What was Hitler’s 'Final Solution'?

Nazi ideology identified Jews as a racial threat that needed to be eliminated in order to protect the German people.

From the early 1920s, Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party described Jews as an enemy race instead of a religious group that undermined German society, corrupted politics and culture, and weakened the state through moral decay and claimed economic wrongdoing.

Nazi ideologues like Alfred Rosenberg and Julius Streicher promoted such views, while publications such as Der Stürmer repeated these lies in crude caricatures and sensational headlines.

These claims, which had no basis in fact, were repeated constantly in Nazi propaganda and soon shaped policy after the Nazis gained power in 1933. 

The regime introduced laws designed to isolate and make Jews poor, which began with the April 1933 boycott of Jewish businesses and continued with the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 that removed their citizenship and banned marriage or sexual relations between Jews and non-Jews.

Over the next few years, Jews were removed from schools, barred from professions, and subjected to frequent harassment, public violence, and humiliation.

Kristallnacht in November 1938 saw a sharp increase in violence, as mobs destroyed synagogues and homes while police arrested thousands and sent them to concentration camps.

By 1939, approximately 300,000 Jews had fled Germany in search of safety abroad. 

After the invasion of Poland in 1939, German authorities placed millions of Jews into ghettos where starvation and disease made overcrowding an everyday reality.

Ghettos such as Warsaw, Lodz, and Lublin confined entire populations behind walls and fences that were meant to be a temporary measure while Nazi leaders debated permanent solutions to what they called the "Jewish question."

When Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, the number of Jews under German control grew dramatically, and Nazi officials began to propose mass murder as a more permanent and efficient solution.

Hans Frank, Governor-General of occupied Poland, openly supported such policies in the General Government zone. 

Hitler’s own speeches made it clear that he viewed the war as an opportunity to remove Jews entirely from Europe.

On 30 January 1939, he declared in the Reichstag that another world war would lead to the destruction of the Jewish race.

His subordinates, including Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich, interpreted such statements as authorisation to begin planning the mass killing of Jews on a continental scale. 

The Final Solution was the organised and deliberate plan to exterminate all Jews living in territories controlled by Nazi Germany and its allies.

It combined forced deportation, mass shootings, starvation, forced labour, and mass killing methods carried out in camps built for killing.

The policy was coordinated during the Wannsee Conference on 20 January 1942, when senior Nazi officials met to plan what they referred to as the "final solution to the Jewish question."

The meeting took place in a villa in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee. 

At the conference, Reinhard Heydrich outlined plans to deport eleven million Jews from across Europe to killing sites in the East.

Adolf Eichmann, who prepared the briefing materials and kept the minutes of the meeting, later oversaw the transportation networks that made the operation possible.

Other participants included senior bureaucrats like Wilhelm Stuckart, who provided legal expertise for Nazi racial policy.

The language used during the meeting was deliberately vague, but the purpose was unmistakable.

Jews who were unable to work would be killed immediately, and those who were used for forced labour would be worked to death under brutal conditions. 

The Nazis built six primary extermination camps in occupied Poland, including Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, Majdanek and Chelmno, because of the large Jewish populations in the area and the need to keep the killing operations away from Germany itself.

Each site was designed to kill large numbers of people quickly and efficiently using gas chambers and crematoria.

Approximate death numbers were over 1.1 million at Auschwitz, 870,000 at Treblinka, 434,000 at Belzec, 170,000 at Sobibor, about 180,000 to 200,000 at Chelmno and 78,000 at Majdanek.

Jews were transported in sealed cattle cars for days at a time, when they arrived dehydrated and exhausted, they were unaware of their fate.

SS doctors carried out selections on the platform, deciding within minutes who would be sent to work and who would be sent to die. 

Those selected for death were led to gas chambers under the false pretence of taking a shower.

Zyklon B, a cyanide-based pesticide, was released into the chamber, killing those inside within minutes.

Afterward, Sonderkommandos, Jewish prisoners forced to work under threat of death, removed the bodies, extracted gold teeth, cut hair, and cleaned the area for the next group.

The bodies were then burned in crematoria or buried in mass graves, depending on the site and the phase of the war.

Commandants such as Christian Wirth and Franz Stangl played leading roles in the operations of the Aktion Reinhard camps.

The Nazis relied on thorough government planning supported by local collaboration and planned deception to carry out the Final Solution with such efficiency.

Officials like Adolf Eichmann coordinated train timetables, camp authorities maintained strict routines, and railway departments treated deportation requests as standard freight assignments.

This allowed for the smooth movement of hundreds of thousands of people from all over Europe to isolated killing centres in the East without widespread public resistance. 

