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"FINAL SOLUTION": OVERVIEW
Human remains found in the Dachau concentration camp crematorium after liberation. Germany, April 1945.
— US Holocaust Memorial Museum
The Nazis frequently used euphemistic language to disguise the true nature of their crimes. They used the
term “Final Solution” to refer to their plan to annihilate the Jewish people. It is not known when the leaders of Nazi
Germany definitively decided to implement the "Final Solution." The genocide, or mass destruction, of the Jews was
the culmination of a decade of increasingly severe discriminatory measures.
Under the rule of Adolf Hitler, the persecution and segregation of Jews was implemented in stages. After the Nazi
party achieved power in Germany in 1933, its state-sponsored racism led to anti-Jewish legislation, economic
boycotts, and the violence of the Kristallnacht ("Night of Broken Glass") pogroms, all of which aimed to
systematically isolate Jews from society and drive them out of the country.
ANTI-JEWISH POLICY ESCALATES
After the September 1939 German invasion of Poland (the beginning of World War II), anti-Jewish policy escalated
to the imprisonment and eventual murder of European Jewry. The Nazis first established ghettos (enclosed areas
designed to isolate and control the Jews) in the General gouvernement (a territory in central and eastern Poland
overseen by a German civilian government) and the Warthegau (an area of western Poland annexed to Germany).
Polish and western European Jews were deported to these ghettos where they lived in overcrowded and unsanitary
conditions with inadequate food.
MASSIVE KILLING OPERATIONS BEGIN
After the June 1941 German invasion of the Soviet Union, SS and police units (acting as mobile killing units) began
massive killing operations aimed at entire Jewish communities. By autumn 1941, the SS and police introduced mobile
gas vans. These paneled trucks had exhaust pipes reconfigured to pump poisonous carbon monoxide gas into sealed
spaces, killing those locked within. They were designed to complement ongoing shooting operations.
On July 17, 1941, four weeks after the invasion of the Soviet Union, Hitler tasked SS chief Heinrich Himmler with
responsibility for all security matters in the occupied Soviet Union. Hitler gave Himmler broad authority to physically
eliminate any perceived threats to permanent German rule. Two weeks later, on July 31, 1941, Nazi leader Hermann
Goering authorized SS General Reinhard Heydrich to make preparations for the implementation of a "complete
solution of the Jewish question."
Source: US Holocaust Memorial Museum
EINSATZGRUPPEN (MOBILE KILLING UNITS)
Members of an Einsatzkommando (mobile killing squad) before shooting a Jewish youth. The boy's murdered family
lies in front of him; the men to the left are ethnic Germans aiding the squad. Slarow, Soviet Union, July 4, 1941.
Einsatzgruppen (in this context, mobile killing units) were squads composed primarily of German SS and police
personnel. Under the command of the German Security Police (Sicherheitspolizei; Sipo) and Security Service
(Sicherheitsdienst; SD) officers, the Einsatzgruppen had among their tasks the murder of those perceived to be
racial or political enemies found behind German combat lines in the occupied Soviet Union.
These victims included Jews, Roma (Gypsies), and officials of the Soviet state and the Soviet Communist party. The
Einsatzgruppen also murdered thousands of residents of institutions for the mentally and physically disabled. Many
scholars believe that the systematic killing of Jews in the occupied Soviet Union by Einsatzgruppen and Order Police
(Ordnungspolizei) battalions was the first step of the "Final Solution," the Nazi program to murder all European
Jews.
During the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, the Einsatzgruppen followed the German army as it advanced
deep into Soviet territory. The Einsatzgruppen, often drawing on local civilian and police support, carried out massmurder operations. In contrast to the methods later instituted of deporting Jews from their own towns and cities or
from ghettosettings to killing centers, Einsatzgruppen came directly to the home communities of Jews and
massacred them.
The German army provided logistical support to the Einsatzgruppen, including supplies, transportation, housing, and
occasionally manpower in the form of units to guard and transport prisoners. At first the Einsatzgruppen shot
primarily Jewish men. By late summer 1941, however, wherever the Einsatzgruppen went, they shot Jewish men,
women, and children without regard for age or sex, and buried them in mass graves. Often with the help of local
informants and interpreters, Jews in a given locality were identified and taken to collection points. Thereafter they
Source: US Holocaust Memorial Museum
were marched or transported by truck to the execution site, where trenches had been prepared. In some cases the
captive victims had to dig their own graves. After the victims had handed over their valuables and undressed, men,
women, and children were shot, either standing before the open trench, or lying face down in the prepared pit.
