The Final Solution

by J. R.

A student essay from Dr. Elliot Neaman's History 210 class (historical methods - spring 1998)

Confinement in urban ghettos was the beginning of a policy of concentration that ended in annihilations. After having identified Jews, seized their property, and then confined them to ghettos, German authorities began to implement a step-by-step plan for extermination. There appears to have been no single order from Hitler that decreed what became known to German officials as the "Final Solution"- the total extermination of European Jews. But Hitler’s recorded remarks make it clear that he knew and approved of what was being done to the Jews. A spirit of shared purpose permeated the entire administrative system, from the civil service through the judiciary. Administrative agencies competed to interpret the Fuhrer’s will. SS guards in the camps and police in the streets embraced Hitler’s "mission" of destruction. Those involved in carrying out the plan for extermination understood what was meant by the Final Solution and what their responsibilities were for enforcing it. To assure that the whole process operated smoothly, a planning conference for the Final Solution was conducted by Reinhard Heydrich, leader of the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), or Security Service of the SS, for the benefit of state and party officials at Wannsee, a Berlin suburb, in January 1942.

The Third Reich began erecting its vast network of death in 1941. The first extermination camp was created in Chelmno, Poland, where 150,000 people were killed between 1941 and 1944. The camps practiced systematic extermination for the savage destruction of those groups deemed racially inferior, sexually deviant, or politically dangerous. The terms genocide, judeocide, and holocaust have been used to describe the mass slaughter of the Jewish people, most of which took place in the five major killing centers in what is now Polish territory- Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, and Auschwitz.

Could the victims of extermination have effectively resisted? The answer is no. The impossibility of any effective resistance was based on two essential characteristics of the process of extermination. First, the entire German state and its bureaucratic apparatus were involved in the policies, laws, and decrees of the 1930s that singled out victims, while most Germans stood silently by. There was no course of appeal and no place to hide. Those who understood early what was happening and who had enough money to buy their way out emigrated to safer places, including Palestine and the United States. But most countries blocked the entry of German and eastern European refugees with immigration quotas. Neither Britain nor the United States was willing to deal with the mass influx of European Jews. Jews in the occupied countries and the Axis nations had virtually no chance to escape. They were trapped in society where all forces of law and administration worked against them.

Holocaust deniers would want you to believe differently. These individuals treat the Holocaust as if it were a scholarly matter up for debate. At the heart of their refutement, against the Holocaust, is the idea of a massive Jewish conspiracy, orchestrated thought the Allied Forces. They attempt to pass off their work as new histography, which it is not. As Deborah Lipstadt puts it, "The attempt to deny the Holocaust enlists a basic strategy of distortion. Truth is mixed with absolute lies, confusing readers who are unfamiliar with the tactics of the deniers. Half-truths and story segments, which conveniently avoid critical information, leave the listener with a distorted impression of what really happened. The abundance of documents and testimonies that confirm the Holocaust are dismissed as contrive, coerced, or forgeries and falsehoods." One of these fallacious individuals is named Arthur R. Butz. In 1976, this Northwestern University professor of electrical engineering wrote a book called The Hoax of the 20th Century: The case against the presumed extermination of European Jewry. Buts is an example of the more dangerous faction of the Holocaust denier camp. His position as a professor at a top university coupled with "veneer scholarship and the impression of seriousness and objectivity he is able to convey" gives him a sense of credibility that should not be allotted to any deniers.

Butz’s book identifies the Jews as a cause for the story of the Holocaust. He holds Jews and their assisting forces responsible for vast conspiracy that is the Holocaust. Together with help for the Allied forces, they form a widespread conspiratorial network that somehow managed to keep their existence a secret. Butz’s list of guilty parties span the globe. He creates a world where the Jews, with the assistance of the Communist, United States, and British governments, were able to create a fraudulent hoax with their people amidst the tragedy. According to Butz, the key to perpetrating the hoax was the forging of massive numbers of documents. With governments all over the world helping, the Jews were able to plant falsified documents throughout Europe in support of their story. Butz believed that the above was accomplished by hundreds of trained staff members who were sent to Europe in the immediate aftermath of the war. They were held accountable for "a fabrication constructed of perjury, forgery, distortion of fact and misrepresentation of documents." Without ever being discovered by a single soul, they were able to create reports from high officials, listing precise cities and exact numbers of individuals killed. Not only did it succeed in dispersing these documents throughout Europe, but they were also able to plant these in places where people who were not part of the hoax would find them.

