The Origins of the Final Solution

Killing pits (in German: Tötungsgrube) all over Eastern Europe and beyond .

Speaker: Professor Timothy Snyder ( lecture access below). Recorded on 11 March 2014 in Old Theatre, Old Building.

Hitler’s “Final Solution” was the Nazi plan for the systematic genocide of the Jewish population in Europe, resulting in the murder of approximately six million Jews from 1941 to 1945. This policy was formalized during the Wannsee Conference in January 1942, where Nazi officials discussed the logistics of mass extermination.

The opening of borders and archives has permitted a much fuller acquaintance with the victims of the Holocaust as well as with the motivation and behaviours of the German perpetrators and the East Europeans who aided them in the murder. Must the national history of Eastern Europe now collapse into nothing more than a prehistory of catastrophe?

Killing pits (in German: Tötungsgrube) & Camps

Timothy Snyder is Philippe Roman Chair in History and International Affairs at LSE IDEAS for 2013-14.

View Dr. Timothy Snyder’s lecture here

The Wannsee Conference 1942

(German: Wannseekonferenz,German pronunciation:[ˈvanzeːkɔnfeˌʁɛnt͡s] was a meeting of senior government officials of Nazi Germany and Schutzstaffel (SS) leaders, held in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee on 20 January 1942. The purpose of the conference, called by the director of the Reich Security Main Office SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, was to ensure the co-operation of administrative leaders of various government departments in the implementation of the Final Solution to the Jewish Question, whereby most of the Jews of German-occupied Europe would be deported to occupied Poland and murdered. Conference participants included representatives from several government ministries, including state secretaries from the Foreign Office, the justice, interior, and state ministries, and representatives from the SS. In the course of the meeting, Heydrich outlined how European Jews would be rounded up and sent to extermination camps in the General Government (the occupied part of Poland), where they would be murdered.[1] —Wikipedia