Highlighted dates in Hitler's extermination plan 1922 -1942 (credit: lamarina conservapedia)

Submitted by George (United States), Jul 31, 2020 at 12:15

Highlighted dates in Hitler's extermination plan 1922 -1942 (credit: lamarina conservapedia)

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1922 - Hitler's plan: Adolf Hitler had provided clues to his ambition to commit mass genocide as early as 1922, telling journalist Josef Hell, "Once I really am in power, my first and foremost task will be the annihilation of the Jews." [1]

Sep. 15, 1935 - Nuremberg Laws[2]

Nov. 9-10, 1938 - Kristallnacht [3]

Sep. 1939 - Escalation after Poland invasion.

July 31, 1941 - Preparations for "final solution". Goering gives instructions from Hitler.[4]

Dec. 12, 1941 - Pivotal.[5]

Jan. 20, 1942 - Wannsee Conference [6], top-ranking Nazi party, SS and government officials gathered in a tiny Berlin suburb to discuss the so-called "Final Solution" to the "Jewish Problem" in Germany and wider Europe. Wannsee Conference, cemented a bureaucratic policy of mass murder, yet, decision to exterminate the population had already been made months, perhaps even years, before the meeting.[7]

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MOTES

[1] The First Moments of Hitler's Final Solution. When Hitler solidified his plan to exterminate Jews – and why it matters 75 years later, By Lorraine Boissoneault, SmithsonianMag.com, Dec. 12, 2016. Adolf Hitler had provided clues to his ambition to commit mass genocide as early as 1922, telling journalist Josef Hell, "Once I really am in power, my first and foremost task will be the annihilation of the Jews."

[2] Nuremberg Race Laws | The Holocaust Encyclopedia. Sep 11, 2019 Two distinct laws passed in Nazi Germany in September 1935 are known collectively as the Nuremberg Laws

[3] KRISTALLNACHT | The Holocaust Encyclopedia. On November 9–10, 1938, Nazi leaders unleashed a series of pogroms against the Jewish population in Germany and recently incorporated territories. This event came to be called Kristallnacht (The Night of Broken Glass) because of the shattered glass that littered the streets after the vandalism and destruction of Jewish-owned businesses, synagogues, and homes. KEY FACTS 1 Nazi officials disguised the organized nature of the pogroms. They described the actions as justifiable and spontaneous responses of the German population to the assassination of a German diplomatic official, Ernst vom Rath, in Paris. This unprecedented violence against the Reich's Jews generated international outrage. 2 During the pogrom, some 30,000 Jewish males were rounded up and taken to concentration camps. This was the first time Nazi officials made massive arrests of Jews specifically because they were Jews, without any further cause for arrest. 3 In the aftermath of Kristallnacht, the Nazi regime ordered the Jewish community to pay a 1 billion Reichsmark "atonement tax" and rapidly enacted many anti-Jewish laws and edicts.

[4] Preparations for the Final Solution begin - HISTORY

[5] When Hitler solidified his plan to exterminate Jews – and why it matters 75 years later, By Lorraine Boissoneault, Dec. 12, 2016. According to scholars Christian Gerlach and Peter Monteath, among others, the pivotal moment for Hitler's decision came on December 12, 1941.

[6] This Day In History - The Wannsee Conference - History.com

[7] What People Get Wrong About the Nazi Conference to Plan the 'Final Solution', Albinko Hasic, Time, Jan. 19, 2017. despite the fact that the Wannsee Conference cemented a bureaucratic policy of mass murder, it was by no means the beginning of Nazi Germany's genocidal campaign against Jewish people. The decision to exterminate the population had already been made months, perhaps even years, before the meeting. According to historians such as Christopher Browning, the process of arriving at the "Final Solution," was slow and gradual, but genocide was always implied. Preparations were well under way, and killings already taking place. The Wannsee Conference merely served the function of consolidating and streamlining the entire process. Entire extermination camps were already under construction, including Belzec, one of the most infamous killing centers of the war. Even prior to the outbreak of war, a policy of persecution of Jews and other "non-desirables" existed in Nazi-controlled Germany. Many historians consider Kristallnacht (the Night of the Broken Glass, Nov. 9, 1938), to be the start of the Holocaust. However, even prior to this pogrom, state-sponsored racial and religious isolation sought to eliminate Jews from German society. The Nuremberg Laws were one of the most obvious examples of this state-sponsored racism. Introduced in 1935, these anti-Semitic policies forbade relationships between Jews and Germans, denied Jews the right to citizenship and established racial categories in order to disenfranchise Jews and deprive them of political and civic rights. Extreme violence against and even the murder of Jews was becoming commonplace by the eve of the war. The situation escalated rapidly after the invasion of Poland by German forces in 1939. Ghettos were established in German-occupied Poland, with various groups of Jews from all occupied territory being sent to these locations. Einsatzgruppen (special task forces) along with other mobile killing squads, murdered civilians as part of the push eastwards. By the summer of 1941, mass killings were continuous and ongoing. For example, mobile "gas vans," which killed people en masse with exhaust fumes, were already in use. Perhaps one of the most interesting aspects of the Einsatzgruppen is that they were often made up of "ordinary men," who were either too old to serve as army regulars or could not for various other reasons. These men were not seasoned Nazi political hardliners, but blue-collar Germans, who engaged in murder because of psychological and social conditioning. As the Nazi war machine rolled eastwards, the infrastructure of death was already beginning to be constructed. Railroads leading infamous death camps such as Auschwitz were built, and ghettos prepared and populated. With 1942 approaching, Hermann Göring, a top ranked Nazi official, who would later be the highest-ranked Nazi leader to be tried at Nuremberg, gave the orders to Reinhard Heydrich, the so-called main architect of the Holocaust: A plan was to be devised to account for the total solution of the Jewish question. That plan was crafted at Wannsee. ..By this then, however, the meeting was nothing more than a technicality. The framework of genocide was already in place, and the conference served as a way to centralize the mechanism and "ensure the smooth flow of deportations." By the end of the war in 1945, an estimated six million Jews—and millions of other victims such as Romanis, Freemasons, physically disabled people, Slavs, communists, homosexuals and others—lay dead in the wake of the genocide. Though the Wannsee Conference was an important moment in that deadly process, it was not the beginning.

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