The Final Solution or the Final Solution to the Jewish Question was a Nazi plan for the genocide of individuals they defined as Jews during World War II. The "Final Solution to the Jewish question" was the official code name for the murder of all Jews within reach, which was not restricted to the European continent. This policy of deliberate and systematic genocide starting across German-occupied Europe was formulated in procedural and geopolitical terms by Nazi leadership in January 1942 at the Wannsee Conference held near Berlin, and culminated in the Holocaust, which saw the murder of 90% of Polish Jews, and two-thirds of the Jewish population of Europe.
David John Cawdell Irving is an English author who has written on the military and political history of World War II, especially Nazi Germany. He was found to be a Holocaust denier in a UK court in 2000 as a result of a failed libel case.
Daniel Jonah Goldhagen is an American author, and former associate professor of government and social studies at Harvard University. Goldhagen reached international attention and broad criticism as the author of two books about the Holocaust: Hitler's Willing Executioners (1996), and A Moral Reckoning (2002). He is also the author of Worse Than War (2009), which examines the phenomenon of genocide, and The Devil That Never Dies (2013), in which he traces a worldwide rise in virulent antisemitism.
The Holocaust—the murder of about six million Jews by Nazi Germany from 1941 to 1945—is the most-documented genocide in history. Although there is no single document which lists the names of all Jewish victims of Nazi persecution, there is conclusive evidence that about six million Jews were murdered. There is also conclusive evidence that Jews were gassed at Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Operation Reinhard extermination camps, and in gas vans, and that there was a systematic plan by the Nazi leadership to murder them.
Raul Hilberg was a Jewish Austrian-born American political scientist and historian. He was widely considered to be the preeminent scholar on the Holocaust. Christopher R. Browning has called him the founding father of Holocaust Studies and his three-volume, 1,273-page magnum opus, The Destruction of the European Jews, is regarded as seminal for research into the Nazi Final Solution.
This is a selected bibliography and other resources for The Holocaust, including prominent primary sources, historical studies, notable survivor accounts and autobiographies, as well as other documentation and further hypotheses.
The Ordnungspolizei, abbreviated Orpo, meaning "Order Police", were the uniformed police force in Nazi Germany from 1936 to 1945. The Orpo organisation was absorbed into the Nazi monopoly on power after regional police jurisdiction was removed in favour of the central Nazi government. The Orpo was controlled nominally by the Interior Ministry, but its executive functions rested with the leadership of the SS until the end of World War II. Owing to their green uniforms, Orpo were also referred to as Grüne Polizei. The force was first established as a centralised organisation uniting the municipal, city, and rural uniformed police that had been organised on a state-by-state basis.
The functionalism–intentionalism debate is a historiographical debate about the reasons for the Holocaust as well as most aspects of the Third Reich, such as foreign policy. It essentially centres on two questions:
Eberhard Jäckel was a German historian. In the 1980s, he was a principal protagonist in the Historians' Dispute (Historikerstreit) over how to incorporate Nazi Germany and the Holocaust into German historiography and over Hitler's intentions.
Hitler's War is a biographical book by British author and Holocaust Revisionist David Irving. It describes the Second World War from the point of view of Nazi Germany’s leader Adolf Hitler.
Beginning with the invasion of Poland during World War II, the Nazi regime set up ghettos across German-occupied Eastern Europe in order to segregate and confine Jews, and sometimes Romani people, into small sections of towns and cities furthering their exploitation. In German documents, and signage at ghetto entrances, the Nazis usually referred to them as Jüdischer Wohnbezirk or Wohngebiet der Juden, both of which translate as the Jewish Quarter. There were several distinct types including open ghettos, closed ghettos, work, transit, and destruction ghettos, as defined by the Holocaust historians. In a number of cases, they were the place of Jewish underground resistance against the German occupation, known collectively as the ghetto uprisings.
Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust is a 1996 book by American writer Daniel Goldhagen, in which he argues collective guilt, that the vast majority of ordinary Germans were "willing executioners" in the Holocaust because of a unique and virulent "eliminationist antisemitism" in German political culture which had developed in the preceding centuries. Goldhagen argues that eliminationist antisemitism was the cornerstone of German national identity, was unique to Germany, and because of it ordinary German conscripts killed Jews willingly. Goldhagen asserts that this mentality grew out of medieval attitudes rooted in religion and was later secularized.
Józefów also called Józefów Biłgorajski, Józefów Ordynacki and Józefów Roztoczański, is a town in Biłgoraj County, Lublin Voivodeship, Poland, with 2,436 inhabitants (2006). It lies on the Niepryszka River, in historic Lesser Poland, among the hills of Roztocze, and Solska Forest. The distance to Biłgoraj is 24 km, to Zamość 30 km, and to Lublin - 92 km.
The Nisko Plan was an operation to deport Jews to the Lublin District of the General Governorate of occupied Poland in 1939. Organized by Nazi Germany, the plan was cancelled in early 1940.
David Irving v Penguin Books and Deborah Lipstadt is a case in English law against American historian Deborah Lipstadt and her British publisher Penguin Books, filed in the High Court of Justice by the British author David Irving in 1996, asserting that Lipstadt had libelled him in her 1993 book Denying the Holocaust. The court ruled that Irving's claim of libel relating to Holocaust denial was not valid under English defamation law because Lipstadt's claim that he had deliberately distorted evidence had been shown to be substantially true. English libel law puts the burden of proof on the claimant, meaning that it was not up to Lipstadt and her publisher to prove that her claims of Irving's deliberate misrepresentation of evidence to conform to his ideological viewpoints were substantially true.
Holocaust studies, or sometimes Holocaust research, is a scholarly discipline that encompasses the historical research and study of the Holocaust. Institutions dedicated to Holocaust research investigate the multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary aspects of Holocaust methodology, demography, sociology, and psychology. It also covers the study of Nazi Germany, World War II, Jewish history, antisemitism, religion, Christian-Jewish relations, Holocaust theology, ethics, social responsibility, and genocide on a global scale. Exploring trauma, memories, and testimonies of the experiences of Holocaust survivors, human rights, international relations, Jewish life, Judaism, and Jewish identity in the post-Holocaust world are also covered in this type of research.
During World War II, Trawniki men were Central and Eastern European Nazi collaborators, consisting of either volunteers or recruits from prisoner-of-war camps set up by Nazi Germany for Soviet Red Army soldiers captured in the border regions during Operation Barbarossa launched in June 1941. Thousands of these volunteers served in the General Government territory of German-occupied Poland until the end of World War II. Trawnikis belonged to a category of Hiwis, Nazi auxiliary forces recruited from native subjects serving in various jobs such as concentration camp guards.
Reserve Police Battalion 101 was a Nazi German paramilitary formation of the uniformed police force known as the Ordnungspolizei, the organization formed by the Nazi unification of the civilian police forces in the country in 1936, placed under the leadership of the SS and grouped into battalions in 1939. One of many such Nazi German Order Police battalions, 101 was formed in Hamburg and was deployed in September 1939 along with the German armed forces (Wehrmacht) in the invasion of Poland.
Major Wilhelm Gustav Friedrich Trapp, nicknamed Papa Trapp by his subordinates, was a German career policeman who commanded the Reserve Police Battalion 101 formation of Nazi Germany's uniformed police force known as the Order Police (Ordnungspolizei). The Battalion was the subject of Christopher Browning's Ordinary Men.
During a speech at the Reichstag on 30 January 1939, German Führer Adolf Hitler threatened "the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe" in the event of war:
If international finance Jewry inside and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, the result will be not the Bolshevization of the earth and thereby the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.
