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1942: The "Final Solution"
 pg. 390 
 
With the onset of World War II, the Nazi regime unleashed a barrage of propaganda that blamed the Jews for inciting world opinion against Germany. Traditional anti-Jewish stereotypes claiming that Jews controlled the media were exploited by the Nazis to demonstrate that the war was a product of international Jewry. Top-secret Gestapo reports suggest, however, that many Germans recognized the biases portrayed in governmental propaganda.
Photo: Roland Klemig / United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Photo Archive
The German government developed extensive plans for the "Aryan" resettlement of Eastern Europe. On November 12, 1942, the Generalgouvernement proclaimed the Zamosc region the "First Resettlement Area" in Poland. As a result, about 110,000 Poles were forcibly removed from approximately 300 villages in the area. In the process, more than 30,000 Polish children, among them the one pictured here, were taken from their parents. While some of these children died in concentration camps, those deemed to have "Aryan" characteristics were given to German families to raise.
Photo: Lydia Chagoll / United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Photo Archive
Otto Thierack

First as president theVolksgerichtshof (People's Court) and later as minister of justice, Otto Thierack used the law to subvert justice.

Thierack joined the Nazi Party in 1932 and became president of the People's Court of Berlin in 1936. As the nation's most feared judge, he handed down sentences with no appeal to those the Nazis declared enemies of the state. His slavish service to Nazi ideology earned him the post of minister of justice in 1942. That year, Thierack enacted Joseph Goebbels's proposal that various foreigners, especially Russians and Ukrainians, along with Jews and Gypsies, should be transferred to concentration camps and "exterminated through labor."

A Brigadeführer in the SS, Thierack permitted Heinrich Himmler to remove Jews and other "asocials" from the jurisdiction of the courts and turn them over to the SS. Captured in 1945, Thierack hanged himself before his trial.
Photo: William Gallagher/United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Photo Archive

 Mid-November 1942: Official sources in Great Britain, the United States, and neutral nations confirm the validity of the Gerhart Riegner cable regarding the "Final Solution"; See August 28, 1942; November 24, 1942.
 November 16, 1942: German troops occupy Tunisia; See May 7, 1943.
 November 19, 1942: Soviet forces begin a counterattack against the Germans near Stalingrad, Russia.
 November 19, 1942: Germans in Debica, Poland, announce that as of December 1, any Pole who assists Jews "will be punished by death."
 
1942: The "Final Solution"
 pg. 390 
The Holocaust Chronicle
© 2009 Publications International, Ltd.