Final Solution
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The Final Solution or the Final Solution to the Jewish Question was a plan orchestrated by Nazi Germany during World War II for the total extermination of people they defined as Jews. This secret policy of deliberate and systematic genocide across German-occupied Europe and all other areas that the Nazis controlled or influenced likely began in 1941, and was formally revealed to non-SS leaders of the German government at the Wannsee Conference in January 1942. It culminated in what is now known as the Holocaust: the murder of approximately 6 million Jews, including 90% of the Jews in Poland, two-thirds of all European Jews, and one-third of the total Jewish population of the world.
The "Final Solution" was a euphemism selected by the Nazis as code name for the murder of all Jews within their reach, a strategy the Nazis often employed to obfuscate their disreputable and/or criminal actions.
The nature and timing of the decisions that led to the Final Solution is an intensely researched and debated aspect of the Holocaust. The program evolved during the first 25 months of war, leading to the final version of the plan: an attempt at "murdering every last Jew in the German grasp". Christopher Browning, a historian specializing in the Holocaust, wrote that most historians agree that the Final Solution cannot be attributed to a single decision made at one particular point in time. Rather, "it is generally accepted the decision-making process was prolonged and incremental."
In 1940, following the Fall of France, Adolf Eichmann devised the Madagascar Plan to move Europe's Jewish population to the French colony, but the plan was abandoned for logistical reasons, mainly the Allied naval blockade. There were also preliminary plans to deport Jews to Palestine and Siberia. Up until this point, thousands of Jews in ghettos, concentration camps, and otherwise under Nazi rule were killed through forced labor, random violence, starvation, and disease—though no plan to kill all Jews yet existed. Following Operation Barbarossa in 1941, the first phase of the systemic mass-murder of Jews began in the occupied eastern territories through the Einsatzgruppen mobile killing units, who rounded up Jews and killed them primarily through mass-shootings and gas vans. By the time of the Wannsee Conference in January 1942, approximately 1 million Jews had been murdered. In the second phase, which stretched across all of German-occupied Europe, Jews were sent on death trains to centralized extermination camps built for the purpose of systematic murder of Jews—primarily, though not exclusively, through gas chambers. The vast majority of victims were murdered in this phase.
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