The Final Solution

The Final Solution was the Nazi answer to what they considered a Jewish Plight across all of Europe.  The final solution was authorized at the Wannese Villa in Germany on January 20, 1942.  The killing of people who were unfavorable to the Reich, e.g. Jews, Homosexuals, and Gypsies had already been going on for quiet some time in the form of Death Squads and mass Pogrom’s.  The Nazi’s had long been looking for a way to get rid of the Jews in Europe, and they had long been experimenting in using Gas Vans to kill people, but they finally would settle on using gas chambers with Zyklon-B which was a strong insecticide which also was poisonous to humans, the Final solution consisted mainly of the German governments efforts to eradicate the European Jewry and to then eliminate all traces of it, the final culmination of this was the construction and later dismantling of massive extermination camps which were able to kill thousands of people per day and as the end of the war drew near, the Germans took steps to hide the very existence of these camps from the world even going so far as to destroy some camps and then have farmers make the former sites into fields which would cover up any remains and the crops would also take nutrients from the soil which would help the bodies in the ground to decay faster.

Image via Wikipedia – Empty Zyklon B containers

Also, as a part of the final solution many concentration camps which were meant as places of forced labor and incarceration not to be confused with extermination camps which were designed to simply kill the max amount of Jews as quickly as possible, were transformed into extermination camps and many had gas chambers added on, as well as massive crematoriums.  To help reduce the now enormous workload on the camp guards that the plan to kill all 6 million Jews living under Nazi control had put on the small number of death camps that existed, the Germans recruited special prisoner units called Sonderkommando’s whose job was to clean up the bodies from the Gas Chambers and to remove anything of value from the victims, any people who made a mistake were thrown into the furnaces at the crematoriums alive as punishment.  Also, the Final solution was used to expunge Europe of other racial and ethnic groups that the Nazi’s did not approve of, many Gypsies, and other ethnic, religious, political, or racial groups were also sent to death camps for extermination.  The Final solution was perhaps at is worst when the war started turning against the Germans, this caused many of the outlying camps to be excavated, and many of the prisoners to be lead on death marches to camps farther in the heart of Germany.  The Germans mainly had tasked the Schutzstaffel or SS for short with running the extermination camps, although it was rarely actual German soldiers that actually administered or oversaw the killings, most of the time it was Ukrainian or Baltic auxiliaries that served as camp guards and regular German soldiers with the exception of the SS officers that ran the camps were generally kept away from the camps.  Also, in many ways the Germans worked very hard to keep the camps secret and when many Jews were rounded up to be taken to an extermination center, they were often told they were being re-settled in the east, and the Nazi’s were very careful to maintain this illusion all the way up to the gas chamber doors in an effort to prevent revolts or uprisings.  For those who were selected to be forced into labor, the conditions were atrocious, they were worked for ridiculously long hours, and sometimes they would be forced to work for over a day with minimal breaks.  Also, in many areas with only small Jewish populations, the construction of a large extermination camps was most likely not feasible or economical especially as the war started turning against the Germans, so instead the Germans had many Jews lined up and shot into large pits that were then covered, being that these shootings often occurred in remote locations with very few officers actually knowing where these pits were, some pits have never been discovered.  Also, the Germans were meticulous record keepers, and because of that we have very detailed records of the atrocities that took place during the war at the concentration and extermination camps.  We also were able to gauge the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust because of the detailed German records without which, we would have never been able to realize how many innocent people were killed in the name of “racial purity”.  Liberation would come to late for many people, and the Germans worked hard to make sure that as few people as possible would be liberated by the advancing Allied forces, and that the camps were dismantled and all traces of them were removed to prevent anyone from discovering the atrocities that were committed.  Fortunately, many SS guards started to desert or flee further into Germany once the Allied forces got close to their camps which left the camps to be liberated by the Allies and it was only then that the atrocities that the Germans had committed during the war became clear.