The First Moments of Hitler’s Final Solution

Ordinary Germans and the ‘Final Solution’

Contents:

On 4 October , in Posen, Heinrich Himmler gave a speech to senior SS officers, which he repeated in more or less the same form two days later to Party Regional Leaders and other prominent figures, including Joseph Goebbels and Albert Speer. The speech contained what have since become some of his most notorious utterances. Therefore they were being killed, and not just the men: We were approached with the question, what about the women and children? The really difficult decision had to be taken to let this people disappear off the face of the Earth.

For the organization that had to carry out the task, it was the most difficult we had so far had. Hitler himself was clear enough about his own overall responsibility, however. As he remarked to senior military personnel on 26 May If the Jews were not eliminated, they would exterminate the entire German people. Not only the generals and Party satraps, but also Himmler himself seemed to share the view that the extermination of the Jews was a crime, a necessary crime in their view, but a crime none the less: Such a crime would invite retribution should Germany lose the war.

That is certainly the most consistent solution, even if it is also a brutal one. For we have to take on the responsibility of completely solving this question for our time. He had no doubt that they would fight to the end. He wanted to remind them, however, that the extermination of the Jews had to be carried out wherever and whenever it was possible, and without any exceptions: Not one of those who talk like that has watched it happening, not one of them has been through it.

Most of you will know what it means when a hundred corpses are lying side by side, or five hundred or a thousand are lying there. To have stuck it out and — apart from a few exceptions due to human weakness — to have remained decent, that is what has made us tough. Even the SS men who carried out the murders, therefore, were told by Himmler that what they were doing would be regarded by most of humanity as a terrible crime, if they were not already conscious of the fact.

More strikingly, perhaps, he made it clear that the mass of the German population felt, at the very least, ambivalent about the extermination; all of them, without exception, felt that some Jews at least should be kept alive, and that some Jews were fine and decent people. In essence, they had no real understanding for the genocide: How much did ordinary Germans know? Did they approve or not? Were there any individuals, groups or institutions that tried to stop the extermination?

The conquest of Poland brought a far larger Jewish population under the control of the Nazis, who removed them from their homes and confined them in overcrowded, insanitary and poorly supplied ghettos in the major cities, where they remained, in terrible and deadly conditions, while the German administrators argued over whether it was better to let them die or co-opt them into providing labour for the German war effort. In June the German invasion of the Soviet Union brought many more Jews under Nazi control, while Hitler, Goebbels and the leading figures in the regime now firmly believed that Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt, who was supplying the Allies with increasing quantities of munitions and essential goods, were acting on behalf of a world Jewish conspiracy aimed at defeating Germany and annihilating the German race.

A barrage of propaganda to this effect sent the signal to Himmler and the SS to begin the process of extermination, first by mass shootings behind the Eastern Front, then by asphyxiation in mobile gassing vans, and finally in specially constructed gas chambers set up in murder camps in the occupied areas of East-Central Europe. In January a conference of senior officials in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee resolved on measures to co-ordinate the murder programme, and listed further countries from which the Jewish population would be deported to the East and killed, including nations not yet conquered by the Third Reich, such as Ireland and Iceland.

By the middle of the murder programme was mostly complete, though the occupation of Hungary by German forces a year later led to the killing of more than , Hungarian Jews at Auschwitz. Altogether during the war, some 3 million Jews were murdered in the extermination camps. Anything up to a million Jews died of hunger, disease or SS brutality and shootings in the concentration camps and especially the ghettos that the Third Reich established in the occupied territories.

A precise total is impossible to arrive at, but it is certain that at least five and a half million Jews were deliberately killed in one way or another by the Nazis and their allies. Since the opening of the archives in the former Soviet bloc in the s it has become clear that the probable total is around six million, the figure given by Adolf Eichmann, the senior co-ordinator of the programme, at his trial in Jerusalem There was, it is clear, next to no resistance on the part of ordinary Germans to this unprecedented act of genocide. For some years after the end of the war, Germans themselves explained their inaction by claiming they had not known about it at the time.

But a great mass of research, most of it by German historians, since the s has shown this claim to be false. Finding out about the killings was not difficult. Obviously, news travelled fast to the few Jews who remained in Germany. It could be obtained from a variety of sources. The Security Service of the SS reported in March that soldiers returning from Poland were talking openly about how the Jews were being killed there in large numbers.

