Essay: The Final Solution of Adolf Hitler

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Meanwhile, officially encouraged massacres known as “pogroms” were wreaking havoc in German-occupied and allied countries throughout Europe. One such pogrom by Romanian troops killed 10,000 men, women, and children in a single day. The killings moved in tandem with Hitler’s war plan. The Soviet Union, Germany’s old foe and too closely related to the “sub-human” Slavic races for Hitler’s standards, became the target of German troops in June 1941 with Operation Barbarossa. As part of the plan for conquest, Hitler ordered his troops to kill all Soviet prisoners of war as they found them. In the first invasion into Soviet territory alone, German troops executed an estimated one million Soviet prisoners of war and civilians. However, Hitler’s troops were feeling the strains of battle and of the mass executions. Finally, Hitler agreed to have the prisoners marched back to concentration camps where S.S. officers would take care of the murders in systematic fashion. In addition, his lead officers created the S.S. Einsatzgruppen, a group of mobile units designed to carry out mass murders.
On July 31, 1941, Hitler associate Hermann Goering wrote a memo to Reinhard Heydrich asking that he deliver a “final solution” to the “Jewish question.” After the Wannsee Conference in January 1942, Hitler almost certainly was the person who determined the “Final Solution” to be the complete extermination of Jews in Europe. In June 1942, S.S. officers began the systematic extermination by gassing at the concentration camp at Auschwitz. By the summer of that year, the S.S. was converting other concentration camps to extermination camps and swept through occupied territories to seize Jews, Roma, Catholic priests, prisoners of war, and countless others who became fodder for the gas chambers.
On May 7, 1945, one week after Adolf Hitler committed suicide, Germany announced its unconditional surrender to Allied forces. For too many victims, the end of the war came too late. According to records collected for the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal following the surrender, and from records found subsequently, it is estimated that 5,962,129 Jewish men, women, and children died in the Holocaust. Many were gassed or shot, others beaten, and still other died as a result of “scientific studies” conducted upon them by S.S. doctors. In addition, to the estimated three million Polish Jews executed, another 1.3 million non-Jewish Poles died at Nazi hands, as did more than three million Soviet prisoners of war.
The Nazi Euthanasia Program claimed the lives of 70,000 innocent children and adults, and accused homosexuals fell prey to medical experimentation, castration, and execution. An estimated 1,400 Jehovah’s Witnesses died for refusing to salute the Fuhrer or serve in the military. Approximately 220,000 of the one million Roma in Europe in the 1930s died by Nazi execution, a fact not officially recognized by Germany until 1982.
Historians, scholars, and advocates continue to work through the documents and the memories of witnesses to piece together the loss of so many people in such a short time. Sixty years after the liberation of the concentration camps by Allied forces, we are still struggling to understand the magnitude of the Holocaust: how it happened, why it happened, and how to keep it from happening again. German antisemitic beliefs about Jews were the central causal agent of the Holocaust … The conclusion of this book is that antisemitism moved many thousands of `ordinary’ Germans — and would have moved millions more, had they been appropriately positioned — to slaughter Jews. Not economic hardship, not the coercive means of a totalitarian state, not social psychological pressure, not invariable psychological propensities, but ideas about Jews that were pervasive in Germany, and had been for decades, induced ordinary Germans to kill unarmed, defenseless Jewish men, women, and children by the thousands, systematically and without pity. (Goldhagen 1996a:9)
In the early morning of July 13, 1942, the `ordinary’ members of German Reserve Police Battalion 101 found themselves in an extraordinary situation. Upon their arrival in Jozefow, Poland, the Battalion commander, Major Wilhelm Trapp, informed the assembled policemen that they were supposed to round up the village’s 1,800 Jews, transport able Jewish males to a work camp, and execute the remaining Jewish women, children, infirm and elderly. It was the first time many of the policemen had been required to participate directly in the mass execution of Jews. One of the policemen recalled that Trapp announced that in the locality before us we were to carry out a mass killing by shooting … Jews. During his address he bid us to think of our women and children in our homeland who had to endure aerial bombardments. In particular, we were supposed to bear in mind that many women and children lose their lives in these attacks. Thinking of these facts would make it easier for us to carry out the order during the upcoming [killing] action. Major Trapp remarked that the action was entirely not in his spirit, but that he had received this order from higher authorities.
