Summary Of The Final Solution: Extermination

With the development of a huge surplus population living in these concentration camps, the German officials had to figure out what to do with these people. First, they tried to use the concentrated Jews as labor slaves for the German War Machine. They were worked to death in factories built on-site at the concentration camps. The German company I. G. Farben invested over one million dollars (converted into 1978 dollars) into Auschwitz (Rubenstein 59). If the Jews refused to work, they would have been killed anyways in the camp for various reasons. This was the main reason for compliance to work (Rubenstein 60). Another attempt at the Final Solution for the Jews was the use of them as human guinea pigs for medical experiments. Various medical

In The Extermination of the European Jews, the author talks about how “extermination not decided on all at once,” supporting a functionalist perspective. The final solution came a development from different organizations at “different levels of their hierarchies,” (Gerlach 66). The biggest development that led to the Final Solution was the Wansee Conference. The Wansee was a secretive meeting where German levels from different levels of expertise met together to get on the same page about how to answer the Jewish Question. Reinhard Heydrich organized a meeting per the instructions of Göring to find an “overall solution to the Jewish Question,”. Göring also referred to it as the final solution (Gerlach 75). Heydrich used the meeting to make sure the ministerial bureaucracy was informed of the decision to exterminate the Jews and make sure they were on the same page (Gerlach 84). One thing is that even after this, four out of the five extermination camps were still locally run and all had different means of killing. Even though the entire government is now on the same page they could not come to a decision on whether half-Jews would be included in their plans to exterminate the Jewish population. Another proof of the functionalist perspective is the fact Hitler never publicly announced his decision to exterminate the Jews until late 1941, years after their persecutions began (Gerlach