Civil servants at many levels of the central Reich administration read the Task Force reports or were in contact with administrators in the East. Railway timetable clerks, engine drivers, and train drivers and other staff on stations and in goods yards, could all identify the trains and knew where they were going.

Policemen rounding up the Jews or dealing with their files or their property knew as well. Finding out about the gassings was far more difficult. The camps were located away from major centres of population, though within easy reach of them by rail, the killings took place behind barbed-wire fences not in trenches in the open, and German troops were generally located elsewhere in the region. Soldiers writing to their families or coming home on leave generally had no direct knowledge of these killings.

Nevertheless, news of the gas chambers also reached Germany, if by a somewhat circuitous route. It was from Poland that the most determined attempts to inform the world of the extermination programme came. On 17 September it approved a public protest against the crimes the Germans were committing against the Jews. Jan Karski, a member of the Polish underground, was commissioned by the resistance to go to the West and report on the situation, though the plight of the Jews was fairly low on the list of priorities he was given.

Hearing of his mission, two members of a Jewish underground group persuaded him to visit the Warsaw ghetto and most probably also the camp at Belzec. Karski followed his orders, and reported what he had seen when he eventually reached London. Businessmen, policemen, bankers, doctors, lawyers, soldiers, railroad and factory workers, chemists, pharmacists, foremen, production managers, economists, manufacturers, jewelers, diplomats, civil servants, propagandists, film makers and film stars, professors, teachers, politicians, mayors, party members, construction experts, art dealers, architects, landlords, janitors, truck drivers, clerks, industrialists, scientists, generals, and even shopkeepers—all were essential cogs in the machinery that accomplished the final solution.

Additional scholars also point out that a wide range of German soldiers, officials, and civilians were in some way involved in the Holocaust, from clerks and officials in the government to units of the army, police, and the SS. The German Army also logistically supported the Einsatzgruppen , helped form the ghettos, ran prison camps, occasionally provided concentration camp guards, transported prisoners to camps, had medical experiments performed on prisoners, and substantially used slave labor.

Stanley Milgram was one of a number of post-war psychologists and sociologists who tried to address why people obeyed immoral orders in the Holocaust. Milgram's findings demonstrated that reasonable people, when instructed by a person in a position of authority, obeyed commands entailing what they believed to be the suffering of others. After making his results public, Milgram sparked direct critical response in the scientific community by claiming that "a common psychological process is centrally involved in both" his laboratory experiments and the Holocaust.

In the opinion of Thomas Blass —who is the author of a scholarly monograph on the experiment The Man Who Shocked The World published in —the historical evidence pertaining to actions of the Holocaust perpetrators speaks louder than words:. My own view is that Milgram's approach does not provide a fully adequate explanation of the Holocaust.

While it may well account for the dutiful destructiveness of the dispassionate bureaucrat who may have shipped Jews to Auschwitz with the same degree of routinization as potatoes to Bremerhaven , it falls short when one tries to apply it to the more zealous, inventive, and hate-driven atrocities that also characterized the Holocaust. Throughout the Middle Ages in Europe, Jews were subjected to antisemitism based on Christian theology, which blamed them for rejecting and killing Jesus.

There were an extensive series of attacks against Jews during the religious fervor accompanying the First and Second Crusades — Martin Luther a German leader of the Protestant Reformation made a specific written call for harsh persecution of the Jewish people in On the Jews and Their Lies , published in In it, he urged that Jewish synagogues and schools be set on fire, prayer books destroyed, rabbis forbidden to preach, homes razed, and property and money confiscated. The movement presented a pseudo-scientific, biologically based form of racism that viewed Jews as a race whose members were locked in mortal combat with the Aryan race for world domination.

Some authors, such as liberal philosopher Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism , [81] Swedish writer Sven Lindqvist , historian Hajo Holborn, and Ugandan academic, Mahmood Mandani, have also linked the Holocaust to colonialism , but moreover, place the tragedy into the context of the European tradition of anti-Semitism and the genocide of colonized peoples.

Arthur de Gobineau 's Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races were fundamental in preparing the conditions for the Holocaust according to some scholars. The Nazis considered it their duty to overcome natural compassion and execute orders for what they believed to be higher ideals; members of the SS in particular, perceived that they had a state-legitimized mandate and obligation to eliminate those perceived as racial enemies.

