“The Final Solution would not have been possible without the pervasive presence and uninterrupted tradition of anti-Semitism in Germany.” –Lucy Dawidowicz
The Final Solution
After suffering countless forms of anti-Semitism, the European Jews were eventually faced with complete annihilation. The Nazis decided that extermination was the “Final Solution” to their Jewish problem. This decision was made either by the time of or at the Wannsee Conference on January 20, 1942. By the end of the year, six extermination camps in occupied Poland were being used to murder hundreds of thousands of Jews. These included Auschwitz-Birkenau, Chelmno, Belzec, Majdanek, Sobibor, and Treblinka. The camps worked quickly and efficiently like factories of death. This was unprecedented. For the first time in history, people were killed systematically on an assembly-line basis. In a single day, thousands of Jews would arrive by train, be killed in the gas chambers, and cremated. If a crematorium wasn’t available, bodies were burned in mass graves (Hilberg, 221, 229).
The death camps had some differences but they all functioned with secrecy and deceit. The Nazis wanted to hide the murders from both the incoming Jews and the rest of the world. Jewish inmates were cremated alive if they told newly arrived Jews that they were going to be gassed. It was also common for Nazi guards to tell the Jews they were being taken to the showers instead of the gas chambers. A group of Greek Jews was holding soap and towels before they were gassed at Auschwitz (Hilberg, 247). Among the extermination camps, Auschwitz had the highest death toll with over one million people killed (Hilberg, 239).
The extermination camps were the worst form of anti-Semitic crimes to ever occur in history. Once they were in place, all other anti-Jewish policies were obsolete. The Nazis were committed to killing as many Jews as possible. If the murder process was not interrupted by Nazi Germany losing the Second World War, the casualties could have reached well over six million.
Image: Entrance to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Source: U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum
The death camps had some differences but they all functioned with secrecy and deceit. The Nazis wanted to hide the murders from both the incoming Jews and the rest of the world. Jewish inmates were cremated alive if they told newly arrived Jews that they were going to be gassed. It was also common for Nazi guards to tell the Jews they were being taken to the showers instead of the gas chambers. A group of Greek Jews was holding soap and towels before they were gassed at Auschwitz (Hilberg, 247). Among the extermination camps, Auschwitz had the highest death toll with over one million people killed (Hilberg, 239).
The extermination camps were the worst form of anti-Semitic crimes to ever occur in history. Once they were in place, all other anti-Jewish policies were obsolete. The Nazis were committed to killing as many Jews as possible. If the murder process was not interrupted by Nazi Germany losing the Second World War, the casualties could have reached well over six million.
Image: Entrance to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Source: U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum