Final Solution

The Final Solution (Endlösung der Judenfrage) was a Nazi plan for the genocide of Jews during World War II. This policy of deliberate and systematic genocide starting across German-occupied Europe took its shape during 1941 and was formulated in procedural and geopolitical terms by Nazi leadership in January 1942 at the Wannsee Conference held near Berlin. The implementation of the plan led to the killing of 90% of Polish Jews, and two thirds of the Jewish population of Europe.

The extermination of Jews was carried out in two major operations.

Phase One: The Holocaust by bullets (the Einsatzgruppen)

With the onset of Operation Barbarossa, mobile killing units of the SS, the Einsatzgruppen, and Order Police battalions were dispatched to the occupied Soviet Union for the express purpose of killing all Jews. The crucial taboo against the killing of women and children was breached for the first time in Białystok in May 1941, but also in Gargždai in late June.

By December 1941, more than half-million Jewish men, women, and children were shot. The killings in Eastern Europe would continue in the East in 1942, causing the death of more than one million Jews.

The Wannsee Conference (20 January 1942)

The plans to exterminate all the Jews of Europe were formalized at the Wannsee Conference, held at an SS guesthouse near Berlin,[25] on 20 January 1942.

While recognized the "success" of the mass shootings, the conference was searching for more effective solutions. From the Nazis' perspective, the mass shootings were slow, costly, and had a negative impact on the moral of the troops.

It was decided to give preference to other means of extermination, through the construction of death camps, where large amount of people could be murdered by gas.

Phase Two: The Holocaust by Gas (the Death Camps)

In 1941-42 the first death camps began to operate: Chelmno (December 1941), Bełżec (March 1942), Sobibór (May 1942), Treblinka (July 1942), Majdanek (Fall 1942) and Auschwitz-Birkenau (Spring 1943).