The "Final Solution to the Jewish Problem"

"I have often been a prophet in my life and was generally laughed at. During my struggle for power, the Jews primarily received with laughter my prophecies that I would someday assume the leadership of the state....and then, among many other things, achieve a solution of the Jewish problem. I suppose [that the laughter] of Jewry in Germany is now choking in their throats. Today I will be a prophet again: If international finance Jewry...should succeed once more in plunging the peoples into a world war, then the consequence will be...the destruction of the Jewish race in Europe." - Adolf Hitler

As a large part of Hitler's scapegoating propaganda, Hitler set the Jews apart from others as a race. He argued that the Jews were the antithesis of the ideal Aryan nation, and the source of all evil in the world. The "Final Solution to the Jewish Problem," as dictated by the Nazis, was extermination. Individuals like Adolf Eichmann, the head of the Berlin desk for Jewish Affairs and Evacuation Affairs, ordered the execution of millions of innocent Jews from across Europe. "Evacuation," in this context, first meant "expulsion," and then became "extermination." Before 1941, the Nazis concentrated on moving Jews to city ghettos, where many died of starvation. In 1941, three thousand men were organized into Einsatzgruppen, the sole purpose of which was to execute Jews in the wake of the German troops who were advancing into Russia. They were taught by Reinhard Heydrich that "Judaism in the East is the source of Bolshevism and must therefore be wiped out in accordance with the Fuehrer's aims."

Each unit (according to a unit leader, SS Colonel Jaeger),
"would enter a village or city and order the prominent Jewish citizens to call together all Jews for the purpose of resettlement. They were requested to hand over their valuables to the leader of the unit, and shortly before the execution to surrender their outer clothing. The men, women, and children were led to a place of execution which in most cases was located next to a more deeply excavated anti-tank ditch. Then they were shot, kneeling or standing, and corpses thrown into the ditch."

In conjunction with Einsatzgruppen, Hitler also implemented a Euthanasia (Mercy Killing) program. He ordered doctors to kill mentally ill or physically handicapped children. The method of execution was initially lethal injection, but later Hitler started ordering experiments with poison gas on the children who were "imperfect Aryans." The Euthanasia program, however, was unpopular, and Hitler ceased the killing of non-Jewish handicapped children.

A German policeman shoots individual Jewish women who remain alive in the ravine after a mass execution of Jews from the Mizocz ghetto.

In Mein Kampf, Hitler had written:

"If at the beginning of, or during, the war 12,000 or 15,000 of these Jewish corrupters of the people had been plunged into an asphyxiating gas...the sacrifice of millions of soldiers would not have been in vain."

It was no surprise, then, that Heydrich and Eichmann elected to begin using poison gas to exterminate large numbers of Jews. After Eichmann met with the doctors who had been experimenting with poison gas on children, he ordered the construction of the first death camps. The year was 1941.