Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov refers to Hitler’s ‘Final Solution’: Know about the Nazi policy formed to eradicate Jews

The 'Final Solution of the Jewish Question' was the euphemistic term used by the Nazi German authorities to refer to the plan to annihilate European Jews.

Today, the “Final Solution” is used as a synonym for the genocide of Europe’s Jews. (Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons)
Key Highlights
  • The "Final Solution to the Jewish question" was the official code name for the murder of all Jews.
  • The nature and timing of the decisions is an intensely researched and debated aspects of the Holocaust.
  • In the second phase, stretching across all of German-occupied Europe, the Jewish victims were sent on 'death trains'.

New Delhi: Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has likened Western policies on Russia to Nazi leader Adolf Hitler’s “Final Solution” plan of genocide against Jewish people. Moscow’s top diplomat, whose comments on Hitler and Jews led to President Vladimir Putin issuing a rare apology on his behalf last year, made the comparison at his annual press conference. Lavrov said, “Just as Napoleon mobilised practically all of Europe against the Russian Empire, just as Hitler mobilised and captured the majority of European countries and sent them against the Soviet Union, now the United States has organised a coalition.” He also said, “The task is the same: The final solution of the ‘Russian question.’ Just as Hitler wanted to finally solve the Jewish question.”

What was the Nazi’s Final Solution?

The “Final Solution of the Jewish Question” was the euphemistic term used by the Nazi German authorities to refer to the plan to annihilate European Jews. The most important use of the term to mean this was in a memorandum from Hermann Goring to Reinhard Heydrich, dated July 31, 1941, asking Heydrich to prepare “an overall plan of the preliminary organisational, practical and financial measures for the execution of the intended final solution of the Jewish question.”

It is not known when the leaders of Nazi Germany definitively decided to implement the “Final Solution.” What is clear, however, is that the “Final Solution” was the culmination of a decade of increasingly severe discriminatory, anti-Jewish measures implemented by the Nazis. Today, the “Final Solution” is used as a synonym for the genocide of Europe’s Jews.

The increase in anti-Jew policies

Under Adolf Hitler, the persecution and segregation of Jews was implemented in Germany in stages. After the Nazi Party achieved power in Germany in 1933, its state-sponsored racism led to anti-Jewish legislation, economic boycotts, and the violence of the Kristallnacht (“Night of Broken Glass”) pogroms, all of which aimed to systematically isolate Jews from society and drive them out of the country.

After the September 1939 German invasion of Poland (the beginning of World War II), anti-Jewish policy escalated to the imprisonment and eventual murder of European Jewry. The Nazis first established ghettos (enclosed areas designed to isolate and control the Jews) in the Generalgouvernement (a territory in central and eastern Poland overseen by a German civilian government) and the Warthegau (an area of western Poland annexed to Germany). Polish and western European Jews were deported to these ghettos where they lived in overcrowded and unsanitary conditions with inadequate food.

Massive killing operations began

After the June 1941 German invasion of the Soviet Union, SS and police units (acting as mobile killing units) began massive killing operations aimed at entire Jewish communities. By the autumn of 1941, the SS and police introduced mobile gas vans. These panelled trucks had exhaust pipes reconfigured to pump poisonous carbon monoxide gas into sealed spaces, killing those locked within. They were designed to complement ongoing shooting operations.

On July 17, 1941, four weeks after the invasion of the Soviet Union, Hitler tasked SS chief Heinrich Himmler with responsibility for all security matters in the occupied Soviet Union. Hitler gave Himmler broad authority to physically eliminate any perceived threats to permanent German rule. Two weeks later, on July 31, 1941, Nazi leader Hermann Goering authorized SS General Reinhard Heydrich to make preparations for the implementation of a “complete solution to the Jewish question.”

By the end of 1941, over 439,800 Jewish people had been killed by the Nazis via killing squads. In fact, certain regions across eastern Europe had been declared “free of Jews”. In addition, the Final Solution policy became common knowledge for all those within the SS. Within the next two years, it has been estimated that the number of killings soared to a potential 8,00,000.

A number of historians mark the start date of the implementation of the Final Solution when the German army took over the city of Bialystok and the Reserve Police Battalion arrived in the city and proceeded to set the Great Synagogue on fire when hundreds of Jewish men locked in. This was apparently the catalyst for other arson attacks, killings and general destruction of Jewish property.

In the second phase, the killings took place with gas vans, which were approved by Heydrich. He confirmed the effectiveness of industrial killings by exhaust fumes and the art of deception. Construction for the first killing centre at Belzec started back in October 1941, just three months before the Wannsee Conference. By March 1942, the place was fully operational. The Nazis set up more and more camps such as Treblinka and Auschwitz, the two camps that claimed the most life. By 1943, around 2 million Jews had been executed at the hands of the Nazis.

The Holocaust by bullets (as opposed to the Holocaust by gas) took place in Nazi-occupied Polish territory. This is where mass shootings took place in conjunction with ghetto uprisings. For example, 13,000 Jews were massacred by May 1943 during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
German SS and police murdered nearly 2,700,000 Jews in the killing centres either by asphyxiation with poison gas or by shooting. In its entirety, the “Final Solution” called for the murder of all European Jews by gassing, shooting, and other means. Six million Jewish men, women, and children were killed during the Holocaust, two-thirds of the Jews living in Europe before World War II.