Final Solution of the Jewish Question

Final Solution
Follow-up letter from SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich to Ministerialdirektor Martin Luther asking for administrative assistance in the implementation of the Final Solution to the Jewish Question, 26 February 1942
Also known as	Endlösung der Judenfrage
Location	German-occupied Europe
Date	1942–1945
Incident type	Extermination of Jews, Genocide
Perpetrators	Nazi Germany
Participants	Schutzstaffel (SS), Security Police (SiPo), Gestapo, Kriminalpolizei (Kripo), SD, and the Waffen-SS
Ghetto	World War II Ghettos in Nazi-occupied Europe; Jewish ghettos in German-occupied Poland and the Soviet Union

The Final Solution (German: Endlösung) or the Final Solution to the Jewish Question (German: die Endlösung der Judenfrage, pronounced [diː ˈɛntˌløːzʊŋ deːɐ̯ ˈjuːdn̩ˌfʁaːɡə]) was a Nazi plan for the extermination of the Jews during World War II. The “Final Solution of the Jewish Question” was the Nazi code name for the plan to murder all Jews within reach, and was not limited to the European continent. This policy of deliberate and systematic genocide starting across German-occupied Europe was formulated in procedural and geo-political terms by Nazi leadership in January 1942 at the Wannsee Conference near Berlin, and culminated in the Holocaust which saw the killing of 90 percent of Jewish Poles, and two-thirds of the Jewish population of Europe.

The nature and timing of the decisions that led to the Final Solution is an intensely studied and debated aspect of the Holocaust. The program evolved during the first 25 months of war leading to the attempt at "murdering every last Jew in the German grasp." Most historians agree, wrote Christopher Browning, that the Final Solution cannot be attributed to a single decision made at one particular point in time. "It is generally accepted the decision-making process was prolonged and incremental." In 1940, following the Fall of France, Adolf Eichmann devised the Madagascar Plan to move Europe's Jewish population to the French colony; but the plan was abandoned for logistical reasons mainly due to a naval blockade. There were also preliminary plans to deport Jews to Palestine and Siberia. In 1941, wrote Raul Hilberg, in the first phase of the mass murder of Jews, the mobile killing units began to pursue their victims across occupied eastern territories; in the second phase, stretching across all of German-occupied Europe, the Jewish victims were sent on death trains to centralized extermination camps built for the purpose of systematic implementation of the Final Solution.