The Holocaust: the unfinished Final Solution

How explain the Holocaust? The Final Solution to the West’s Jewish Problem is typically viewed as an outgrowth of the Second World War. Might it not have been the reverse, that the Final Solution was a major factor in inspiring the Second World War? Certainly the Jews did not start the war, nor even the Russians, but Germany under the charismatic leadership of Adolph Hitler.

Germany started the war with the apparent intention of opening up lebensraum for the “future needs” of the German “master race.” The Poles were, by Germany’s racial formula inferior, worthy only of servitude under their Aryan masters. As Germany viewed Poland the country provided vast territories for German colonization, was already underpopulated and, following “culling” of the educated and other elites, would be even more so. To the eugenics’ guided thinking of the German Third Reich the conquest of Poland was rational and economical. But an extermination program aimed at the Jews? Why the Jews?

The Jews were scattered throughout the Western Diaspora, tiny minorities wherever they were found. Even in Poland they numbered fewer than 10%. Clearly there was nothing material to be gained by National Socialism’s intention, “to murder each and every Jew” it could get its hands on. Had Germany triumphed in the war, an outcome considered possible by the Allies before “Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of Russia, in all likelihood no Jews would have survived, the entire planet would today be judenrein.

In the last three years of the war, when it was increasingly apparent that Germany could lose the war, when rationally, if the war aim was victory against the Allies, all available resources should have committed to stopping the Allied invasion, to protecting the Homeland. Instead Germany provided ever-increasing resources to killing the Jews, built more death camps; increasingly diverted precious transport and manpower resources to the Final Solution. Why the Jews?

According to how one chooses to read the facts, Dawidowicz title for her history of the Holocaust, The War Against the Jews may accurately reflect the primary war aim, more important than Aryan lebensraum, more important even than stopping the Allies at Normandy, protecting the homeland. How else understand Germany’s allocation of resources in those last years?

The evidence regarding Hitler’s intentions, Germany’s war aims can as well recommend that assuming the Holocaust in context of the Second World War may be putting the shoe on the wrong foot. Perhaps the Second World War is better viewed within the context of the West’s Jewish Problem. And the implications of that reading have seriously impact future Jewish survival in the West.

The “Jewish Problem” is not a 20^th century invention but a twenty-century-long irritant born with the separation of a small messianic Jewish sect from the parent religion. Mid-century Germany provided leadership in resolving that problem, undertook to solve it once and for all. But the Final Solution failed and, as a result, the West’s Jewish Problem remains, as yet unresolved.