Shooting was the most common form of killing used by the Einsatzgruppen. Yet in the late summer of 1941, Heinrich
Himmler, noting the psychological burden that mass shootings produced on his men, requested that a more
convenient mode of killing be developed. The result was the gas van, a mobile gas chamber surmounted on the
chassis of a cargo truck which employed carbon monoxide from the truck's exhaust to kill its victims. Gas vans made
their first appearance on the eastern front in late fall 1941, and were eventually utilized, along with shooting, to
murder Jews and other victims in most areas where the Einsatzgruppen operated.
The Einsatzgruppen following the German army into the Soviet Union were composed of four battalion-sized
operational groups. Einsatzgruppe A fanned out from East Prussia across Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia toward
Leningrad (now St. Petersburg). It massacred Jews in Kovno, Riga, and Vilna. Einsatzgruppe B started
from Warsaw in occupied Poland, and fanned out across Belorussia toward Smolensk and Minsk, massacring Jews in
Grodno, Minsk, Brest-Litovsk, Slonim, Gomel, and Mogilev, among other places. Einsatzgruppe C began operations
from Krakow (Cracow) and fanned out across the western Ukraine toward Kharkov and Rostov-on-Don. Its
personnel directed massacres in Lvov, Tarnopol, Zolochev, Kremenets, Kharkov, Zhitomir, and Kiev, where famously
in two days in late September 1941 units of Einsatzgruppe detachment 4a massacred 33,771 Kiev Jews in the ravine
at Babi Yar. Of the four units, Einsatzgruppe D operated farthest south. Its personnel carried out massacres in the
southern Ukraine and the Crimea, especially in Nikolayev, Kherson, Simferopol, Sevastopol, Feodosiya, and in the
Krasnodar region.
The Einsatzgruppen received much assistance from German and Axis soldiers, local collaborators, and other SS units.
Einsatzgruppen members were drawn from the SS, Waffen SS (military formations of the SS), SD, Sipo, Order Police,
and other police units.
By the spring of 1943, the Einsatzgruppen and Order Police battalions had killed over a million Soviet Jews and tens
of thousands of Soviet political commissars, partisans, Roma, and institutionalized disabled persons. The mobile
killing methods, particularly shooting, proved to be inefficient and psychologically burdensome to the killers. Even as
Einsatzgruppen units carried out their operations, the German authorities planned and began construction of special
stationary gassing facilities at centralized killing centers in order to murder vast numbers of Jews.
KILLING CENTERS
In the autumn of 1941, SS chief Heinrich Himmler assigned German General Odilo Globocnik (SS and police leader for
the Lublin District) with the implementation of a plan to systematically murder the Jews of the General
gouvernement. The code name Operation Reinhard was eventually given to this plan, named after Heydrich (who
was assassinated by Czech partisans in May 1942). As part of Operation Reinhard, Nazi leaders established
three killing centers in Poland—Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka—with the sole purpose of the mass murder of Jews.
The Majdanek camp served from time to time as a killing site for Jews residing in the General gouvernement. In its
gas chambers, the SS killed tens of thousands of Jews, primarily forced laborers too weak to work. The SS and police
killed at least 152,000 people, mostly Jews, but also a few thousand Roma (Gypsies), in gas vans at
the Chelmno killing center about thirty miles northwest of Lodz. In the spring of 1942, Himmler
designated Auschwitz II (Auschwitz-Birkenau) as a killing facility. SS authorities murdered approximately one million
Jews from various European countries at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Source: US Holocaust Memorial Museum
German SS and police murdered nearly 2,700,000 Jews in the killing centers either by asphyxiation with poison gas
or by shooting. In its entirety, the "Final Solution" called for the murder of all European Jews by gassing, shooting,
and other means. Six million Jewish men, women, and children were killed during the Holocaust—two-thirds of
the Jews living in Europe before World War II.
Source: US Holocaust Memorial Museum