The Final Solution

• How many Jews and other ‘undesirables’ were murdered during the Holocaust? 

  About 6 million Jews and about 5 million others.  
• Where and when was the Final Solution agreed upon? 

  At the Wannsee Conference on 20th January 1942.  
• Who chaired the meeting at Wannsee? 

  Reinhard Heydrich - second in command of the SS.  
• Which was given a higher focus when the war turned against Germany: the killing of the Jews or military needs? 

  The killing of the Jews.  
• Which event caused Goebbels to give his ‘total war’ speech?  

  The German defeat at Stalingrad in February 1943.  
• After Stalingrad, which other 2 events caused the Jews to be targeted more so?  

  The heightened Allied bombing campaign in 1943. 

  The D-Day landings in 1944.  
• At what late point did the Nazis start trying to conceal what they had been doing to the Jews? 

  November 1944 (e.g. the crematorium at Auschwitz was blown up).  
• What is the difference between a concentration camp and a death camp? 

  Not all concentration camps became places of extermination. But a death camp’s purpose was to kill the inmates.  
• Which gas was settled upon as the favoured method of gassing inmates? 

  Zyklon B - a rat poison.  
• What other Death Camps existed other than Aushwitz

  -Treblinka 

  -Belzec 

  -Sobibor 

  -Chelmno 
• Which Jewish brothers fought from within Polish forestland and saved 1200 Jews from the Nazis?  

  The Bielski brothers.  
• Which Jewish uprising lasted from Jan 1943 to May 1943? 

  The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising - the Germans required massive military firepower to crush this uprising.  
• How many people died on the death marches as the Nazis began to move the camp inmates westward in 1944?  

  Between 250,000 and 400,000.