The Final Solution

Hermann Goering's memo to Reinhard Heydrich mandating the Holocaust. "Endlösung der Judenfrage" in the lowest line translates as "Final solution to the Jewish question."

The Holocaust is such a huge subject that it is impossible to do it justice in any kind of reasonable space. Every one of the six million victims and many more had a story, and each such story is as important as anyone else's. No matter what is put here, it will never be enough. For every camp that has attained, shall we say, "celebrity" or perhaps "notoriety" for lack of better words, such as Auschwitz, there is another, such as Sobibor or Maly Trostinets, where countless people died without much historical notice. Most of those poor souls are barely even remembered except by students of the war. However, it is important that at least some of the camps received enough focus to become household names, because they become symbols for all the others.

Let me caution: this page is not for the squeamish.


As the saying goes, never let the perfect be the enemy of the good. While this page can't do justice to such a massive enterprise, a little analysis is better than nothing. Hopefully, this page will stimulate a little thought and remembrance. I get a little deeper into individual camps elsewhere, such as my discussion of Mauthausen, the most brutal concentration camp, but this article will not go into that kind of detail. Instead, it will simply serve as an overview of the machinery of death so that we have a moment to honor the victims.

The paths of the four main Einsatzgruppen operations during Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union.

The Holocaust did not just "happen," like dropping your phone on concrete or getting in a car accident. It was meticulously planned by the best brains in the German administration. It was not just death camps for "undesirables"; the Germans actively sent out teams to hunt down people they didn't want around and liquidate them. The SS would assemble the "undesirable" people of some little nothing village in the middle of nowhere, march them out to a nearby field, have them dig a hole, shoot them in it, then bury them there. That's a lot different than just having a jail and throwing people in it for a reason, however valid or not. The soldiers at the front would move forward, pushing the enemy back, and the Einsatzgruppen eventually would move in silently behind them.

This is not all of the concentration camps - but it shows the main ones in Germany and Poland. The Germans held all of this territory through the end of 1944.

It is important to remember these events. They happened. Remembrance, after all, is what we are after. As a brutal crime against humanity, the Holocaust will live in infamy as long as any other crime by the Axis Powers or anything else done during the 20th Century.

Background

Adolf Hitler authorized and inspired the Holocaust

The Germans rose to power by appealing to the baser instincts of certain elements of the German population. Deep resentment against successful Jews which had lingered for centuries became intertwined with red-hot anger about the loss of World War I and the peace terms imposed in the Treaty of Versailles (which, in retrospect, were not all that harsh). Hitler managed to combine those two strains of resentment to create an edifice of overwhelming hate, a feeling that "others" were trying to ruin Germany. That the Jews really had nothing to do with the outcome of World War I or the terms of the subsequent peace was irrelevant to Hitler. He just manipulated the fierce emotions toward both targets and managed to fuse them to ignite fanatical devotion in his followers.

Eugenics poster entitled "The Racial Composition of Jews." The German text reads: "The Jews are a mixture of alien Near Eastern, Oriental, Hamite and Negroid races." This poster is no.55 in a series entitled, Erblehre und Rassenkunde (Theory of Inheritance and Racial Hygiene), published by the Verlag für Nationale Literatur (Publisher for National Literature), Stuttgart.

Discrimination against and murder of Jews had been building for years in Germany when Hermann Goering set forth in a July 1941 memo that there be implemented a "final solution" of the "Jewish question." The order was to his principal deputy, Reinhard Heydrich, who was a back-office type who got things done. The memo is reproduced at the top of this article. This instruction led in due course to Heydrich chairing the so-called Wannsee Conference (named after the Berlin suburb where it was held) in January 1942.

A picture from an Einsatzgruppen soldier’s personal album, labeled on the back as “Last Jew of Vinnitsa.” A member of Einsatzgruppe D is about to shoot a Jewish man kneeling before a filled mass grave in Vinnitsa, Ukraine, in 1941.

The Wannsee Conference was a major link in the chain of the Holocaust, but the systematic extermination of Jews was already underway with the Einsatzgruppen (German for "task forces", "deployment groups," singular Einsatzgruppe; official full name Einsatzgruppen der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD). The Wannsee Conference just began the systematization of the killings, making them more efficient, quicker, and easier for the authorities. This, in turn, enabled the paramilitary Schutzstaffel (SS), who ran the process, to kill more and more people with less and less effort.

