you tell us if there was much tattooed skin in this block?

Witness Bachalowsky: There was always human skin there. I can't tell you exactly how much there was because there was a lot of traffic in this block. There was not only tattooed skin but also tanned human skin without tattoos.

Mr. Dubost: Does this mean that they skinned prisoners?Witness Bachalowsky: They skinned prisoners, then they tanned the skin.Mr. Dubost: Could you give us more details about that?

Witness Bachalowsky: I saw the SS leaving Block 2 with human skin in their arms. Some comrades who worked in this block told me the SS received orders for human skin, and that tanned skin were given to the guards and visitors. Human skin was also used to make book covers.

Mr. Dubost: We have been told here that the former commandant, Koch, was punished for that.

Witness Bachalowsky: I don't know about that case, I was not in the camp at this time.

Mr. Dubost: So, were there human tattooed and tanned skin in the camp after Koch left?

Witness Bachalowsky: There was always skin. When the Americans liberated the camp, they still found tattooed and tanned skin...

Ravensbrück• only major Nazi concentration

camp for women • a small village located in a

beautiful area with many forests and lakes

• death by starvation, beating, torture, hanging, and shooting

• During the last months of the war, and due to the rapid advance of the Russian Army, the SS decided to exterminate as many prisoners as they could, in order to avoid any testimony about what happened in the camp.

Irma Grese• "Beast of Belsen"• the League of German

Girls• Her father ordered her to

stay away from their house

• acts of sadism, beatings and arbitrary shooting of prisoners, savaging of prisoners by her trained and half starved dogs, and her selecting prisoners for the gas chambers

Maria Mandel• directly responsible for orders to kill over 500,000 female Jews, Gypsies, and political prisoners

• impressed her superiors with her brutality

• enjoyed selecting children to be killed

• last words were "Long live Poland!"