A Study of the Popular Mind provided influence to Hitler's infamous tome, Mein Kampf , [88] Le Bon claimed that Hitler and the Nazis used propaganda to deliberately shape group-think and related behaviors, especially in cases where people committed otherwise aberrant violent acts due to the anonymity resultant from being a member of the collective. A controversy erupted in when historian Daniel Goldhagen argued in Hitler's Willing Executioners that ordinary Germans were knowing and willing participants in the Holocaust, which he writes, had its roots in a deep racially motivated eliminationist antisemitism that was uniquely manifested in German society.

A major issue in contemporary Holocaust studies is the question of functionalism versus intentionalism. Intentionalists hold that the Holocaust was the result of a long-term masterplan on the part of Hitler, and that he was the driving force behind it. They see the Holocaust as coming from the ranks of the German bureaucracy, with little or no involvement on the part of Hitler. Historian and intentionalist Lucy Dawidowicz argues that the Holocaust was planned by Hitler from the very beginning of his political career, traceable back to his traumatic experience at the end of the First World War.

Mayer , argued that Hitler first ordered the mass murder of the Jews in December , due principally to the failed Blitzkrieg against the Soviet Union. In Mein Kampf , Hitler repeatedly states his inexorable hatred of the Jewish people, but nowhere does he proclaim his intention to exterminate them. They also argue that, in the s, Nazi policy aimed at making life so unpleasant for German Jews that they would leave Germany. Essentially the view of functionalists concerning the Holocaust is that it came about via improvisation as opposed to deliberate planning.

To that end, functionalists argue that, in German documents from to , the term "Final Solution to the Jewish Question" was meant to be a "territorial solution"; that is, the entire Jewish population was to be expelled somewhere far from Germany. The reason Frank vetoed the "Lublin Plan" was not due to any humane motives, but rather because he was opposed to the SS "dumping" Jews into the Government-General.

Recently, a synthesis of the two schools has emerged that has been championed by diverse historians such as the Canadian historian Michael Marrus , the Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer , and the British historian Ian Kershaw that contends Hitler was the driving force behind the Holocaust, but that he did not have a long-term plan and that much of the initiative for the Holocaust came from below in an effort to meet Hitler's perceived wishes.

As historian Omer Bartov relates, "the "intentionalists" and "functionalists" have gradually come closer, as further research now seems to indicate that the more extreme new interpretations are just as impossible to sustain as the traditional ones. Most historians take the view that Hitler was the opposite of a pragmatist: There is no "smoking gun" in the form of a document which shows Hitler ordering the Final Solution.

Hitler did not have a bureaucratic mind and many of his most important instructions were given orally. Historian Paul Johnson writes that some writers, such as David Irving , have claimed that because there were no written orders, "the Final Solution was Himmler's work and […] Hitler not only did not order it but did not even know it was happening. The administration of the Third Reich was often chaotic but its central principle was clear enough: According to Kershaw, "Hitler's authority — most probably given as verbal consent to propositions usually put to him by Himmler — stood behind every decision of magnitude and significance.

The unparalleled outpourings of hatred were a constant even amid all the policy shifts of the Nazis.

They often had a propaganda or mobilizing motive, and usually remained generalized. Even so, Kershaw remains adamant that Hitler's role was decisive and indispensable in the unfolding of the "Final Solution. In a letter dated Hitler mentions that part of the ultimate aim of a strong national government must "unshakably be the removal of the Jews". Once I really am in power, my first and foremost task will be the annihilation of the Jews. As soon as I have the power to do so, I will have gallows built in rows—at the Marienplatz in Munich, for example—as many as traffic allows.

Then the Jews will be hanged indiscriminately, and they will remain hanging until they stink; they will hang there as long as the principles of hygiene permit. As soon as they have been untied, the next batch will be strung up, and so on down the line, until the last Jew in Munich has been exterminated. Other cities will follow suit, precisely in this fashion, until all Germany has been completely cleansed of Jews.

We are going to destroy the Jews.

When Hitler solidified his plan to exterminate Jews – and why it matters 75 years later

They are not going to get away with what they did on 9 November The day of reckoning has come. And we say that the war will not end as the Jews imagine it will, namely with the uprooting of the Aryans, but the result of this war will be the complete annihilation of the Jews. If at the beginning of the war and during the war twelve or fifteen thousand of these Hebrew corrupters of the people had been held under poison gas, as happened to hundreds of thousands of our very best German workers in the field, the sacrifice of millions at the front would not have been in vain.

