Endlösung
- Also known as the "Final Solution" in English.
- Many Jews were evicted and persecuted although many Jews were already persecuted throughout Europe.
- Such as the Catholic Church who blamed Jewish people for killing Christ all the way up until the 1970s.
- Jews were easy to blame for problems as they had often immigrated from elsewhere.
- Although many still believed that things in Germany could be improved.
- Populist ideas targeted minorities.
- A part of the Nazi leadership is gathered in the Wannsee conference in 1942 to discuss what to do with the Jews.
- They decided to start systematically destroying the Jewish population in Germany and other occupied nations.
- Industrial methods of destruction were decided on.
- The concentration camps already present in Germany and occupied countries would be modified to kill.
- Gas chambers and other infrastructure was built.
- Large scale industrialization such as railroads and cattle cars were used for transport to the camps.
- There were already SS groups looking for and killing minorities.
- Before the war was over about 5 to 6 million Jews had been killed with an additional 5 to 6 million disabled people, POWs, Romani people, dissidents, etc.
- Jews could be tracked down easily due to population registry records.
- In Lithuania for example, about 90% of the Jewish population was killed.
- The gas chambers were very rudimentary and were often concrete chambers underground.
- Camps that didn't have crematoriums had fire pits.
- Human fat would disgustingly be made into soap for example.
- Zyklon b gas was often used.
- Industrial killing of humans.
- Most of the death camps were placed in Poland.
- The largest camps were Auschwitz Birkenau and Treblinka.
- In addition to the destruction of humans, cruel medical experiments and torture were applied.
- Mass castrations, testing on twins, testing human durability, etc.
- People were divided into capable of working, and to be destroyed immediately.
- Children, the elderly, pregnant, etc. were immediately killed.
- Workers were worked to exhaustion and killed once they couldn't work any longer. After exhausting, they too would be killed.
- Although the Holocaust might not have resulted in the most deaths of any genocide, it certainly was the worst by far due to the industrialized execution of people.