Hermann Goering ordered the Holocaust

There's no point going over the numbers of this or that. The number 6 million was invented, and it works, but the actual figure was likely much higher. It wasn't just Jews, but it was primarily Jews, so we use "Jews" in an inclusive sense to represent all victims.

Heinrich Himmler inspected the camps personally - the only top government official who did - to make sure it was being done right.

This is a pictorial history, and the numbers are cold and lifeless and stupid individually because they are too large to grasp. There was an awful lot of people who perished, more than in your town or city or county.

Canister of cyclon B gas used in gas the chambers. It was a cyanide-based pesticide developed in the 1920s. The British executed one of its inventors, chemist, and businessman Bruno Tesch, in 1946 for his participation in the Holocaust. Zyklon B was used in late 1941 to kill Soviet prisoners of war, then adapted for use in the Holocaust in 1942. It was used to kill about a million people. It leaves behind a distinctive light blue ("Prussian blue") residue which can still be seen in concentration camps where it was used to kill people.

Imagine everyone you ever knew or even saw being slaughtered, and that would barely scratch the surface. Lots of victims, too many for you to ever appreciate any more than you can appreciate the number of grains of sand on a beach.

Reinhard Heydrich organized the Holocaust. Part of it ultimately was named after him internally as a sort of testimonial, "Operation Reinhard" (German: Aktion Reinhard).

Entire libraries have been written on this topic. We are not trying to re-write them. We are trying to present something manageable. Rather than just inundate this page with repetitive pictures - because there are endless pictures of dead and dying people, of killers and sadists, of heroes and villains - we'll just try to give a few representative pictures on each salient point and let them serve as an appropriate marker.

Prologue: Boycott and Ostracization - "Jews Are Our Misfortune"

The Holocaust per se did not begin until the Wannsee conference in January 1942. However, there was absolutely no question where things were headed from the very beginning after the Germans took over. They worked assiduously to separate and dehumanize and destroy the image of Jews from the very start.



The process was not in the slightest bit subtle.

A billboard in France advertising an exhibition about Jews.

Some would say the Holocaust actually began earlier than the 1942 Wannsee Conference, and it is difficult to disagree. That was a major turning point, so it always needs to be highlighted. But skipping over the earlier steps that got the government - and public - to the Wannsee Conference would be a major downplaying of the vicious route that German society took along the way.

An anti-Semitic photomontage entitled, "The Scourge of God, Polish Jews." It was used as a title page for a brochure issued by Der Stürmer. This image was presented as evidence at the Nuremberg trials.

The dehumanization of the Jews took many forms: books, film, billboards, even parades.

Public displays of antisemitism in Germany took a variety of forms, from posters and newspapers to films and radio addresses. A float in the Fastnacht (Shrove Tuesday) parade in Singen am Hohentwiel features workers from the local aluminum cylinder works feeding "Jews," wearing paper noses, to the Judenfresser, or "Jew Devourer," a voracious crocodile with big, pointy teeth. The motto carried by the workers' unit in the parade (not shown) was: "Grumblers and Trouble-Makers go under the Roller."

Kristallnacht (Crystal night) was a pogrom (a series of coordinated attacks) against Jews throughout Germany and Austria on 9–10 November 1938.

The casual and blatant nature of anti-Semitism in Germany just continually astonishes. This is a picture from around the time of Kristallnacht, showing a marching column at the border between Nürnberg (Nuremberg)-Fürth probably 1938. At the right is the building Höfener Straße 91 in Nürnberg. On the street sign (translated literally) is: "City borough of Fürth / Jews are our misfortune." In the middle, children make the Hitler salute ("Hitlergruß"). Also seen (Höfener Str. 91) is a factory building of J.W.Spear (the building was still in existence recently) -- this Jewish business company was "Aryanised" in 1938

It was carried out by SA paramilitary forces, the SS, the Gestapo and non-Jewish civilians. It earned the name because of the huge amount of storefront plate glass broken - very expensive glass that was a Belgian monopoly.

SA men singing to encourage a boycott of F.W. Woolworth, 1933.

Hermann Goering, the administrator of the Four-Year Plan, was furious - he was going to have to come up with an awful lot of hard currency to replace all that broken plate glass.

Police maintain watch outside the "Eldorado" nightclub, long frequented by Berlin's homosexual community. The government quickly closed the establishment down and pasted pro-Hitler election posters on the building. Berlin, Germany, March 5, 1933. Landesarchiv Berlin /UNITED STATES HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL MUSEUM #74554

Some would say the Holocaust began on Kristallnacht. Any particular date is arbitrary and subject to dispute, 1933 is a good date as well.

