The War against the Jews, 1933-1945

“The Final Solution of the Jewish Question” was the code name assigned by the German bureaucracy to the annihilation of the Jews. The very composition of the code name, when analyzed, reveals its fundamental character and meaning to the Germans who invented and used it. The term “Jewish question,” as first used during the early Enlightenment/Emancipation period in Western Europe, referred to the “question” or “problem” that the anomalous persistence of the Jews as a people posed to the new nation-states and the rising political nationalisms. The “Jewish question” was, at bottom, a euphemism whose verbal neutrality concealed the user’s impatience with the singularity of this people that did not appear to conform to the new political demands of the state.

Since a question demands an answer and a problem a solution, various answers and solutions were propounded to the “Jewish question,” by foes and even friends, that entailed the disappearance of the Jews as such—abandonment of the Jewish religion or its essential elements, of the Jewish language, Yiddish, of Jewish culture, Jewish uniqueness and separatism. The histories of Jewish emancipation and of European anti-Semitism are replete with proffered “solutions to the Jewish question.” The classic illustration is the “solution” offered by Constantine Pobyedonostsev, chief adviser to Czar Alexander III, in 1881: one-third of the Jews were to emigrate, one-third to convert, and one-third to die of hunger.

To this concept that the National Socialists adopted they added one new element, embodied in the word “final.” “Final” means definitive, completed, perfected, ultimate. “Final” reverberates with apocalyptic promise, bespeaking the Last Judgment, the End of Days, the last destruction before salvation, Armageddon. “The Final Solution of the Jewish Question” in the National Socialist conception was not just another anti-Semitic undertaking, but a metahistorical program devised with an eschatological perspective. It was part of a salvational ideology that envisaged the attainment of Heaven by bringing Hell on earth. “The Devil is loose,” Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen noted in his diary on October 30, 1942. The most important event of our time, André Malraux said, was “le retour de Satan,” citing the German system of terror.

To attain its heavenly Hell on earth the German dictatorship launched a war that engulfed the whole world. Over 35 million people were killed, more than half of them civilians. On the battlefields 1 out of every 22 Russians was killed, 1 out of every 25 Germans, 1 out of every 150 Italians and Englishmen, and 1 out of every 200 Frenchmen. The human cost of 2,191 days of war surpassed the losses of any previous war in the world. That war brought death to nearly 6 million Jews, to 2 out of every 3 European Jews. Though one-third of them managed to survive, though the Jewish people and Judaism have outlived the Third Reich, the Germans nevertheless succeeded in irrecoverably destroying the life and culture of East European Jewry.

The Final Solution transcended the bounds of modern historical experience. Never before in modern history had one people made the killing of another the fulfillment of an ideology, in whose pursuit means were identical with ends. History has, to be sure, recorded terrible massacres and destruction that one people perpetrated against another, but all—however cruel and unjustifiable—were intended to achieve instrumental ends, being means to ends, not ends in themselves.

The German state, deciding that the Jews should not live, arrogated to itself the judgment as to whether a whole people had the right to existence, a judgment that no man and no state have the right to make. “Anyone who on the basis of such a judgment,” said Karl Jaspers, “plans the organized slaughter of a people and participates in it, does something that is fundamentally different from all crimes that have existed in the past.”

To carry out this judgment, designated as the Final Solution, the German dictatorship involved and engaged the entire bureaucratic and functional apparatus of the German state and the National Socialist movement and employed the best available technological means. The Final Solution destroyed the East European Jews. In doing so, it subverted fundamental moral principles and every system of law that had governed, however imperfectly, human society for millennia.