The Third Reich and the Holocaust: Camp Systems, Wannsee Conference, & the Final Solution

Timeline:

1942

• 20 January: Wannsee Conference
• April: US creates Japanese-American Internment Camps
• 27 May- 6 June: Heydrich Assassination
• June: mass murder of Jews by gas begins at Auschwitz
• 10 June: Nazis liquidate Lidice in reprisal for Heydrich's death
• 17 December: British Foreign Secretary Eden tells the British House of Commons of mass executions of Jews by Nazis; US declares the crimes will be avenged

Today's main reference source is www.ushmm.org, the official site of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in Washington, D.C., and a phenomenal resource in this type of study.

The Wannsee Conference was attended and lead by SS General Reinhard Heydrich, Gestapo Commander Heinrich Müller, and SS Chief of Jewish Affairs Adolf Eichmann. The goal of this meeting was to answer the "Jewish Question." According to USHMM, it was "to inform and secure support from government ministries and other interested agencies relevant to the implementation of the Final Solution," and "to disclose to the participants that Hitler himself had tasked Heydrich and the RHSA with coordinating the operation." The Final Solution held the fate of some 11 million Jews in German occupied Europe.

In Paris, on the Ile de la Cité-- an island in the Seine River and the medieval settlement of Paris, there on the Notre Dame end of the island is a small memorial to the victims of the Holocaust. As we talked about last week, France had many active roles in the Holocaust: perpetrators, bystanders, resistance, rescue, etc. The inner walls of this memorial have the most provocative design: the names of the all the camps of the Holocaust in red upon a cream colored wall. We only know of the most famous camps-- Auschwitz, Treblinka, Dachau, Birkenau-- but there were thousands. For every major camp, there are dozens of sub camps, all dedicated to concentration, labor, and death.

We started last class with the camp system and the beginnings of the Final Solution.

Key Historical Concepts in Holocaust Education: Nazi Camps
 
This link above is an overview of the camps, from the first one at Dachau to the eventual death camps, as the French call Camps de la Mort.

Sachsenhausen was then built with more intentions than just housing/concentrating the the unwanted.

Getting from Dachau to Sachsenhausen details the organization of the camps and the leadership of Heinrich Himmler and Theodor Eicke. The clip used in class was the minutes 4:16 to 9:23. Several clips from this documentary were used in this class, so there are a few more times I will link this in the blog today along with the corresponding minutes.

Sometime after these camps began, in working order, the invasion of Nazi Germany into the east, namely Poland and  Russia, brought hundreds of thousands of Jews into Germany occupied territories. The ghettos were created to contain, but the ultimate goal became annihilation.

The Final Solution Coalesces expands on this "Jewish Question" of what to do with the millions of Jews.

In the film Conspiracy (2001), the film focuses some time on the Wannsee Conference. The Matter at Hand is a dramatization of the meeting. Kenneth Branagh plays the part of Reinhard Heydrich and Stanley Tucci is Adolf Eichmann in this clip.

The Question was answered by the "eradication of Europe's Jewry." Auschwitz was originally, in 1940, for be a concentration camp of political dissidents like the Polish intelligencia. After the Wannsee Conference, Auschwitz became the main operation of the Final Solution.

The evolution of Auschwitz can be viewed at this link Inside Hitler's Killing Machine- The Nazi Camps: An Architecture of Murder; minutes for this clip are 21:00 to 26:10.

In these clips, you have heard the term "Operation Reinhard." This operation was not a military action but was the code name of the German plan to exterminate the Jews of occupied Poland. The name of this operation was not initially named for Reinhard Heydrich, but was changed later in honor of the death of Heydrich by assassination on June 6, 1942. It began in autumn of 1941 and ended in late summer 1943. There were three Operation Reinhard killing centers: Belzec, Treblinka, and Sobibor. The goals of this operation were to resettle, secure personal property (small items like money and jewelry), and to secure larger, hidden acquisitions like property, homes, and businesses.

Sobibor, one of the Operation Reinhard camps is described here, from minutes 41:24 to 48:32; Inside Hitler's Killing Machine- The Nazi Camps: An Architecture of Murder. 

This (The Final Solution- Jewish Life on the Brink of Death) is a good summation of the Final Solution and its overall impact on Jews within occupied Europe. Elie Wiesel, who wrote the book Night which we have been reading in class, is highlighted in the clip and he is at the end of the video, as an elderly man speaking about the impact of the Holocaust. "We never try to tell the tale to make people weep, that's too easy... if we decided to tell the tale it's because we wanted the world to be a better world, just a better world, and learn and remember. What is our role? We must become the messengers' messengers."