A boycott of Jewish businesses, 1933, the year Hitler took over. The Germans wanted to be crystal clear to everyone, thus the weird translation into English for some reason. Oh, the store behind them? It is selling ready-made white children's hats, probably for school or something along those lines.

Kristallnacht was a disaster on multiple levels for the Jews. Ostensibly a retaliation against the Jewish community as a whole for the murder of a German diplomat by a Jew, Kristallnacht in fact was Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels' idea derived from his own personal motivations and using the murder entirely as a pretext.

Germany. Burning Synagogue in Bielefeld during Kristallnacht, 10/11/1938

Goebbels wanted to look good to the Fuhrer because of his own scandalous infidelities (his wife reportedly was cheating on him, too), so he set up the pogrom with the SS and the Gestapo as a kind of bravura act. That's how these folks thought, the ruination of millions of people was nothing if it improved their own position in Hitler's court. Reinhard Heydrich, the Gestapo chief, as usual, was the sinister go-to man when this sort of dirty work was required. A reported 35 people died that night, as did the German soul.

Kristallnacht - cleaning up the next morning.

Ultimately, Kristallnacht backfired on Germany on many levels. The Jewish shopkeepers generally rented their stores and sold on consignment, with non-Jews the ones left holding the financial bag from all the destruction. Everything was insured, so the loss fell on the German insurance industry - also owned largely by non-Jews. Goering stepped in and, to avoid the financial hit to the economy, passed laws fining the entire Jewish community for the diplomat's murder and outlawing them from the economy. It was a crude and huge step down in the spiral toward the Holocaust.

Etty Hillesum was a Dutch Jewish woman who wrote about beauty and meaning and forgiveness. She died in a concentration camp in 1943.

1. Herding the Victims

In a sense, this is the most horrifying aspect of the Holocaust. The Germans and their helpers and enablers went out and rounded people up, as though the victims were little nothings. It was no different than an animal control officer rounding up feral cats or stray dogs. The profound hatred displayed is stupefying.

A Jewish woman being chased to her doom by children beating sticks

Jews being rounded up in the Warsaw Ghetto

A random street sweep of Jews, Warsaw 1941

German police assigned to controlling open-air markets investigate a Jewish woman, Lublin, Poland, May 1941. They had every right under Nacht und Nebel to just take her in and send her to a camp, without notice to her family or anyone, for any reason they felt sufficient. One wonders what she did that caught their eye - was her shopping bag too full? Maybe just a routine sweep? (Withgen, Federal Archives).

Measuring the victims to identify the Jews

2. Child Victims

Age was no barrier to execution. Anyone could be killed for any reason or no reason. If there was a system, it devolved to killing the oldest and the youngest first, because they would be less useful in the factories and the quarries.

A 14 year old Auschwitz victim, Czestawa Kowka, in 1942 or 1943

Children awaiting their fate

3. Selection

At some point, the incoming people went before a man sitting at a desk, usually with uniformed SS and perhaps Dobermans behind him. He looked directly into the inmate's eyes - a cold, lifeless stare devoid of humanity or emotion - and then nodded either right or left. One direction led to the barracks. The other direction led to the gas chambers, disguised as showers.

Jews await selection - life or death, though they don't know it - at Auschwitz Birkenau

4. Humiliation

Part of the sadistic glee with which the captors exercised their power was derived from the humiliation they could inflict on people they identified with various past humiliations against themselves or people they knew. Foreign occupation of the Rhineland under the Treaty of Versailles? A global Jewish stab-in-the-back plot to rob good Aryans of their dignity. Perhaps they lost their savings or home in the hyper-inflation of the 1920s - blame the Jewish bankers. Or, maybe their family business went under or their stocks tanked during the recent Great Depression - those darned Jews who control finance. Lost their job, lost a court case before a Jewish judge, saw a Jewish child do better at school than theirs, saw them dress differently, observed them buy more stylish clothes or not eat what they ate - there is an unlimited supply of fuel for hatred if you want to blame others who are different for your own misfortune.

You hear the same kinds of things today about the bankers and the media and Hollywood. In truth, the German Jews had been disliked and disparaged by the majority non-Jews since the Middle Ages. It was no great leap for Hitler to channel the underlying public hatred that he himself felt and focus it, increasing the intensity like a laser beam. There was no equivalency between what Jews ever did to the Germans and what they did to the Jews under their control, of course, except in the twisted minds of the low-life sadists given unlimited power over others. Public displays of pointless humiliation reveal what was really at work.

