The Final Solution initially started with the
dehumanization of the Jews, who were increasingly classified in German society as humans
with no rights – they thus had to be demarcated as separate with identifying marks. This
was followed by ghettoization as Jewish citizens were forcibly moved to older and poorer
neighborhoods and literally fenced in or confined there by the German police, as well as
the military.
Such policies were stepped up with the
launching of Operation Barbarossa – the war was to be treated as a war of imperial
encroachment. The Nazi state drew a heavy and close relationship between their aims of
destroying the communist state and obliterating the Jews, who formed the principal
targets. Orders were issued via the army in March, April and May 1941 and mobile killing
was carried out by the Einsatzgruppen, which were heavily armed mobile killing squads
that were used to eliminate all the undesirables in German-occupied
territories.
However, there were simply too many
of them to be killed. The tactic of using the Einsatzgruppen was failing since there
were too many race enemies for the squads to deal with. It was extremely inefficient to
continually increase the number of Einsatzgruppen to be used as that would only strain
Germany’s military capability.
It was impossible
to physically transport all the Jews out of Germany, since that meant a possible massive
outburst of Jewish refugees to the rest of Europe and most nations on the continent
proved unwilling themselves to take in such large numbers of Jews. Perhaps in this
manner, the other European states could be considered to have been complicit in the
Final Solution – they did not provide a haven for the persecuted Jews for fear of a
possible backlash. However, in reality, there was simply not enough shipping to have
moved all the surviving Jews out of Central Europe; no one in Europe had also expected
the Nazi state to undertake such an extreme policy of mass extermination. As a result,
the Germans had to turn to mass extermination and industrial killing through the
establishment of death camps to get rid of the Jews since there were no other options
available. The policy they adopted grew very naturally out of what they had already been
doing and did not divert significantly from the Nazi worldview.
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