592 Chapter 29known as the Final Solution (Endlösung). The Final Solu-
tion was mass murder; approximately eleven million
people were killed in the Nazi camps. Gypsies, homo-
sexuals, Communists, the handicapped, the mentally ill,
and members of sects such as the Jehovah’s Witnesses
were all marked for extermination, and they died in large
numbers—from 5,000 German and Austrian homosexu-
als to 200,000 gypsies. Millions of Poles and Soviet pris-
oners of war (both nations were Untermenschen, or
subhumans, in the Nazi racial cosmology) also perished
in the German concentration camps. But the Final Solu-
tion was aimed first at the Jews, nearly 6 million of
whom were killed (two-thirds of all European Jews),
including 1.5 million children (see illustration 29.5).
Under the direction of Himmler, Reinhard Hey-
drich, and Adolph Eichmann, the concentration camps
became a universe of slave labor and starvation, then of
brutality so savage that it included medical experimen-
tation on live people and ultimately factories for the ef-
ficient killing of people. Nazi officials had begun to
discuss “a complete solution of the Jewish question” in
1941, and the concentration camps started to become
death camps that year. Then in January 1942, fifteen
leading Nazi officials met at Wannsee, in suburban
Berlin, to plan genocide; in the Wannsee Protocol, they
pledged to achieve the Final Solution. This led to grisly
experimentation to find an efficient means of commit-
ting genocide: Sobibor killed 200,000–250,000 people
by carbon monoxide poisoning, before the managers of
the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex discovered the effi-
ciencies of Zyclon-B (a form of Prussic acid) for gassing
inmates. Poison gas was typically administered to
groups of people locked into large rooms made to
resemble showers; great furnaces were built to burn the
bodies. More than 1.1 million people were killed in this
way at Auschwitz, and meticulous Nazi bureaucrats
kept detailed records of their murders. At his postwar
trial, the Nazi commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf
Hoess, calmly described the entire procedure (see doc-
ument 29.2).
The Holocaust witnessed heroism amid the horror.
Fascist Italy joined in anti-Semitic legislation (such as a
1938 law forbidding intermarriage with Jews) and had
interned foreign-born Jews, but Mussolini resisted
genocide and refused to deport forty-four thousand
Jews to the death camps, enabling 85 percent of Italian
Jews to survive the war. Although Vichy France simi-
larly collaborated by deporting foreign-born Jews, a
heroic Protestant village in southern France, Le Cham-
bon, led by Pastor André Tromé, saved five thousand
Jews by hiding them, and a Capuchin monk at Mar-
seille, Marie Benoît, saved four thousand by providing
papers allowing them to escape. Danes ferried Jews to
safety in Sweden so effectively that seven thousand
Danish Jews escaped and only fifty-one died in the
camps. A single Swedish diplomat, Raoul Wallenberg,
organized a system that saved ten thousand Budapest
Jews. (In a tragic irony, Wallenberg himself died in
Soviet captivity.) A German businessman, Oscar
Schindler, saved Jews from Auschwitz by taking them
to work in his factory. Jewish self-defense also had no-
table moments: In April 1942 the Jewish ghetto of War-
saw fought back and killed five thousand German
soldiers.Illustration 29.5
Nazi Concentration Camps.One
of the first concentration camps liber-
ated by Allied armies was Bergen-Belsen
in northwestern Germany, a camp origi-
nally opened in 1941 for Allied prisoners
of war but converted by Himmler into a
camp for Jews from western Europe (in-
cluding Anne Frank) in 1943. When the
British army entered Bergen-Belsen in
April 1945, they found thousands of un-
buried bodies (shown here) and, as the
BBC reported, thousands of “scarcely hu-
man, moaning skeletons” who had been
without food or water for five days.