final solution

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(To the Jewish question; German Endlosung der Judenfrage) euphemism used by the Nazis to describe the extermination of Jews (and other racial groups and opponents of the regime) before and during World War II in the Holocaust.

The term came from a statement in May 1941 by SS commander Heinrich Himmler to Rudolf Hoess, commandant of Auschwitz concentration camp, that Hitler had given orders ‘for the final solution of the Jewish question’. Extermination squads (Einsatzgruppen) were formed and extermination camps such as Auschwitz, Sobibor, Treblinka, and Maidanek were established in Poland to which Jews were shipped from all parts of German-occupied Europe to be killed by gas or shooting. Accounting was slipshod, and no accurate figure can ever be reached, but the best estimates suggest that about 5.75 million Jews, and a further million Romanies, communists, Soviet prisoners, incurable invalids, homosexuals, and other Untermenschen (‘subhumans’) were murdered.

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