Translated material
"Final decision"
The International Day of Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust is celebrated on January 27. It was established by the UN General Assembly on the proposal of a number of injured countries, including Russia. The date was chosen due to the fact that on this day the Soviet troops in 1945 entered the territory of the German death camp of Aushvitz-Birkenau, organized next to the ancient Polish city of Auschwitz, and saw a terrible picture of what people can reach their hatred of their like. However, the process of dividing part of the population of the German Empire proceeded very slowly. 90 years ago, on February 28, 1933, the decree of the Reichsprezident of Germany Paul von Gindenburg “On the Protection of the People and the State”, which canceled the civil rights, the Verordnung desuspronsprinten zum schutz von volk und Staat) was issued. In the short term, the decree acquired the most important importance for the “legal” coming to the power of the National Socialists and the foundation of the Third Reich. The Nazis devoted the whole subsequent decade to the solution of the “Jewish question” by certain means, but the most terrible changes occurred after the start of the war with the USSR and the occupations of territories inhabited by a large number of Jewish population 1 . And it was the Soviet prisoners of war that became the first to experience gas chambers on whom. However, since the beginning of the war, there were still a variety of “options”. And only 81 years ago, on January 20, 1942, at the “conferences”, which took place in the Berlin suburb of Vanze2, was the most terrifying “final decision”, which sentenced the whole nation. Formally, the meeting, which decided the fate of millions of Jews, was not even the highest leaders, officials of a lower rank, participated. But as a result of this meeting, a debugged state system of murder of people on an industrial scale arose, which formed the basis of the total genocide of the Jewish population - what will later be called the Holocaust.
The secret Vanzey Conference was attended by a relatively small circle of persons (only 15 people), and it lasted only one and a half to two hours. The decisions voiced on it were more likely to be a technical nature, since everything was fundamentally determined in advance, it was only a meeting of performers who distributed a circle of duties on their departments. The protocol containing 15 pages, by 1945, tried to destroy almost all the participants - there was only one copy that its owner could not burn because he himself got into the concentration camp.
Formally, the head of the Main Directorate of Imperial Security Reinhard Heydrich was responsible for the organization of the “conference” - it was he who was appointed by German Goering responsible for the “final solution of the Jewish question” on July 31, 1941. From Heydrich, it was necessary to draw up a “general project” on the organization and implementation of this undertaking with an assessment of the corresponding expenses. And on November 29, 1941, Heydrich sent personal invitations to his colleagues, choosing a cozy mansion in the picturesque suburb of Berlin, built by eccentric entrepreneur Ernst Marlier, who escaped to Switzerland. (Marlier produced and advertised pseudo -electional homeopathic drugs, but went bankrupt and in 1921 was forced to sell his villa by the industrialist Friedrich Min, and he, in turn, was in prison, at the urgent “request” lost it in 1940 to the Nordhav Nazi Foundation, which was controlled by the SS and personally by Heydrich.
First, the conference was appointed on December 9, 1941, then postponed several times-then in connection with the counter-offset of the Red Army near Moscow, then because of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor and the entry into the US war.
However, on January 20, 1942, the Vanzey Conference 2 still took place, and it was attended by representatives of the most important ministries of Nazi Germany - the Ministry of Justice, Foreign Affairs, the agency of nationality and relocation, as well as the institutions responsible for the distribution of Jewish property, and the leadership of state institutions directly involved in the “Solution of the Jewish Question”, the Gestapo and SS Security Service.
Two -third of the time allotted to the “conference” was taken by the performance of Heydrich himself. The discussion was short, and at that time the present preferred to speak with abysses, not calling a spade a spade. However, after the official part, in a more private environment, they exchanged no one by embarrassment, without euphemisms and allegories - about the murders, the liquidation and destruction of the Jews. This was told in 1961 by Adolf Eichmann when he was judged in Jerusalem 3 .
Adolf Eichman, the head of the “Jewish” department of the Gestapo and Obersturmbanfuhrer SS, played the second most important role in the preparation and holding of this conference. Together with the secretary, he conducted the protocol of the meeting and, according to his results, on January 31, 1942 he sent orders to the command staff of the police, secret services and heads of diabetes. They contained detailed instructions for the preparation of the deportation of the Jews of Germany, Austria, the Czech Republic, etc. It was from this moment that the systematic and carefully planned genocide began, although the mass killings of Jews have been known since the second half of 1941. Among the participants in the “conference” was both the Gestapo-man Heinrich Müller and a number of officials, whom international courts later found “insignificantly guilty”-they were released by serving short terms, and died in the 1980s in retirement. However, the main organizers of the Vanzey Conference - Heydrich and Eichmann - still did not leave retaliation. Eichmann was already said about Eichmann, and Heydrich paid a lot earlier - his liquidation took place on May 27, 1942 as a result of the Anthropoid diversion operation, carried out jointly by the British special service and the National Committee for the Liberation of Czechoslovakia ( She turned into cruel repression) 4 . German Goering committed suicide in a prison cell in anticipation of the execution on October 15, 1946, 5 .
