What was the Germans' motive for the 'Final Solution'?

Answer 1

Irrational hatred and scapegoating of Jews.

Germany had gone into great depression after WW2. This ruined Germany's nation pride. They were forced to take the blame of the war. the Germans believed that it was the Jews fault that they had lost the war.

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Hitler saw it as his mission in life to rid Europe (and the world) of what he called 'Jewish Bolshevism [Communism]'. He assumed that most Jews were Communists, and that Communism was a specifically Jewish ideology.

Answer 2

There is disagreement among historians about Hitler's motives and none of the suggestions is entirely satisfactory.

Until the 1960s it was widely assumed that from a fairly early age Hitler was rabidly and obsessively antisemitic and drew up a master plan for the extermination of the Jews by 1925 at the latest. There is no sound evidence for this view and it is at odds with the Nazi policy, until August 1941, of bullying Jews in Germany and many occupied countries into leaving Germany and areas under German control.

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Some people look for a single devastating experience as a boy or young man, but one needs to be cautious about psychohistory. When his mother died of Breast cancer in 1907 he wrote a letter of thanks to the Jewish surgeon who had treated her. This suggests that he wasn't rabidly antisemitic at that stage.

Ian Kershaw, in his biography of Hitler, suggests two possible sources for Hitler's rabid antisemitism: (1) a growing belief, among hardline German right-wingers, towards the end of World War 1 and afterwards in conspiracy theories claiming that there 'Jewish subversives' at work wrecking the homefront; (2) he found that ranting against 'Judeo-Bolshevist' conspirators brought him wild applause in the beer halls of Bavaria, and that this became part of his stock-in-trade.

Hitler's style of leadership encouraged increasing extremism. Though a very successful orator, he was in many ways a chaotic and lazy leader with few leadership qualities. (See Ian Kershaw's biography). He ranted like crazy, and then let those under him try to work out the details of policy. As a result, they competed with one another to try to guess what Hitler 'really wanted'; and each interest group tried to become more extreme than the others. Hence the rapidly increasing extremism (radicalization) of Nazi policy. He then picked picked out various plans presented to him and rejected others.

Hitler allowed the terror apparatus under Himmler (a fanatical racist and believer in 'Judeo-Bolshevist' conspiracy theories) and the able and assiduous Heydrich to become an extremely powerful interest group and lobby, second only to the regular armed forces.

Until August 1941, official policy was to bully German Jews into emigrating to countries beyond Germany's sphere of power. In a few cases Jews from occupied countries were allowed to leave (if they could find somewhere to go, which was extremely hard). However, the invasions of of 1939-41 added vast numbers to the 'Jewish problem' that the Nazis created for themselves.

Clearly, there was a change in Nazi policy, some time between September and December, 1941.

In Poland the Nazis forced the Jews into ghettos. Almost everywhere in Germany and German-occupied countries the Jews were increasingly excluded from society and were often unable to earn a living. This turned them into a multiple problem in the eyes of the Nazis.

The terror apparatus had all kinds of poorly thought out and unrealistic schemes for 'resettlement in eastern Europe'. In practice, this meant occupied Poland, but many of the German administators there complained bitterly about the 'impossibility' of using Poland as a dumping ground for ever increasing numbers of so-called 'undesirables'. Hitler and his henchman then 'thought the unthinkable' ... Given their blind hatred of the Jews they were increasingly willing to commit genocide. Time and again, Hitler said he wanted this area and that area cleared of Jews and would not ask later how it had been done.

Obviously, this is a 'functionalist' view and runs counter to the notion that Hitler had a master plan for the Holocaust from about 1925 or even earlier. Lest there be any misunderstanding about it, responsibility lies with Hitler. He ranted and raved about the Jews as 'Bolshevists', as part of a 'world conspiracy' allegedly trying 'to destroy Germany'. He bears responsiblity for his style of leadership, which encouraged the growth of the terror apparatus.

However, none of these explanations is in itself entirely satisfactory, and more recently some historians, including Ian Kershaw and Yehuda Bauer, have tried to synthesize the key hypotheses.

Hitler was a devotee of conspiracy theories to the effect the 'the Jews' were seeking world domination.

"The basic motivation [of the Holocaust] was purely ideological, rooted in an illusionary world of Nazi imagination, where an international Jewish conspiracy to control the world was opposed to a parallel Aryan quest. No genocide to date had been based so completely on myths, on hallucinations, on abstract, nonpragmatic ideology - which was then executed by very rational, pragmatic means."

Yehuda Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust, New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002, p.48. (Quoted in Wikipedia article on the Holocaust, accessed 31 March 2009).

Whether Hitler took such notions altogether seriously or used them partly for the purpose of Propaganda is, however, another matter. Certainly, the view of the Jews as dangerous, diabolically cunning schemers did not accord with the Nazi view of them as an inferior race.

Other historians, such as Arno Mayer are more inclined to see the Holocaust as part of a wider campaign to rid the world of what the Nazis called 'Jewish Communism'.

For a detailed study of the origins of the Holocaust, see:

• Christopher Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution : The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939 - March 1942, Lincoln : University of Nebraska Press, 2004.
• Peter Longerich, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews. Oxford: University Press. 2010. ISBN 978-0-19-280436-5.

Answer 3

To exterminate all Jews from Europe and specifically any German or German-held territory.

The goal of the Final Solution was the complete elimination of all Jews in Europe.

The Final Solution was named thus because the other solutions such as deportations had been eliminated as a possibility.

To kill all Jews within Europe by genocide

He wanted to rid Europe of all its Jews, therefore the final solution involved the extermination of the Jews, first by shooting them and keeping them confined in ghettos, then finally by sending them to death camps like Treblinka and Auschwitz-Birkenau, and also he wanted to kill all Jehovah's Witnesses, by putting them in concentration camps sentencing them to death.

Answer 4

The Final Solution of the Jewish Question (German Endl

Answer 5

He wanted to kill all Jews, disabled, mentally challenged, and others.

Answer 6

To be Jew free.