What is more, mobile killing squads, known as Einsatzgruppen, carried out mass shootings in Eastern Europe between 1941 and 1943.

These groups followed behind the advancing German army, in which they rounded up Jewish communities before murdering them in fields, forests and ravines.

Einsatzgruppe A alone murdered approximately 250,000 people in the Baltic states, according to postwar estimates based on surviving Nazi reports such as the Jäger Report.

At places like Babi Yar near Kyiv, tens of thousands were shot over just a few days.

The Jäger Report, a surviving Nazi document, recorded in detail the number of Jews murdered in Lithuania during 1941.

The bodies were often buried in mass graves dug by the victims themselves before they were executed. 

Lies remained a key tool throughout the process, as Nazi officials told Jewish communities that they were told that they would relocate for work, they received transport papers and families were encouraged to bring belongings.

This reduced the risk of rebellion and helped maintain order at deportation points.

Once inside the camps, SS guards used lies and routine procedures to prevent panic until the very last moments before death.

Many victims had no idea what awaited them. 

The Final Solution also depended on the participation or indifference of local populations.

In some places, collaborators assisted in arrests, guarded camps, or provided information.

In others, authorities turned a blind eye to deportations. In Vichy France, for example, the French police helped organise the July 1942 Vel' d'Hiv Roundup, in which more than 13,000 Jews were arrested and confined in a Paris stadium before being sent to Auschwitz.

The secrecy of the killing process, combined with the scale of the war and the isolation of the camps, made it difficult for outsiders to understand or interfere with what was happening. 

The Final Solution wiped out centuries of Jewish history, culture, and family life in Europe.

Before the war, cities such as Warsaw, Vilnius, Prague, and Salonika had thriving Jewish populations with their own languages, newspapers, schools, synagogues, and traditions.

These communities disappeared almost completely within just a few years. Where hundreds of thousands had once lived, only a handful survived. 

In Poland, where over three million Jews lived before the war, an estimated 250,000 to 300,000 survived.

In Hungary, more than 400,000 were deported to Auschwitz between mid-May and early July 1944.

In the Netherlands, three-quarters of the Jewish population died. In Greece, entire communities such as the Jews of Salonika, who traced their origins back to the Spanish expulsion of 1492, were deported and exterminated with almost no survivors.

Other once-vibrant centres such as Kaunas and Vilna were similarly erased. 

Families were torn apart at the moment of arrival. Children were often separated from their parents and killed immediately.

Elderly people were discarded as unfit for work and sent to the gas chambers within hours of arrival.

Survivors endured unimaginable trauma, having lost relatives, neighbours, and homes.

After the war, many had nowhere to return, as their property had been seized and their communities destroyed. 

For the few who lived through ghettos, camps, or hiding, the experience left physical and emotional scars.

Survivors struggled to find relatives, rebuild lives, and confront a world that often failed to understand or accept the horrors they had faced.

The Allied powers received reliable information about the persecution and murder of Jews as early as 1941, but they did not prioritise intervention.

Intelligence reports from occupied Poland, intercepted messages, and eyewitness accounts reached London and Washington, yet these were often dismissed, delayed, or buried within broader war briefings.

Polish resistance couriers such as Jan Karski delivered detailed accounts of extermination camps, but while some officials believed him, others found the reports too horrifying to accept as credible.

Officials feared that publicising the genocide would distract from military objectives or that the claims would be seen as untrustworthy. 

Then, in December 1942, the British, American, and Soviet governments issued a formal declaration condemning the Nazi plan to exterminate the Jews of Europe.

However, this statement did not come with any practical measures to stop the killings.

Allied leaders decided that the quickest way to save lives was to defeat Germany as fast as possible.

Military planners resisted suggestions from Jewish organisations and some Allied officials to bomb Auschwitz or the railway lines leading to it, claiming that it would require diverting aircraft from essential combat missions. 

Immigration restrictions remained in place throughout the war, and both the United States and Britain refused to admit significant numbers of Jewish refugees.

The 1938 Evian Conference and the 1943 Bermuda Conference highlighted the unwillingness of the Allied nations to offer safe havens, even as evidence of genocide became overwhelming.

Fear of antisemitism, domestic political opposition, and a desire to avoid long-term refugee commitments influenced these decisions. 

In 1944, the United States created the War Refugee Board, which helped rescue thousands of Jews through diplomatic pressure, financial support, and organised rescue missions.

Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, working in Budapest under the Board's auspices, issued thousands of protective passports and shelter to Jews.

However, these actions came too late to prevent the mass killings that had already taken place.

By the time Allied forces liberated the camps in 1945, millions had already been murdered.