The Final Solution (German: (die) Endlösung) or the Final Solution to the Jewish Question (German: die Endlösung der Judenfrage, pronounced [diː ˈɛntˌløːzʊŋ deːɐ̯ ˈjuːdn?ˌfʁaːgə]) was a Nazi plan for the extermination of the Jews during World War II. This policy of deliberate and systematic genocide across German-occupied Europe was formulated in procedural terms by Nazi leadership in January 1942 at the Wannsee Conference near Berlin, and culminated in the Holocaust which saw the killing of 90 percent of Polish Jewry, and two-thirds of the Jewish population of Europe.
No aspect of the Holocaust has been studied and debated as intensively as the nature and timing of the decisions that led to the Final Solution. The program evolved during the first 25 months of war leading to the attempt at “murdering every last Jew in the German grasp.” Most historians agree, wrote Christopher Browning, that the Final Solution cannot be attributed to a single decision made at one particular point in time. “It is generally accepted the decision-making process was prolonged and incremental.” In 1940, following the Fall of France, the Madagascar Plan was devised by Adolf Eichmann in order to relocate Europe’s Jewish population to the French colony; but the plan was abandoned for logistical reasons mainly due to a naval blockade. A year later, wrote Raul Hilberg, in the first phase of the mass murder of Jews, the mobile killers began to pursue their victims across occupied eastern territories; in the second phase, affecting all of Europe, the victims were brought to the killers at the centralized extermination camps built for this purpose.
The term “Final Solution” was a euphemism used by the Nazis to refer to their plan for the annihilation of the Jewish people. Historians have shown that the usual tendency of the German leadership was to be extremely guarded when discussing the Final Solution. Euphemisms were, in Mark Roseman’s words, “their normal mode of communicating about murder”.
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Author: Wikipedia
Keywords: Holocaust, Shoah, Nazi concentration camps, Nuremberg Laws, Extermination camp, Final Solution, Jewish question, Auschwitz concentration camp, Auschwitz, Nazi Germany, Jews destroyed, Genocide, Concentration camps, Jewish genocide, Jews genocide, Holocaust of the Jewish people, How many Jews died in the Holocaust, Two thirds, Six million, Six million Jews, Six million Jews died, 6 million, 6 million Jews, 6 million Jews died, 9 million, Nine million, 9 million Jews, Nine Million Jews, Jews Holocaust, World War II, World War 2, ethnic cleansing, racial extermination, extermination, Oscar Schindler, Oskar Schindler, Schindler, Wallenberg, Raoul Wallenberg, Raul Wallenberg, Hitler, Adolf Hitler, Adolph Hitler, German Nazis, Schindler's List, Third Reich
Bible reference(s): Esther 3:6, Esther 3:8-9, Esther 3:11, Esther 3:13, Esther 4:8, Esther 7:3-4, Esther 8:6, Psalm 83:4, Psalm 137:7, Isaiah 43:2, Jeremiah 5:18, Jeremiah 30:11, Jeremiah 30:7, Jeremiah 31:36, Jeremiah 46:28, Jeremiah 48:2, Zechariah 13:7-8, Matthew 27:25
Source: This article uses material from the Wikipedia article “Final Solution,” which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0.
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