In order to convince the reader that the Holocaust is just a propaganda hoax Butz creates doubt on the credibility of documents, as forgeries or tampered with documentation. Butz would have the reader believe that, along with the documents, testimony is fallacious. He expresses the idea that the testimony that are given throughout the Nuremberg Trials are just victims, if not creations of this massive hoax. Either through misunderstanding, torture, or in search of mercy those who stood trial somehow all decided that they were just going to go along with the hoax so as to not cause a stir. These solid citizens of the world , Butz would have us believe, decided to follow the multitude and admit to crimes they did not commit in the pursuit of some sort of moral goal.

There are other arguments that Butz makes throughout his book that basically follow the same pattern of lies which is already evident. Throughout the book he assumes much and shows little in the way of evidence for his beliefs. In is creation of a story of a massive Jewish hoax that encompassed the world, and closer to home, controlled "official Washington" he fails to deal with situations like the St. Louis. The St. Louis was a ship filled with nine hundred Jewish refugees who were turned away in both Cuba and Miami as they tried to escape oppressive Europe. This does not sound like the story of a powerful group who had various governments at their fingertips.

Another argument that Butz makes is that the false documents that were created at this time were not only made up but also planted by a large number of people who sprinkled these papers across devastated Europe. If this assumed to be what really happened, it is hard to believe that such a large scale operation that had encompassed so many different government across the globe has yet to produce one shred of evidence of movement during this time. Even if done in a covert manner surely by now (50 years later) some form of documentation hinting towards a mass movement of people right around the end of the war.

An important question that is not approached by Butz or any of his counterparts is if the Jews were able to create such a vast production of false documents why did they not credit something definitive and unrefutable? Why did they not create a document with Hitler and Himmler clearly defining their extermination plan? Clearly it is because there is no Jewish conspiracy to speak of. Butz book is just a group of tall tales grouped together under the banner of a great "Jewish hoax". On this issue of tangible evidence, Butz (along with the rest of the deniers) knows that the Nazi’s were always desecrate when it came to their plan to exterminate the European Jewish population. This plays well into what the Deniers want to do. As a refuter of the Holocaust Butz wants as much ambiguity as he can get his hands on. For his purposes there is a basic formula, if it not clearly documented it does not exist, but if it is clearly documented and it goes against his ideas than it is a symbol of the ever present Jewish conspiracy that clouds the so called truth.

The example I want to carefully look at is that of the Wannsee Conference of 1942. I choose this event because it has many elements that are important and prevalent to our present study. Because it clearly lays out a plan for extermination of the Jewish population, has various accounts from people who participated in the conference, and is well documented. This seems to me to be a obvious and distinctly Nazi affair which leaves no room for denial.

On January 20,1942 Obergruppenfuhrer Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the Sischerheitspolizei (Security Police) and the Sicherheitsdienst (Security Service) of the SS convened the meeting which has come to be known as the Wannsee Conference. At the meeting, Heydrich announced that there was to be a Final Solution of the Jewish problem and that he had been commissioned by Goering to coordinate its implementation. In reality, the conference was less a conference, with a give-and-take exchange of views, than the exercise by Heydrich of his powers over the Final Solution. According to Heydrich’s reckoning, the number of defenseless human beings targeted for extermination was 11,000,000. SS Obersturmbannfuhre Adolf Eichmann, who participated in the conference, testified in his trial in Jerusalem in 1960 that the meeting was conducted in a relaxed and cooperative spirit. Indeed, a number of the participants expressed enthusiasm for the task that lay ahead.

The conference itself was the first of three inter-agency meetings at which officials of the Third Reich discussed and made plans for the "Final Solution." A second meeting of lesser officials was held on March 6 at Kurfurstendam 116, headquarters of Eichmann’s Section IVB 4 of the Reichssidcherheitshauptarnt (RSHA), the bureau of the Reich Security Main Office responsible for Jewish affairs and emigration. A third meeting was held there on October 27,1942.