In the following widely cited speech made on 30 January , Hitler says to the Reichstag:. I want to be a prophet again today: According to historian Klaus Hildebrand, moral responsibility for the Holocaust resides with Hitler and was nothing less than the culmination of his pathological hatred of the Jews, which for all intents and purposes formed the basis of Nazi genocide and drove the regime to pursue its racial-eliminationist goals. This led to the Wannsee Conference held on 20 January , where Heydrich formally announced that genocide of the Jews of Europe was now official Reich policy.

Although the Nazi regime is often depicted as a super-centralized vertically hierarchical state, individual initiative was an important element in how Nazi Germany functioned. This was a coordinated effort among the SS and its sprawling police apparatus with the Reich ministries and the national railways, all under the supervision of the Nazi Party. The extent to which the officers of the regular German military knew of the Final Solution has been much debated. Political imperatives in postwar Germany led to the army being generally absolved from responsibility, apart from the handful of "Nazi generals" such as Alfred Jodl and Wilhelm Keitel who were tried and hanged at Nuremberg.

The Crimes of the Wehrmacht" [l] showed the extent to which the military was involved in the Holocaust. It was particularly difficult for commanders on the eastern front to avoid knowing what was happening in the areas behind the front. Many individual soldiers photographed the massacres of Jews by the Einsatzgruppen. Other front-line officers went through the war without coming into direct contact with the machinery of extermination, choosing to focus narrowly on their duties and not noticing the wider context of the war.

Although the Holocaust was planned and directed by Germans, the Nazi regime found willing collaborators in other countries, both those allied to Germany and those under German occupation and by , the atrocities across the continent became a "pan-European program. Bulgaria refused to co-operate, and all 50, Bulgarian Jews survived though most lost their possessions and many were imprisoned , but thousands of Greek and Yugoslavian Jews were deported from the Bulgarian-occupied territories.

The Nazis sought to enlist support for their programs in all the countries they occupied, although their recruitment methods differed in various countries according to Nazi racial theories. In the "Nordic" countries of Denmark, Norway, Netherlands, and Estonia they tried to recruit young men into the Waffen-SS , with sufficient success to create the "Wiking" SS division on the Eastern Front, many of whose members fought for Germany with great fanaticism until the end of the war. In recent years, the extent of local collaboration with the Nazis in Eastern Europe has become more apparent. Historian Alan Bullock writes: Historian Dieter Pohl has estimated that more than , non-Germans "prepared, carried out and assisted in acts of murder"; that is about the same number as Germans and Austrians.

In Belgium the state has been accused of having actively collaborated with Nazi Germany. An official report commissioned by the Belgian senate concluded that the Belgians were indeed complicit for participating in the Holocaust. According to the report, the Belgian authorities "adopted a docile attitude providing collaboration unworthy of a democracy in its treatment of Jews.

This was only the first of such actions as the deportations to the east continued resulting in the death of some 25, people; [] and 3 At the end of , the Belgian state officials decided that its authorities bore no legal responsibility for the persecution of the Jews, even though many Belgian police officers participated in the rounding up and deportation of Jews. However, collaboration is not the whole story. While there is little doubt that there were strong antisemitic feelings in Belgium, after November , the German roundups became less successful as large-scale rescue operations were carried out by ordinary Belgians.

This resulted in the survival of about 25, Jews from Belgium. Roughly 60 percent of Belgium's Jews, who were there at the start of the war, survived the Final Solution. Bulgaria , mainly through the influence of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church , saved nearly all of its indigenous Jewish population from deportation and certain death. This is not to imply that Bulgaria was entirely blameless, as they passed specials laws to confiscate Jewish property and remove them from public service in early Channel Islands police collaborated with the Nazis deporting local Jews, some of whom were sent to Auschwitz in , others were deported in as retaliation for the British commando raid on the small Channel Island of Sark, when most of the Jews were shipped to internment camps in France and Germany.

Due in part to the fact that the Germans were dependent upon an "uninterrupted supply of Danish agricultural products to the Reich" they tolerated the status quo of 6, Jews living unmolested in Denmark. Most of the Danish Jews were rescued by the unwillingness of the Danish government and people to acquiesce to the demands of the occupying forces and through their concerted efforts to ferry Danish Jews to Sweden during October Despite being at times a co-belligerent of Nazi Germany, Finland remained independent and its leadership flatly refused to cooperate with Heinrich Himmler's request to relinquish its 2, Jews.

