The
Final Solution was the name of the
Nazis' plan to kill all the
Jews of Europe. It was carried out mainly by
mobile killing squads and in
ghettos,
concentration camps and
death camps.
The systematic humiliation, inhuman treatment and murder of European Jews did not start with the final solution. As early as 1919, Adolf Hitler wrote a letter to Adolf Gemlich, in which he stated that the Jewish problem would eventually be solved through a process of systematic deprivation of Jews of their privileges and having them classified as foreigners. He concluded by saying that "The final goal, however, must stedfastly remain the removal of the Jews altogether."
From 1932 through 1942, Jews' rights diminished whenever they were under Nazi occupation. They were segregated, deported, put in ghettos and murdered. When the Einsatzgruppen (special task forces) entered the Soviet Union behind the invading armed forces in late June 1941, they began shooting Jews where they were found. Roughly 500,000 Jews were killed in this way between July and December 1941.
But the administrative planning for the Final Solution was finalized at the Wannsee Conference on January 20, 1942 in Wannsee, a Berlin suburb. Here all the details of the Final Solution were worked out. The meeting was convened by Reinhard Heydrich, who was the head of the S.S. main office and S.S. Chief Heinrich Himmler's top aide. The purpose of the meeting was to coordinate the Nazi bureaucracy required to carry out the Final Solution. This constituted: