What Was Hitler's Final Solution

Hitler’s Final Solution After WWI, Germany’s economy was in despair, and the German people wanted someone to blame. The Jews, who were widely resented, became the scapegoats. When Adolf Hitler came into power, he took advantage of the existing anti-Semitism, and came up with his infamous final solution—his plan to exterminate all the Jews in Europe. He thought getting rid of Jews would somehow make the world a better place. While Hitler and his fellow Nazis obviously didn’t manage to eradicate Jews entirely, they were able to kill as many as they did by convincing the German people that it was for their benefit, and by torturing the Jews to the point where they were too exhausted to fight back. While Hitler remains one of the most evil human …show more content…
As for the Jews in the concentration camps, they would be killed if they tried to stop what was being done to them, and many of them were too exhausted and hungry to try anyway. According to psychoanalyst and Holocaust survivor Bruno Bettelheim, the horrific abuse the prisoners faced at the hands of SS officers began on the way to the camps. They were kicked, slapped, forced to stare into bright lights and kneel for hours, and forced to turn on each other and their values. “The purpose of this massive initial abuse was to traumatize the prisoners and break their resistance; to change at least their behavior if not yet their personalities,” Bettelheim says (Document 4). Fellow Holocaust survivor Fred Baron says that he was told by a non-Jewish kapo to look out only for himself at all times, and that in his experience everyone was mostly focused on food and survival (Document 5). This makes sense, considering how little they were given. Reportedly, in the Warsaw Ghetto, people were fed less than ten percent of daily requirements (Document 9). And a ration card from October 1941 granted holders a mere 300 calories a day (Document …show more content…
The first-person account in Document 7 by a man who personally gassed multiple Jewish women makes us wonder how people, even with Hitler’s propaganda, could allow such cruelty to take place. And it’s hard to imagine police today agreeing to supervise Kristallnacht (Document 8). Hearing about the torture from Jews who managed to survive the camps makes it seem even better that Axis powers lost the war and Hitler never managed to accomplish all of his goals. Though perhaps not enough people cared about the Holocaust while it was going on, thanks to historical documents such as these, it is now universally recognized as a terrible