Anti-Semitism, as the Dreyfus Affair had shown at the end of the 19th century, was widespread in France, especially among anti-republican sympathizers.

Approximately 50, were refugees fleeing Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia, while another 25, came to France from Belgium and Holland; the remaining Jews were arrivals to France in the s and 30s from Eastern Europe. Once the Germans invaded, many Jews fled away from the advancing forces but France's rapid collapse both militarily and politically, the armistice, and the speed at which everything happened trapped many of them in southern France.

By the end of , more Jews were arrested in Vichy France than in the German occupied region of the country.

Responsibility for the Holocaust

The Greek governor, Vasilis Simonides, cooperated with the Nazi authorities and supplied local police forces to aide in deporting 48, Jews from Salonika to Auschwitz-Birkenau during March to August Upwards of 2, Jews from Corfu and another 2, from Rhodes were transported to concentration camps in June Approximately 90, Jews and their family members who relied on their support upwards of , people lost their means of economic survival and when the third anti-Jewish law went into effect, it nearly mirrored the Nazi Nuremberg Laws. Due to this order as many as 50, Jews worked in forced labor companies starting in the spring of through During parts of May through June , some 10, Hungarian Jews were gassed on a daily basis at Auschwitz-Birkenau, a pace with which the crematoria could not maintain, so many of the bodies were burned in open pits.

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Nearly one-tenth of the Holocaust's Jewish victims were Hungarian Jews, accounting for a total of over , deaths; some 64, Jews were killed prior to the German occupation of Hungary. Among Germany's allies, Italy was not known for its anti-Semitism and had a relatively well assimilated Jewish population and its policies were essentially about domination as opposed to "destruction.

This effectively reduced the country's Jews to second-class status, though the Italians never made it official policy to deport Jews to concentration camps. Edging closer towards Germany, the Italian Ministry of the Interior established 43 camps where enemy "aliens" to include Jews were detained—these camps were not pleasant but they were "a far cry from the Nazi concentration camps.

After the fall of Benito Mussolini and the Italian Social Republic , Jews started being deported to German camps by the Italian puppet regime, which issued a police order to that effect on 30 November Before the war over 93, Jews resided in Latvia, comprising less than 5 percent of the country's population. Only a handful of Jews lived in the small neutral state of Liechtenstein at the outbreak of the Second World War.

Liechtenstein's royal family also rented inmates from Strasshoff concentration camp near Vienna, where they employed forced labor on nearby royal estates. Nearly 7 percent of Lithuania's population was Jewish, totaling approximately , persons. Just seven-weeks later however, the Nazis invaded and were greeted as liberators.

Subsequent blame for the ill-fortune that befell the Lithuanians under the Soviets landed on the Jews, which started even before the Germans had finished conquering the country; [] Lithuanians carried out pogroms in at least 40 different places, where Jews were raped, severely injured, and killed. On 25 June Nazi forces arrived in Kaunas, where they witnessed local Lithuanians drag about 50 male Jews into the center of the city while one Lithuanian man beat them to death with a crowbar cheered on by spectators in a public display of brutality that shocked many Germans.

Once the Jews were all dead, the man who had beaten them to death, climbed atop their corpses and played the Lithuanian national anthem on an accordion. While estimates vary, the number of Lithuanian Jews murdered in the Holocaust is assessed to be between , and , Additionally, Lithuanian auxiliary police troops assisted in killing Jews in Poland, Belarus and Ukraine. Known prior to the war for racial and religious tolerance, the Netherlands had taken in Jews since the 16th century, many of whom had found refuge there after fleeing Spain.

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From there, most Dutch Jews were first sent to Mauthausen concentration camp. From the summer of forward, upwards of , Dutch Jews were deported and killed—much of which was made possible by the "cooperation and efficiency of the Dutch civil service and police" who willingly served the Germans. Amid a prewar population of 3 million, there were only 2, Jews living there, the largest contingency residing in Oslo. Many Jews and other people were saved by the actions of Norwegians, including Norwegian police. The largest of which was the 13th "Handschar" division.

