Final solution

The final solution (German Endlösung) is the name of the German Nazis' plan to address the "Jewish problem" through systematic relocation and later extermination through genocide.

Heinrich Himmler was the main architect of the slaughter which would eventually exterminate three-quarters of all European Jews. On July 31, 1941, under instructions from Adolf Hitler, Nazi official Hermann Göring, ordered SS general Reinhard Heydrich to "submit to me as soon as possible a general plan of the administrative material and financial measures necessary for carrying out the desired final solution of the Jewish question."

Jewish ghettos and later concentration camps would be where the Nazis would concentrate Jewish populations in order to assist in their exploitation and later extermination.

The Wannsee conference, which took place in Berlin, am Großen Wannsee on January 20, 1942, was the discussion by a group of Nazi officials about the "final solution of the Jewish question".

The meeting is noted as the first discussion of the "final solution" and also because the records and minutes of the meeting were found intact by the Allies at the end of WW II and used during the Nuremberg Trials.

Much of the world now refers to the results of the "final solution" as the Holocaust.\n