IB History Political Factors Including Nazi Leaders and Wannsee Conference Notes

Political Decision-Making and the Road to the Final Solution

Hitler, Himmler, and Heydrich: The Chain of Authority

1. The transition from mass shootings in the Soviet Union to a continent-wide programme of systematic genocide required political decisions by the Nazi leadership. Three figures were central to this process.
2. Adolf Hitler set the ideological direction and authorised the policy's escalation. No written Hitler order for the Holocaust has ever survived, a gap that functionalist historians have used to argue the genocide was not centrally directed. But cumulative evidence, including perpetrator testimony, internal Nazi communications, and comparative analysis of decision-making, points to Hitler as the driving authority behind the escalation to genocide in 1941.
   1. In his Reichstag speech of 30 January 1939, Hitler declared publicly that a new world war would result in “the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe”, a statement of genocidal intent made before the war began.
3. Heinrich Himmler commanded the SS and built the machinery of implementation. As Reichsführer-SS, Himmler directed the organisations, including the Einsatzgruppen and the concentration and death camp system, that carried out mass murder across occupied Europe.
4. Reinhard Heydrich organised the administrative coordination. Appointed Plenipotentiary for the Preparation of the Final Solution of the European Jewish Question, Heydrich chaired the Wannsee Conference and directed the bureaucratic machinery that turned policy into logistics.

The Wannsee Conference (20 January 1942)

1. On 20 January 1942, fifteen senior Nazi officials and SS leaders met in a villa at Wannsee, a suburb of Berlin, convened by Heydrich. The meeting lasted approximately 90 minutes. Its purpose was to coordinate the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question” (Endlösung der Judenfrage) across all German-controlled territories and government ministries.
   1. The meeting did not debate whether to conduct genocide, that decision had already been made. Its function was administrative coordination. The minutes (Protokoll), drafted by Adolf Eichmann, listed the Jewish population of each European country, including neutral nations, at a total of eleven million. All were targeted.

Operation Reinhard and the Death Camps

1. Following Wannsee, the implementation of mass murder accelerated. Operation Reinhard (named for Heydrich after his assassination in May 1942) was the code name for the systematic murder of the Jews of the General Government, the approximately two million Jews in the German-administered area of occupied central Poland. It operated through three specially constructed death camps: Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka. Unlike concentration camps, these were purpose-built killing centres with no labour function: almost everyone who arrived was killed within hours using carbon monoxide gas.
   1. Auschwitz-Birkenau, established earlier as a concentration and labour camp, was expanded from 1942 with new crematoria and gas chambers using Zyklon B. Unlike the Operation Reinhard camps, Auschwitz processed both immediate killing and forced labour: some arrivals were selected for work and survived weeks or months before being killed or dying from exhaustion, disease, or starvation. Over one million people were murdered at Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest single killing site of the Holocaust.

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