The Final Solution or the Final Solution to the Jewish Question was a Nazi plan for the genocide of 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 killing of 90% of Polish Jews, and two-thirds of the Jewish population of Europe.
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 controversial 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 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) is the United States' official memorial to the Holocaust. Adjacent to the National Mall in Washington, D.C., the USHMM provides for the documentation, study, and interpretation of Holocaust history. It is dedicated to helping leaders and citizens of the world confront hatred, prevent genocide, promote human dignity, and strengthen democracy.
Yehuda Bauer is an Israeli historian and scholar of the Holocaust. He is a professor of Holocaust Studies at the Avraham Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
The functionalism–intentionalism debate is a historiographical debate about the origins of the Holocaust as well as most aspects of the Third Reich, such as foreign policy. The debate on the origins of the Holocaust centres on essentially two questions:
The history of the Jews during World War II is almost synonymous with the persecution and murder of Jews which was committed on an unprecedented scale in Europe and European North Africa. The massive scale of the Holocaust which happened during World War II greatly affected the Jewish people and world public opinion, which only understood the dimensions of the Final Solution after the war. The genocide, known as HaShoah in Hebrew, aimed at the elimination of the Jewish people on the European continent. It was a broadly organized operation led by Nazi Germany, in which approximately six million Jews were murdered methodically and with horrifying cruelty. Although the Holocaust was organized by the highest levels of the Nazi German government, the vast majority of Jews murdered were not German, but were instead residents of countries invaded by the Nazis after 1938. Of the approximately 6 million Jews murdered by the Nazis, approximately 160,000 to 180,000 were German Jews. During the Holocaust in occupied Poland, more than one million Jews were murdered in gas chambers of the Auschwitz concentration camp alone. The murder of the Jews of Europe affected Jewish communities in Albania, Austria, Belarus, Belgium, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Channel Islands, Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Libya, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Macedonia, Moldova, The Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia, and Ukraine.
Holocaust victims were people targeted by the government of Nazi Germany based on their ethnicity, religion, political beliefs, or sexual orientation. The institutionalized practice by the Nazis of singling out and persecuting people resulted in the Holocaust, which began with legalized social discrimination against specific groups, involuntary hospitalization, euthanasia, and forced sterilization of persons considered physically or mentally unfit for society. The vast majority of the Nazi regime's victims were Jews, Sinti-Roma peoples, and Slavs but victims also encompassed people identified as social outsiders in the Nazi worldview, such as homosexuals, and political enemies. Nazi persecution escalated during World War II and included: non-judicial incarceration, confiscation of property, forced labor, sexual slavery, death through overwork, human experimentation, undernourishment, and execution through a variety of methods. For specified groups like the Jews, genocide was the Nazis' primary goal.
Responsibility for the Holocaust is the subject of an ongoing historical debate that has spanned several decades. The debate about the origins of the Holocaust is known as functionalism versus intentionalism. Intentionalists such as Lucy Dawidowicz argue that Adolf Hitler planned the extermination of the Jewish people as early as 1918, and personally oversaw its execution. However, functionalists such as Raul Hilberg argue that the extermination plans evolved in stages, as a result of initiatives which were taken by bureaucrats in response to other policy failures. To a large degree, the debate has been settled because historians have conceded that both positions have merit.
Hans Krueger was a German captain of the Gestapo in occupied Poland during World War II, involved in organizing the string of massacres after the commencement of Operation Barbarossa behind the Curzon Line. His murderous rampage in the General Government territory against the ethnic Poles and the Polish Jews began with the massacre of Lviv professors in July 1941, which was followed by the Czarny Las massacre near Stanisławów in August 1941, as well as the notorious Bloody Sunday massacre of 10,000–12,000 Jews: men, women and children in October 1941, leading to the liquidation of the Stanisławów Ghetto a year later. Krueger was known as the right man for the job due to his Nazi fanaticism which earned him the seat of a city commandant in 1941 but also his brutality exhibited through hands-on participation in the killings.
Omer Bartov is the John P. Birkelund Distinguished Professor of European History and Professor of History and Professor of German Studies at Brown University.
Jonathan Petropoulos is an American historian who writes about National Socialism and, in particular, the fate of art looted during World War II. He is John V. Croul Professor of European History at Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, California. Before his 1999 appointment to Claremont McKenna College, Petropoulos taught at Loyola College in Maryland.
The Holocaust in Ukraine took place in the Reichskommissariat Ukraine, the General Government, Crimean General Government and some areas under military control to the East of Reichskommissariat Ukraine and as well in the Transnistria Governorate and Northern Bukovina and Carpathian Ruthenia in World War II. Between 1941 and 1944, more than a million Jews living in the Soviet Union were murdered by Nazi Germany's "Final Solution" extermination policies. Most of them were killed in Ukraine because most pre-WWII Soviet Jews lived in the Pale of Settlement, of which Ukraine was the biggest part.
The Nazi gun control argument is a belief that gun regulations in the Third Reich helped to facilitate the rise of the Nazis and the Holocaust. The majority of historians and fact-checkers have described the argument as "dubious," "questionable," "preposterous," "tendentious," or "problematic." This argument is frequently employed by opponents of gun control in debates on U.S. gun politics. Questions about its validity, and about the motives behind its inception, have been raised by scholars. Proponents in the United States have used it as part of a "security against tyranny" argument, while opponents have referred to it as a form of reductio ad Hitlerum.
Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin is a book by Yale historian Timothy D. Snyder that was first published by Basic Books on October 28, 2010.
Women in Nazi Germany were subject to doctrines of Nazism by the Nazi Party (NSDAP), which promoted exclusion of women from the political life of Germany as well as its executive body and executive committees. On the other hand, whether through sheer numbers, lack of local organization, or both, many German women did indeed become Nazi party members. In spite of this, the Nazi regime (officially) only permitted and encouraged women to fill the roles of mother and wife; women were excluded from all positions of responsibility, notably in the political and academic spheres.
The Bila Tserkva massacre was the World War II mass murder of Jews, committed by the Nazi German Einsatzgruppe with the aid of Ukrainian auxiliaries, in Bila Tserkva, Soviet Ukraine, on August 21–22, 1941. When the Jewish adult population of Bila Tserkva was killed, several functionaries complained that some 90 Jewish children were left behind in an abandoned building, and had to be executed separately. The soldiers reported the matter to four chaplains of the Wehrmacht, who passed along their protests to Field Marshal von Reichenau; it was the only time during World War II that Wehrmacht chaplains tried to prevent an Einsatzgruppen massacre, but Paul Blobel's verbal order was direct and decisive.
Geoffrey P. Megargee was an American historian and author who specialized in World War II military history and the history of the Holocaust. He served as the project director and editor-in-chief for the Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933–1945 produced by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Megargee's work on the German High Command won the 2001 Distinguished Book Award from the Society for Military History.
Genocide education refers to education about patterns and trends in the phenomenon of genocide and/or about the causes, nature and impact of particular instances of genocide.
Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933–1945 is a seven-part encyclopedia series that explores the history of the concentration camps, ghettos, forced-labor camps, and other sites of detention, persecution, or state-sponsored murder run by Nazi Germany and other Axis powers in Europe and Africa. The series is produced by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) and published by Indiana University Press. Research began in 2000; the first volume was published in 2009; and the final volume is slated for publication in 2025. Along with entries on individual sites, the encyclopedias also contain scholarly overviews for historical context.
Erna Petri (1920–2000) was a Nazi German murderer during World War II. Petri lived in Thuringia Germany and was married to Horst Petri, an SS officer.
