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Judenjagd
The Final Solution was a plan that Heinrich Himmler and Adolf Hitler devised for the total destruction of the Jews during World War II. The plan’s full title is “Final Solution to the Jewish Question,” and it called for a highly organized systematic genocide that was initially implemented in Europe in the early 1940s. The Nazis believed that Germans were part of a master race and they had a vision of transforming the world into a racial utopia, free of Jews and other undesirables (such as Gypsies, people with mental illnesses, gay people, and other racial minorities). To that end, extermination camps were established all over Nazi-occupied territory in Europe, and many (like Treblinka and Sobibór, which Browning mentions frequently in Ordinary Men) were fitted with gas chambers that enabled the Nazis to kill large numbers of people very quickly and with much less bloodshed. Jews were rounded up from ghettos and either shot on the spot or sent to these extermination camps with the ultimate goal of making judenfrei areas for the German master race to settle in. One important thing to remember is that the Nazis did not begin World War II in order to launch the Final Solution and cause the Holocaust, but rather for geopolitical reasons (to regain lost territory after World War I). In actuality, the Final Solution came about because of their early success in the war. Feeling unstoppable, the Nazis believed that the war had given them the perfect opportunity to create a judenfrei Europe and that the war itself justified killing anyone they saw as an enemy.
The Final Solution Quotes in Ordinary Men
The Ordinary Men quotes below are all either spoken by The Final Solution or refer to The Final Solution. For each quote, you can also see the other terms and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Chapter 14
Quotes
But the “Jew hunt” was different. Once again they saw their victims face to face, and the killing was personal. More important, each individual policeman once again had a considerable degree of choice. How each exercised that choice revealed the extent to which the battalion had divided into the “tough” and the “weak.” In the months since Józefów many had become numbed, indifferent, and in some cases eager killers; others limited their participation in the killing process, refraining when they could do so without great cost or inconvenience. Only a minority of nonconformists managed to preserve a beleaguered sphere of moral autonomy that emboldened them to employ patterns of behavior and stratagems of evasion that kept them from becoming killers at all.
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Though the “Jew hunt” has received little attention, it was an important and statistically significant phase of the Final Solution. A not inconsiderable percentage of Jewish victims in the General Government lost their lives in this way. Statistics aside, the “Jew hunt” is a psychologically important key to the mentality of the perpetrators. Many of the German occupiers in Poland may have witnessed or participated in ghetto roundups on several occasions—in a lifetime, a few brief moments that could be easily repressed. But the “Jew hunt” was not a brief episode. It was a tenacious, remorseless, ongoing campaign in which the “hunters” tracked down and killed their “prey” in direct and personal confrontation. It was not a passing phase but an existential condition of constant readiness and intention to kill every last Jew who could be found.
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The Final Solution Term Timeline in Ordinary Men
The timeline below shows where the term The Final Solution appears in Ordinary Men. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 3: The Order Police and the Final Solution: Russia 1941
In Russia in 1941, the Order Police actively participates in the Final Solution for the first time. During preparations for Hitler’s planned invasion of Russia, special units of...
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Chapter 8: Reflections on a Massacre
...worst violence. This makes it easier for the battalion to continue their participation in the Final Solution .
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Chapter 9: Łomazy: The Descent of Second Company
...Lublin district, Gnade and the Second Company settle in the area of Biała Podlaska. The Final Solution began in this area in June 1942 with the deportation of 3,000 Jews to Sobibór....
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Chapter 14: The “Jew Hunt”
...judenjagd is not just one big event, but a prolonged and important phase of the Final Solution .
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...September 1943. This supports Browning’s assertion that the judenjagd is an important part of the Final Solution . Because it goes on for so long, is so violent, and occurs so often,...
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Chapter 15: The Last Massacres: “Harvest Festival”
...the district of Lublin is essentially judenfrei and Reserve Police Battalion 101’s participation in the Final Solution ends. Using conservative estimates of about 6,500 Jews shot at mass executions like Józefów, 1,000...
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Chapter 17: Germans, Poles, and Jews
...hostile. This might be because they naturally had more contact with Poles who supported the Final Solution by helping them find Jews hiding in the forest or even trying to get favors...
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Chapter 18: Ordinary Men
...has is whether the policemen in the battalion were specially selected to help implement the Final Solution . He concludes that this is almost definitely not the case; in fact, the middle-aged,...
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