Before the “Final Solution”. Toward a global history of the Nazi “Jewish Question”, 1919–45

When historians discuss the so-called “Jewish Question” (Judenfrage), it is almost always framed as a direct prelude to the “Final Solution” (Endlösung). By focusing on the Holocaust, it is often overlooked that the Final Solution emerged very late in the history of the Jewish Question. There was no comprehensive plan to murder European Jews until the start of Operation Reinhard in the winter and spring of 1941-1942, more than nine years after the Nazis seized power, nearly a quarter century after the foundation of the NSDAP, and at least a century after discussions of the Jewish Question began percolating widely across German and European politics, culture, and society. Equally as important, most victims of the Holocaust died in a period of just eleven months between mid-March 1942 and mid-1943. Collapsing the long and complicated history of the Jewish Question into the universal “vanishing point” of 1941-42 obscures as much as it reveals. Doing so ignores the fact that the Final Solution was the dominant scheme for fewer than three years and would almost certainly not have occurred––at least not to the same degree and scale––had some combination of these earlier “solutions” to the Jewish Question been deployed with greater efficiency or alacrity. To be sure, the very concept of a Jewish Question presupposes a problem to be solved, which in turn plays into the hands of anti-Semites and potentially encourages increasingly radical approaches. There is also no doubt regarding the culpability of the Third Reich in conceiving and carrying out the Final Solution. However, approaching the Nazi Jewish Question as merely a prelude to the Final Solution fails to account for decades of discussion, debate, and alternative methods that occurred in a transnational and often global context. The many strategies regarding the Jewish Question were defined by a variety of state and individual actors, only a minority of whom were German, much less (future) Nazis. Hence, neither the framing of the Jewish Question as a problem to be solved, nor the proposed solutions to that problem were possible without (geo) political, socioeconomic, cultural, and intellectual entanglements that extended beyond German-speaking Central Europe. These entangled histories of ethnicity, religion, and national identity; of disintegrating empires and emerging nation-states; of global capitalism and colonialism, and of race and space provide the context for the fundamental issues underlying any history of the Nazi Party’s Jewish Question.

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