Polish Jews comprised roughly 10 percent of the country's population at upwards of 3. Poland was the country with the most ghettos, the only camps designed exclusively for extermination, and trains from all across northern, southern, and western Europe carried Jewish deportees into the country. The extent of local collaboration in these massacres is a controversial issue, as is the pivotal role of the Einsatzgruppe Zichenau-Schroettersburg under Hermann Schaper. There were also multiple occurrences of individual Volksdeutsche turning in, chasing down, or blackmailing Jews; such people were condemned as collaborators and under threat of execution by the Polish resistance.

Emmanuel Ringelblum wrote that he saw Polish Blue Police beating Jews and that they participated in street rounds up. They [the Polish Blue Police] could not join the Germans in major operations against Jews or Polish resistors, lest they be considered traitors by virtually every Polish onlooker. There also were no Polish SS battalions, though there were SS volunteer battalions from almost all of the German-occupied countries.

Attempts to organize Polish SS battalions resulted in immediate, large-scale desertions, and so these attempts were abandoned. Assimilation was common for Jews in Romania, where some , of them lived but not necessarily in total peace there. Following the First World War, attacks against Jews intensified, as many Jews were stripped of citizenship.

According to historian Lucy Dawidowicz, economic discrimination as well as violent anti-Semitism was present in Romania concomitant with Germany. The fascist Alexandru Razmerita advocated imprisoning the Jews in concentration camps and working them to death, while a Romanian Orthodox priest suggested drowning them all in the Black Sea. The Romanian Antonescu regime was responsible for the deaths of approximately , Jews according to historian Yehuda Bauer. The Commission concludes, together with the large majority of bona fide researchers in this field, that the Romanian authorities were the main perpetrators of this Holocaust, in both its planning and implementation.

Wannsee Conference

This encompasses the systematic deportation and extermination of nearly all the Jews of Bessarabia and Bukovina as well some Jews from other parts of Romania to Transnistria, the mass killings of Romanian and local Jews in Transnistria, the massive execution of Jews during the Iasi pogrom; the systematic discrimination and degradation applied to Romanian Jews during the Antonescu administration — including the expropriation of assets, dismissal from jobs, the forced evacuation from rural areas and concentration in district capitals and camps, and the massive utilization of Jews as forced laborers under the same administration.

Jews were degraded solely on account of their Jewish origin, losing the protection of the state and becoming its victims. A portion of the Roma population of Romania was also subjected to deportation and death in Transnistria. In cooperation with German Einsatzgruppen and Ukrainian auxiliaries, Romanian troops killed hundreds of thousands of Jews in Bessarabia , northern Bukovina , and Transnistria ; some of the larger massacres of Jews occurred at Bogdanovka , a Romanian concentration camp along the Bug River in Transnistria , between 21 and 30 December Jean Ancel , who headed the commission along with Elie Wiesel , spent his entire life researching Romania's treatment of Jews.

In his book he provides a confirmation using Romania's own archives, made available in —95 after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and with Nazi documents, survivor testimonies, war crimes trial transcripts, that Romania not only participated in but independently implemented its own autonomous genocide of Jews in Bessarabia, Bukovina, and in Ukraine—the only Nazi ally to do so during the war.

The protests of various public, political and religious figures, including Prince Constantin Karadja , against the deportation of the Jews from the Romanian Kingdom contributed to the change of policy toward the Jews starting with October Before the First World War, Serbia existed as an independent country before being incorporated into Yugoslavia in Approximately 16, Jews resided there. Sometimes the Serbian authorities cooperated with the Germans as matter of course, whereas others took individual initiative; some Serbian military commanders rounded-up Gypsies so they could be concentrated in one area, where they were shot.

In approximately , Jews resided in Slovakia, around 40, of them lived in Ruthenia and Subcarpathia, areas previously ceded to Hungary; most of whom, led good lives despite the presence of anti-Semitism among the peasant population of Slovakia. Nonetheless, the restrictions against Jews proceeded accordingly, blocking them from various professions, which was accompanied by violence against the Jews from the indigenous Hlinka Guard. Despite this action, approximately 12, Slovak Jews were still sent to Auschwitz, Theresienstadt, and other camps in Germany before the deportations ceased.

Around half of them were killed in concentration camps. Franco was known to harbor virulent anti-Semitic beliefs and agreed with Hitler that Judaism, Communism, and cosmopolitanism were related threats to European society. Trudy Alexy refers to the "absurdity" and "paradox of refugees fleeing the Nazis' Final Solution to seek asylum in a country where no Jews had been allowed to live openly as Jews for over four centuries.

