What was Hitler’s “Final Solution’’?

1. What was Hitler’s “Final Solution’’? By Victoria Armstrong.

2. What was Hitler’s ‘’Final Solution’’? • Hitler’s ‘’final solution’’ killed six million Jews. • The "Holocaust" is the period of history between January 30, 1933, when Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, to May 8, 1945, when the war in Europe ended. • From as early as 1935, Hitler introduced anti-Semitic legislation, including the boycott of Jewish shops and businesses. • The "Final Solution," or the plan for the systematic murder of all Jews in Europe, began in June 1941 with the German invasion of the Soviet Union. • Around six million Jews - two-thirds of the population of European Jews - were murdered by the Nazis, including 1.5 million children. • Another six million people including three million Polish …

3. What was Hitler’s ‘’Final Solution’’? • After the annexation of Austria, and the Evian Conference, Hitler seemed to throw caution to the winds while the world stood by and allowed it to happen.  As Martin Gilbert comments,  "It was a neutral stance, not a hostile one, but this neutral stance was to cost a multitude of lives."2 Murders, killings, torture and forced labor in concentration camps continued after Evian. In October Hitler marched into the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia and four months after the Conference Kristallnacht, or 'Night of the Broken Glass' took place when thousands of Jewish shops and businesses were destroyed and many people arrested and killed.  Although protest was again made in many parts of the world, the appeasement of Hitler and governments' own agendas were paramount over helping the Jews.  Humanitarian considerations were sacrificed to self-interest and after war was declared, the allies' main thought was that of victory and the refugee problem was sidelined.   After war against the Nazis was eventually declared Hitler's 'Final Solution' to the Jewish problem resulted in the loss of around six million Jewish lives in the Holocaust

4. What was Hitler’s ‘’Final Solution’’? • Founder and leader of the Nazi Party, Reich Chancellor and guiding spirit of the Third Reich from 1933 to 1945, Head of State and Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces, Adolf Hitler was born in Barona am Inn, Austria, on 20 April 1889. The son of a fifty-two-year-old Austrian customs official, Alois Schickelgruber Hitler, and his third wife, a young peasant girl, Klara Poelzl, both from the backwoods of lower Austria, the young Hitler was a resentful, discontented child. Moody, lazy, of unstable temperament, he was deeply hostile towards his strict, authoritarian father and strongly attached to his indulgent, hard-working mother, whose death from cancer in December 1908 was a shattering blow to the adolescent Hitler.

5. What was Hitler’s ‘’Final Solution’’? • In May 1913 Hitler left Vienna for Munich and, when war broke out in August 1914, he joined the Sixteenth Bavarian Infantry Regiment, serving as a dispatch runner. Hitler proved an able, courageous soldier, receiving the Iron Cross (First Class) for bravery, but did not rise above the rank of Lance Corporal. Twice wounded, he was badly gassed four weeks before the end of the war and spent three months recuperating in a hospital in Pomerania. Temporarily blinded and driven to impotent rage by the abortive November 1918 revolution in Germany as well as the military defeat, Hitler, once restored, was convinced that fate had chosen him to rescue a humiliated nation from the shackles of the Versailles Treaty, from Bolsheviks and Jews.