Rabbi Moshe Hegerman being abused by amused guards, Olkusz, Poland, July 31, 1940. Shoes have been removed, now he's undressing. Note the line of dead beside him, he's being readied to take his place, but not in his fancy clothes.

Klooga, Estonia: cutting of the beard and sidelocks of Jews in captured territory. The quality of some of the most telling photos is poor, they were often found by chance on the persons of dead Germans, kept as mementos.

Women shorn of their hair prior to execution. Human hair has a variety of uses. They wouldn't need theirs any longer.

5. Starvation

Starvation was the norm. Very, very few concentration camp inmates got sufficient food. During the last days of the war, rations became especially rare and inmates either died of starvation outright or perished from diseases that ravaged impaired immune systems. Many of the pictures of skeleton-like inmates were taken right after the liberation, following a period when rations were especially scarce. Many survivors died of their treatment well after the liberation, nothing could be done to return them to health and sometimes even the return to normalcy happened too quickly for their systems to handle.


Russian prisoners of war were treated horribly right from the start because the Soviet Union was not a signatory to the Geneva Convention, which provided for humane treatment of prisoners. So many millions of Soviet prisoners died from maltreatment that it is not out-of-line to consider them part of the Holocaust, though technically they are not included. Naturally, they were not given much food. The commandant of Stalag 318, Colonel Falkenberg, noted on September 11, 1941:

There are so many good quotes about how the Germans saw the Jews as helping the Third Reich against their will, it is difficult to pick out the best ones. Let's let Heinrich Himmler (Posen speech) speak for them. Himmler is speaking in terms of nationalities, but everyone knew what he really meant when he spoke about 'our own blood':

In Janowska concentration camp the Germans conducted their tortures, beatings and shootings to the accompaniment of music. For this purpose the SS organised a prisoner's orchestra led by the renowned conductors Stricts and Mund. It was used to cover the noise of the tortures and executions with so called “Death Tango”. Shortly before the camp was liquidated, the Germans shot all the members of the orchestra.

One basic principle must be the absolute rule for the SS men: We must be honest, decent, loyal and comradely to members of our own blood and to nobody else. What happens to a Russian, to a Czech, does not interest me in the slightest. What other nations can offer in the way of good blood of our type, we will take, if necessary, by kidnapping their children and raising them here with us. Whether nations live in prosperity or starve to death interests me only so far as we need them as slaves for our culture; otherwise, it is of no interest to me. Whether 10,000 Russian females fall down from exhaustion while digging an antitank ditch interests me only insofar as the anti-tank ditch for Germany is finished.

That just about sums up the entire Hitler philosophy. It also happens to be a key reason why they lost the war, but I get into that elsewhere.

So, in essence, it was a matter of supreme indifference what happened to the Jews, as long as German production goals were met. However, those goals could only be met by forcing the Jews to work until they perished, and killing them outright if the work did not kill them. The labor could involve anything from forced carrying of rocks up hills to no purpose, until everyone carrying them was dead, or relatively gentle work in subterranean missile factories.

Slave labor at Mauthausen-Gusen Concentration Camp (1938 - 1945) in Austria. Unlike many other concentration camps, which were intended for all categories of prisoners, Mauthausen was mostly used for extermination through the labour of the intelligentsia. These were educated and members of the higher social classes in countries subjugated by the regime. Hot day, cold day - didn't matter. Out they went to haul rocks.

Women's Slave Labor at Ravensbruck Concentration Camp

Disposal was the fundamental constraint upon extermination. Early in the process, the SS didn't know what to do with all the bodies. You could only dig so many mass graves - that was hard work! The institution of ovens made the whole thing a lot easier.

Soviet soldiers inspecting a pile of human ashes, Majdanek, 1944.

A truckload of bodies of prisoners of the Germans in the Buchenwald concentration camp at Weimar, Germany. These did not quite make it to the pile above. The bodies were about to be disposed of by burning when the camp was captured by troops of the 3rd U.S. Army. It looks like the cart was over-loaded and some corpses spilled out. Perhaps they died from starvation and disease. April 14, 1945. Pfc. W. Chichersky. (Army)

Russian women and children recently liberated from a concentration camp lay flowers at the bodies of four dead American soldiers. Eyewitnesses reported the Americans were murdered by German officers after they had surrendered in Hilden, Germany (1945).