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Did Hitler Approve the “Final Solution” 80 Years Ago This Month?
One theory suggests the decision came on December 12, 1941
There exist no written orders authorizing Adolf Hitler’s “Final Solution” — the systematic extermination of Europe’s Jews. It’s unknown if one ever existed or, if so, if it was destroyed before the end of World War II. History shows high-ranking Nazis met in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee on January 20, 1942, to implement the policy. German historian Christian Gerlach believes Hitler ordered the Final Solution in December 1941.
Nazi policy toward the Jews was clear from the outset. In 1920, the Nazi Party platform said that “no Jew may be a member of the [German] nation.” In 1922, Hitler told a journalist, “If I am ever really in power, the destruction of the Jews will be my first and most important job.”
Between Hitler becoming German Chancellor in January 1933 and the start of the war in September 1939, the Nazis enacted hundreds of decrees and laws discriminating against Jews. And, on January 30, 1939, Hitler told the Reichstag, “I want today to be a prophet again: if international finance Jewry inside and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, the result will be not the Bolshevization of the earth and thereby the victory of Jewry, but the…