Diplomats discussed the possibility of Spain as a route to a containment camp for Jewish refugees near Casablanca , but it came to nothing due to lack of Free French and British support. Almost all of them survived the war. In , a document was found in Spanish archives, which revealed that Franco's government gave a main architect of the Nazi " Final Solution ", Heinrich Himmler, a list of six thousand Jews living in Spain, upon his request.

Jose Maria Finat y Escriva de Romani , Franco's chief of security issued an official order dated 13 May to all provincial governors requesting a list of all Jews, both local and foreign, present in their districts. After the list was compiled, Romani was appointed Spain's ambassador to Germany, enabling him to deliver the list to Himmler. Following the defeat of Germany in , the Spanish government attempted to destroy all evidence of cooperation with the Nazis, but this official order survived. Spanish diplomats did save thousands of Jews, but it was done on their personal initiative. As early as , Vladimir Lenin had already formulated a Communist ideology about the Jews, who he avowed, were not a nation since they did not possess any specified territory; this position was shared by Stalin and in the s as many as , Soviet Jews were considered lishentsy non-citizens.

This would not apply if they were married to a non-Jew and had children by that marriage. It would also not apply if they had been granted written exemption by "the highest offices of the Party and State. If such a marriage had produced children who were being raised as Germans, the Jewish partner would not be killed. If they were being raised as Jews, they might be killed or sent to an old-age ghetto.

In most of the occupied countries, Jews were rounded up and killed en masse , and anyone who lived in or identified with the Jewish community in any given place was regarded as a Jew. Heydrich commented, "In occupied and unoccupied France, the registration of Jews for evacuation will in all probability proceed without great difficulty", [57] but in the end the great majority of French-born Jews survived. Very soon, , Jews of Hungary and parts of Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Yugoslavia occupied by Hungary were sent to their deaths by Eichmann, with the collaboration of Hungarian authorities.

Heydrich spoke for nearly an hour. Then followed about thirty minutes of questions and comments, followed by some less formal conversation. Heydrich assured him that this was already the policy; such Jews would not be killed. During the conversation they minced no words about it at all He had expected a lot of resistance, Eichmann recalled, but instead he had found "an atmosphere not only of agreement on the part of the participants, but more than that, one could feel an agreement which had assumed a form which had not been expected".

At the conclusion of the meeting Heydrich gave Eichmann firm instructions about what was to appear in the minutes. They were not to be verbatim: Eichmann ensured that nothing too explicit appeared in them. He said at his trial: He stated at his trial that it was personally edited by Heydrich, and thus reflected the message he intended the participants to take away from the meeting.

It was not until that Luther's copy number 16 out of 30 copies prepared was found by Robert Kempner , a U. The Wannsee Conference lasted only about ninety minutes. The enormous importance which has been attached to the conference by postwar writers was not evident to most of its participants at the time. Heydrich did not call the meeting to make fundamental new decisions on the Jewish question. Massive killings of Jews in the conquered territories in the Soviet Union and Poland were ongoing and a new extermination camp was already under construction at Belzec at the time of the conference; other extermination camps were in the planning stages.

This was indeed the crucial result of the meeting and the main reason why Heydrich had detailed minutes prepared and widely circulated", said Longerich. Eichmann's biographer David Cesarani agrees with Longerich's interpretation; he notes that Heydrich's main purpose was to impose his own authority on the various ministries and agencies involved in Jewish policy matters, and to avoid any repetition of the disputes that had arisen earlier in the annihilation campaign. In , historian Joseph Wulf proposed that the Wannsee House should be made into a Holocaust memorial and document centre, but the West German government was not interested at that time.

The building was in use as a school, and funding was not available. Despondent at the failure of the project and the West German government's failure to pursue and convict Nazi war criminals, Wulf committed suicide in On 20 January , on the fiftieth anniversary of the conference, the site was finally opened as a Holocaust memorial and museum known as the Haus der Wannsee-Konferenz House of the Wannsee Conference.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. For the film, see The Wannsee Conference film. Gerlach , p. This date is not universally accepted, but it seems likely that a decision was made at around this time. On 18 December, Himmler met with Hitler and noted in his appointment book "Jewish question — to be exterminated as partisans". Browning , p. You must come to terms with it. Cesarani , p.