The primary documents concerning the conference consists of the summary by Adolf Eichmann known as the Wannsee Protokoll and Eichmann’s latter testimony at the time of his trial in Jerusalem. It would have been better had a more trustworthy witness been available. Currently we have no alternative but cautiously to use the testimony available to us. At the trial Eichmann admitted that on Heydrich’s instructions he had edited the document to exclude overt references to killing and extermination. Eichmann’s Protokoll begins with a list of those present as a relatively high-level meeting. These included four state secretaries (the equivalent of an American Assistant Secretary), Dr. Roland Freisler (Ministry of Justice), Dr. Wilhelm Stuckart (Ministry of the Interior), Erich Neumann (Plenipotentiary for the Four-Year Plan) and Dr. Josephy Buhler of the Nazi Gerneralgouvernement of rump Poland. The lesser lights included State Secretary Martin Luther of the Foreign Ministry, Ministerialdirektor Wilhelm Kritzinger of the Reich Chancellery who had played a significant part in stripping Jews within the Reich of all legal status. SS Gruppenfuhrer Heinrich Muller, known as Gestapo Muller of the RSHA, SS Gruppenfuhrer Hofmann representing the Race and Resettlement Main Office, SS Strumbannfuhrer Dr. Rudolf Lange, Commander of the Security Police and the SD for Latvia, and, of course, Adolf Eichmann.

Heydrich began the conference by citing Goering’s July 31,1942 charge to him. It read in part:

To supplement the task that was assigned to you on 24 January 1939, which dealt with the solution of the Jewish problem by emigration and evacuation in most suitable way. I hereby charge you with making all necessary preparations with regard to organizational, technical and material matters for bringing about a total solution (Gesamtlosung) of the Jewish question within the German sphere of influence in Europe.

Whatever other governmental agencies are involved, these are to cooperate with you.

I request you further to send me, in the near future, an overall plan covering the organizational, technical and material measures necessary for the accomplishment of the final solution of the Jewish question which we desire.

As is the case with almost all Nazi documents dealing with the Final Solution, Goering’s language is deliberately ambiguous. Nevertheless, Goering does distinguish between "emigration and evacuation" on the one hand and the "overall plant" (Gesamtentwurf) on the other hand. This distinction recalls Heydrich’s September 21,1939 orders to the Einsatzgruppen commanders in which a similar distinction was made. Given this distinction, the Aktionen of the Einsatzgruppen during the summer and fall of 1941, as well as Himmler’s invitation of construction of death camps such as Chelmno, it is obvious the "solution" Goering charged Heydrich to implement was extermination.

This view accords with Eichmann’s trail testimony. When the Presiding Judge inquired whether "the means of extermination, systems of killing" were discussed at the gathering which followed the formal session: Eichmann replied:

...I do know that these gentlemen...discussing the subject quite bluntly, quite differently from the language I had to use later in the record. During the conversation they minced no words about it at all... I had later remembered that I told myself-Look here...even this guy Stuckart, who was known as one of these uncles who was a great stickler for legalities, he too uses language which is not at all in accordance with paragraphs of the law.

When pressed for further details, Eichmann replied:

...they spoke about methods for killing, about liquidation, about extermination.

Having established his authority for the implementation of the ‘Final Solution’ without regard to geographic boundaries, Heydrich went on to describe briefly the steps already taken "against this enemy," the essential points being the expulsion of the Jews from "every particular sphere of life of the German people." Nevertheless, it did succeed in elimination 537,000 Jews from Germany, Austria and Bohemia-Moravia from January 30,1933, the date of Hitler’s assumption of power, through October 31,1941, and the emigration was financed primarily by Jewish organizations.

Heydrich continued, saying that the Reichfuhrer SS, Heinrich Himmler, had banned the "emigration of Jews" and that "Another possible solution of the problem has now taken the place of emigration, i.e. the evacuation of the Jews to the East. This activity was to be considered temporary. Nevertheless, Heydirch added, evacuation was yielding "practical experience...which will be the greatest importance to the final future solution."

At this point, Heydrich referred to 11,000,000 Jews of Europe as the object of the extermination project. Since the first object of Jewish policy had been to remove Jews from the Reich, it was not surprising that the process would start from Germany and the protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Outside the Reich the process would depend upon military and diplomatic measures in dealing with such countries as Slovakia and Croatia, Romania, Hungary, Italy, France, Denmark, and Norway.

What was interesting about this important conference is that it did not even take two hours to finish the gathering. Ten days after the Wannsee Conference on the ninth anniversary of his assumption of power on January 30,1933 and three years to the day after his infamous prophecy that the Jews would not survive the war, Hitler declared in his annual major address to the Reichstag:

We are clear about the fact that the war can only end either in the extermination of the Aryan nations or in the disappearance of Jewry from Europe. On September 1,1939, I already announced in the German Reichstag - and I avoid making premature prophecies-that this war would not end as the Jews imagined, namely with the extermination of the European-Aryan nations, but rather the war will result in the destruction of Jewry...the hour will come when the most evil enemy of the world of all time will for at least a thousand years have played his last role.

