Hitler planned to eradicate all Jews from Germany and Europe during World War II, implementing “The Final Solution to the Jewish Question”. Jews faced discrimination, violence, and forced labor before being forced into ghettos and ultimately into labor and extermination camps. The Holocaust was the final stage of Hitler’s plan, resulting in the systematic killing of over six million Jews.
During World War II, Adolf Hitler orchestrated a plan to eradicate all Jews from Germany and Europe in general. With labor camps already in operation and pogroms already underway across Germany and other European countries, the Nazi leadership met at the Wannsee Conference to discuss how to finally eradicate all European Jewry, ultimately implementing a plan Hitler called “The Final Solution to the Jewish Question”. The Holocaust was the final stage in this plan, even if it didn’t start there. Well before the death camps were up and running, Jews were facing intense discrimination, violence, and forced labor.
Under Hitler’s rule, Jews in Germany were already experiencing repressive practices and abusive attacks. Pogroms – mass killings and riots targeting Jews – were common in Nazi Germany, and Jews were systematically channeled out of positions of power in commerce and government. These were the first steps in Hitler’s Final Solution, and while Hitler himself did not condone chaotic and disorganized pogroms, he did little to stop them. As anti-Semitic sentiment grew across Europe, Jews were forced into cramped and dirty ghettos. This was yet another step towards Hitler’s Final Solution.
By the time the Nazi leadership met at the Wannsee Conference to discuss the Final Solution, nearly a million Jews had already been killed by the Einsatzgruppen, or Nazi death squads. Their methods were inefficient, however, so the Nazi leadership decided they needed to find more efficient ways to perpetuate the Final Solution. Thousands of Jews were struggling to survive despite hunger and poverty, overcrowding and the increasing violence of the Nazi forces in the ghettos, but this was also an inefficient way to exterminate the Jews. The architects of the Final Solution set out to force Jews into labor and extermination camps, thus creating an efficient system for both exterminating Jews and stimulating the economy with cheap labor.
While the first extermination camps weren’t built until 1941, it’s up for debate when Hitler decided on his plan to completely eradicate Jews. Since the Final Solution took place in a series of phases starting in the early 1930s, it is difficult to pinpoint when Hitler’s plan began to come to full fruition. Regardless, the final stages of the Final Solution took place in the death camps with the systematic and constant killing of Jews by gas chambers, shooting, forced labor or other inhumane means. This final stage – the Holocaust itself and the death camps – is widely regarded as the end of the process, or the so-called Final Solution. The final solution to the Jewish question was thwarted after Hitler was overthrown and the death camps liberated, but not before immense damage had been done and over six million Jews had been killed.
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