After driving the Jews out of their homes, shooting those who resisted or were immobile, and selecting around 300 `work Jews’, Police Battalion 101 began its murderous deeds. The method of execution was simple, brutal and direct. Each policeman in the firing squad was paired up with a victim. The members of the squad then walked down a forest path –beside their victims — to a wooded area where the Jew was ordered to lie down. Following the instructions of the battalion physician, the executor placed his bayonet on the backbone above his victim’s shoulder blades and fired upon command. The result was gruesome. As one perpetrator recalled, the bullet sometimes `struck the head of the victim at such a trajectory that often the entire skull or at least the entire rear skullcap was torn off, and blood, bone splinters, and brains sprayed everywhere and besmirched the shooters’ (Hr. Ernst, cited in Browning 1992:64). Despite being given frequent breaks and alcohol, several other policemen asked to be relieved and/or simply slipped away. In the end, perhaps ten to twenty per cent of the executioners opted out of the killing at some point during the massacre.
Goldhagen’s position is that it was not `ordinary men’, but `ordinary Germans’ like Mobius who willingly and enthusiastically participated in the `extermination’ of millions of dehumanized Jews because of their extreme anti-Semitic beliefs. Goldhagen argues that past analyses of the Holocaust have ignored the fundamental issue of motivation, or the mental processes that perpetrators undergo prior to engaging in genocidal acts. As opposed to explaining away perpetrators’ actions as generic examples of `bureaucratic fragmentation’, `self-interest’, `social pressures to conform’ or `external compulsion’, he states, scholars must look at the cognitive value systems that give rise to violence. For Goldhagen, the historical and ideological development of a single German cultural model — `eliminationist antisemitism’ — was ultimately responsible for the extreme loss of life during the Holocaust.
Goldhagen (1996a:49f.) traces the origins of European anti-Semitism back to the rise of Christianity when Jews began to be condemned as blasphemers (i.e., they rejected the teaching of Jesus, thus indirectly challenging the validity of Christian dogma), as `Christ-killers’ (i.e., they were responsible for and approving of the murder of Jesus), and, eventually, as followers of the Devil (i.e., they were almost inhuman beings who were responsible for social problems and calamities). Although Jews were periodically attacked and persecuted for centuries, they were ultimately viewed as redeemable through conversion. However, the possibility of redemption through conversion began to be questioned during the nineteenth century, as traditional Christian anti-Semitism was transformed by the concept of race.
While anti-Semitism was prevalent throughout Europe, it took on an extreme, obsessive, and, ultimately, lethal form in Germany as notions of racial inequality and German folk ideology merged. Goldhagen maintains that, by the time the Nazis came to power in 1933, most Germans deeply believed that Jews were malevolent subhumans who were inherently different from Germans and constituted a dire threat to the German folk community. Political discourse frequently drew upon pseudo-scientific theories of race and social Darwinism that held that tall, blond and blue-eyed Nordic people stood at the pinnacle of a racial hierarchy to which Jews did not even belong. This perspective was illustrated by a 1936 children’s book, entitled Don’t Trust a Jew on the Green Heath … A Picture Book for Big Folks and Little Folks, which stated: `The Devil is the father of the Jew. / When God created the world, / He invented the races: / The Indians, the Negroes, the Chinese / And also the wicked creature called the Jew …’.
Of course, for Goldhagen, the often zealous and brutal behavior of German perpetrator’s is perhaps the key issue that needs to be addressed. By acknowledging the existence of a separate cultural model of racial hygiene, Goldhagen would have been able both to maintain his argument that these excesses were largely due to an extreme form of anti-Semitism that characterized Jews as malicious subhumans, and to account for the annihilation of non-Jews who occupied slightly higher places in the racial hierarchy. Several anthropologists, however, have suggested that violent excesses may also be viewed as a reaffirmation of group boundaries and difference (Feldman 1991; Malkki 1994; Appadurai 1998). Thus, the subhuman status of Jews was reinscribed on the bodies of the men who Gnade forced to strip (thereby divesting them of one of the last social markers of their human identity) and who were beaten as they crawled on the ground like animals. Likewise, Jews were stripped, had their hair shaved off (thus losing yet another mark of humanity), and then were gassed in `showers’ of mass murder that symbolize the horrendous ritual `cleansing’ and purification of racially polluting beings.

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