The protocol of the Vanzey Conference does not contain references to the physical destruction of all Jews, about gas chambers and crematoriums, it is said only about "hard labor, which, hoping, the majority will die." The rest of the Jews will have to be subjected to “appropriate processing”. Gas chambers in this specific language were called "special treatment." The Nazis sought not to advertise the “conference” itself and their methods, the population of Germany was not at all informed that the Jews were physically destroyed - it was believed that the “evacuated” work for the good of the country, redeem the “guilt” of their people (but to guess what was happening, it was not difficult for citizens).
The attached certificate provides the “Front of Work” - the total number of Jews in Europe (most in Ukraine - 3 million, the least 200 people in Albania, but they were not forgotten by meteral officials). According to the most authoritative estimates, as a result of the implementation of all these plans in Europe, up to half of all Jews died, and half of these dead falls on the USSR.
The audience willingly joked and did not experience visible remorse. It is especially noted that the participants in the meeting are highly educated and well -informed people who are well familiar with the “problem” discussed, and more than half of those present at the meeting possessed doctoral degrees awarded by him by German universities. They could not help but understand that “evacuation to the east” was euphemism for deportation to concentration camps, and the “final decision” meant precisely that the physical destruction of all Jews. They only needed to choose the fastest and most “economically justified” methods for this.
According to many researchers, which is consistent, in particular, with the testimony of a senior SS figure Diter Viclicius, an approach to the solution of a “Jewish problem” in the Third Reich survived several stages.
Initially - until 1940 - they tried to “decide” it with the help of relocation and the expulsion of the Jews outside the German Empire. Then came the turn of the ghetto, organized mainly in the East European regions, in particular, in Poland. In Warsaw on October 16, 1940, Governor General Hans Frank decided to organize the largest ghetto-both in area and in the number of inhabitants. There were more than a third of a million Jews, or approximately a third of the entire urban population (on a piece of land, which was only 2–4% of the city area). The exit from the ghetto without permission was originally punished by the “only” prison, then this was already threatened with death, and from November 16, 1941, the ghetto was fenced off from other city with a wall. Thus, a segregation of the Jewish population was carried out, which was immediately ruined, lost, and turned off from all the spheres of social and economic life - it was to a state where only heavy physical (frankly slave) labor could provide survival.
In the third period - with the so -called final solution to the Jewish issue - it was just a decision on the systematic, albeit not advertised destruction of the entire Jewish people, to which the Nazis to a large extent prompted the beginning of the war with the USSR. In the rapidly occupied territories of Belarus and Ukraine, they were faced with a large number of Jewish population, which was difficult to “maintain”, and they immediately began to exterminate it.
On October 23, 1941, Jewish emigration from the occupied territories was completely banned, the first destruction camps began to operate since December, experiments were carried out on mass poisoning by the Cyclone B gas, it was tested primarily for Soviet prisoners of war.
Researchers of the Holocaust argue about whether the idea of the need to destroy all Jews was inherent in Nazism from the very beginning. One way or another, Hitler did not hide his intentions even when only went to power - all this is present in his book Mein Kampf. It’s just that at first it seemed at first a polemic exaggeration, jokes and the desire to quickly gain popularity among a non -in -law public, during the war it was able to gain real and truly monstrous forms.
By the end of the war, when the coming defeat of Germany was no longer around the mountains, some Nazi leadership had thoughts about the use of the remaining Jews for bargaining during negotiations about the world and the need to hide the true scale of their extermination. However, the most odious part of the apex, led by Hitler, manic continued to demand the total extermination of everyone who was still alive. But at the same time, during the retreats, the Nazis nevertheless always sought to destroy evidence of the existence of death camps, and were engaged in the export of the buried remains of the executed. And after the war, they often denied their personal participation in the extermination of unarmed people and in every possible way downplay the scope of this phenomenon.
Maxim Borisov
1 gazeta.ru/science/2021/09/28_a_14030995.shtml
2 gazeta.ru/science/2022/01/20/14437567.shtml
3 gazeta.ru/science/2021/12/15_a_14317237.shtml