In this speech Hitler changed the date he made the infamous prophecy - from January 30,1939 to the day the war began, September 1,1939. For Hitler the war to which he was most deeply committed was the war against the Jews. Undoubtedly, Hitler had received a full report of Wannsee before he gave his speech on January 30. Henceforth, there would be no programs of resettlement or emigration, no Madagascar programs. The course had been irrevocably set. As long a German power dominated wartime Europe, every single Jew was targeted for extermination.

At the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the defense counsel, Dr. Robert Servatius, asked his client:

What is not reflected in the protocol is the spirit which reigned at this conference. Can you report of comment regarding the spirit and attitude at this conference?

Describing the mood of the participants, Eichmann replied:

Yes the climate of this conference wads characterized as it were by a relaxed attitude of Heydrich who had actually more than anybody else expected considerable stumbling blocks and difficulties.

Concerning the spirit which prevailed among the other participants, Eichmann added:

It was 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. Unflinching in his determination to participate fully in the functions with regard to the final solution of the Jewish problem and particularly outstanding in the enthusiastic and unexpected form of agreement was the State Secretary, Buhler, and even more than Buhler, Stuckart had evinced boundless enthusiasm. He was usually hesitant and reticent and furtive, but all of a sudden he gave expression to boundless enthusiasm, with which he joined the others with regard to the final solution of the Jewish problem.

Thus, even Stuckart, the cautious, legalistic bureaucrat, whom Hilberg has described as a "party man" nut "not an all-out party man" was as rapidly enthusiastic bout the prospect of the Final Solution as the SS and SD officials.

How shall we understand this attitude of satisfaction and good spirits among the men who had gathered to organize the murder of as many as 11,000,000 defenseless human beings? In the midst of the bloodiest war in human history, these men belonged to a society in which religion, politics, art, music, literature and propaganda all combined to depict the Jews in the words of Hitler’s January 30,1942 Reichstag speech as "the most evil enemy of the world of all time." Moreover, when everything has been said pro and con about the uniqueness of the Holocaust, there is one respect in which the Holocaust was absolutely unique: In no other instance of mass murder of extermination in modern times has the fate of the victims been as deeply involved in the inheritance of the biblical religions as the fate of the Jews.

In Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945 the overwhelming majority of Germans became convinced that their nation was in life-and-death struggle with powerful internal and external enemies, the most dangerous being the Jews. By legitimating the Final Solution, the Nazi ethic facilitated the rational implementation of genocide. It helped to remove any moral resistance to subordinate authority within the bureaucratic chain of command.

When the decision was to go forward with the extermination as the Final Solution, it was clear the Heydrich and the RSHA could not proceed by themselves. They required the cooperation and compliance of such agencies as the Foreign Ministry, the Interior Ministry and the Ministry of Justice. Above all, the bureaucrats had to understand that in this all-important project they were to subordinate their policies to those of the RSHA. This is quite a vital situation, because it means that everyone in the Reich knew what was going on. In this small moment in time we get clarity in a disturbing time.

We in the ninety also face a difficult time when it comes to dealing with the Holocaust Deniers. As times pushes forward History becomes more distant and skepticism blurs our view of it. This tradegic moment of our collective human history should be seen for what it is, and not as a toy to be played with. The Deniers are nothing but petty muckrakers who devalue our society. I believe that the pressing issue is the future of our human culture. Just to give a distrubing example a couple of days ago I called my best friend for some literary advise for this paper. After a few moments of describing the topic he told me his little brother was saying that it never happened and was a huge conspricacy, curiously I asked him where he had picked that up? He responded " The WEB". Highly disturbed by this I wanted to find a place for it in my paper, because I see that 12 year old boy as the task at hand. He has not talked about it at school yet, but is ( like many other adolescents) well versed on the internet so his first real exposure to the Holocaust has been a Deniers point of view, thus it legitamizes their arguement. This can not be allowed to happen.

Bibliography

1. Bretman, Richard. The Architect of Genocide. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991.

2. Butz, Arthur R. The Hoax of the Twentieth Century: The Case Against The Presumed Extermination of European Jewry. Newport Beach: Institute for Historical Review, 1976.

3. Hilberg, Raul. Documents of Destruction: Germany and Jewry 1933-1945. Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1971.

4. Noakes, J. and G. Pridham. Nazisim 1919-1945. Exeter: University of Exeter Press.

5. Lipstadt, Deborah. Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on truth and Memory. New York: Plume Book, 1993.

6. American Jewish History. Winter 1989, v 79 n2, pg 203.