Policies Towards The Jews & Untermenschen

• Before the Final Solution, there was no uniform policy for dealing with the Jews.
• Local initiatives drove the Holocaust.

• At the Wannsee Conference in January 1942, a more systematic approach to exterminating Europe’s Jews was planned as opposed to mass shootings.

• Roseman (2002):
  • ‘Wannsee emerges as an important act…in the process of turning mass murder into genocide.’
• Kershaw:
  • ‘The idea of racial cleansing…had become, via Hitler’s leadership…institutionalised in all aspects of organized life in the Nazi state.’
• Browning (2005):
  • On 12 December 1941: ‘[Hitler] made it clear that the entry of the United States into the war would not delay implementation of the Final Solution.’

• Death camps were created in occupied Europe where Untermenschen would be gassed. The most infamous camp is Auschwitz-Birkenau.
• The Einsatzgruppen had used gas in the T4 euthanasia programme. Now gas chambers were built in death camps, plus railways to deliver Jews and others.
• Upon arrival, Jews were divided into those who would be gassed and those who could work until they dropped or until they were of no more use and then gassed.

• The majority of Jews were killed after 1942.
• 40% of the total Jews killed in the Holocaust were killed by mass shootings or burning. 60% were killed by gassings.
• Over 6 million Jews were killed as part of the ‘Final Solution.’ Other Nazi victims included Russians, Poles, gypsies, Jehovah’s Witnesses, political opponents and countless other asocials, mentally ill, physically handicapped people.
• Historians such as Friedlander have noted that no one in the world spoke up to defend the Jews during the Holocaust.

– In all occupied territories, Untermenschen were separated out and marked for persecution and either slave labour or in extermination camps.

• The Generalplan-Ost saw Slavs, Serbs and Slovenes as fit for enslavement or extermination. Eastern Europeans of German ethnic descent were ‘Germanised.’
• In Poland, the USSR and Yugoslavia, adults resisting Germanisation were executed, children put up for adoption.

• 46,000 ethnic Slovenes (southern Slavs) were taken and used as slave labour for the German war effort.
• Ethnic Germans were resettled on their land.

• Serbian schools were shut. Orthodox Christian Serbs were forced to convert to Roman Catholicism.
• Massacres of Serbs were carried out by Croatians.

• The Nazis first killed 60,000 Poles who were leaders in their fields. The aim was to get rid of any Polish leadership before enslaving or killing Poland’s masses.
• In October 1939 all Slavic Poles over 14, and Jews over 12, could be used as forced labour.
• Up to 2.9 million Slavic Poles were killed as Untermenschen as were gypsies, the mentally ill, disabled and asocials.
• Germans were moved into Poland to be resettled as part of Lebensraum.