Professor Jane Caplan - 'What’s in a Name? From ‘The Final Solution of the Jewish Question’ to ‘The Holocaust’

 

This evening I want us to consider how and why these terms have become attached to the historical events the identify, and to begin with this point:  Whereas there has been a good deal of commentary on the origin and meaning of the word ‘Holocaust’, the ‘Final Solution of the Jewish Question’ is less often discussed, and it also tends to be abbreviated to its convenient first half, ‘the Final Solution’.   The ‘Jewish Question’ thereby recedes into unspoken distance, so I’ll be paying particular attention to this.    

 

I’m going to start by invoking from another phrase that has become the watchword of Holocaust remembrance: ‘Never Again’.   ‘Never Again’ demands that we must never forget the Nazis’ attempt to exterminate Europe’s Jews, nor allow another such genocidal catastrophe to overtake humanity.   I’d like to begin by looking at something that is suggested by this phrase, but less explicitly noticed.  This is its implicit but silent correlate, ‘Never Before’.  If ‘Never Again’ is an injunction for the future, ‘Never Before’ is a description of the challenge that met the first postwar historians, as they struggled to find adequate words for a deed that appeared so overwhelming and unprecedented.   This is not an original point: there are now whole literatures on the historical antecedents and parallels to the Nazi destruction of the European Jews, on the necessity or impossibility of comparison, and on the challenge of representation on the grand scale.  But what I want to discuss today here is something more modest but no less important.  A name was needed for this deed; but what should that name be?     

 

The celebrated historian of the Nazi destruction of the European Jews Raul Hilberg (d. 2007), who began his research in the silence of the late 1940s, reflected on this question more than once: 

 

At the very beginning, references to the Holocaust were cloudy.  The phenomenon had no name … There was as yet no word for what had happened … The vocabulary with which to describe what had happened had not yet been developed … The entire process had not yet been grasped.

(Incompleteness p81; Development p226).

 

Hilberg felt himself confronted by an almost impossible task of historical reconstruction, which encompassed a deed so massive in scope and so unprecedented in character that even its perpetrators found it hard to name.  As the scale and enormity of the deed acquired definition after 1945, it seemed to deny historians any conceivable vocabulary or narrative strategy.  And no language meant no history, or at best a fragmented history of mass murder and atrocity, told mostly through the postwar tribunals and survivor memoirs.  Even when a tentative lexicon began to surface, Hilberg rejected much of it, because he refused as a matter of principle to use any words with abhorrent or belittling resonances.  This ruled out, for example, the term ‘extermination’, with its association of the victims with ‘vermin’, or words like ‘murder’ or ‘execution’ with their judicial undertones.  

 

For this reason, when Hilberg finally found a publisher for his monumental study in 1961, the title he gave it was The Destruction of the European Jews, using a blunt but neutral term that carried no pejorative or ethical associations.  Hilberg’s choice of language also embodied a deliberate choice of perspective and interpretation: he focussed not on the experience and suffering of the Jews under the Nazi onslaught, but on the decisions, policies, procedures and actions of the bureaucrats in the civil service, the business sector, the Nazi Party and the military hierarchy who perpetrated their destruction.  As he wrote: ‘This is not a book about Jews.  It is a book about the people who destroyed the Jews’.  In other words, it was not a book of Jewish history, but a book about what he called ‘Western history’.

 

What took centre-stage in Hilberg’s strategy was ‘the vast organization of the Nazi machinery of destruction and the men who performed important functions in this machine’ (Destruction, p.v).  When he comes to write about the gas chambers, he describes their installation and use in unembellished factual and objective terms.  There are no descriptions of SS men barking orders, or terrified Jews awaiting their fate.

 

Nevertheless, Hilberg’s manuscript was rejected by several US publishers on the very grounds that he had sought to avoid: viz. that it was too subjective, and also devoted exclusively to a topic of relatively marginal historical importance.  As a result, it was  beaten to publication by another pioneering study, this one by the British scholar Gerald Reitlinger.  Reitlinger’s  book The Final Solution. The Attempt to Exterminate the Jews of Europe 1939-1945 appeared in Britain in 1953 and in Germany in 1956.  Reitlinger was evidently less troubled by Hilberg’s scruples about language, and he was forthright about what was meant by ‘The Final Solution of the Jewish Problem’.  It was ‘a code-name for Hitler’s [NB] plans to exterminate the Jews of Europe … used by German officials after the summer of 1941 in order to avoid the necessity of admitting even among themselves that such plans existed’ (p.3). 

 

Let’s look more closely at that alleged code-name, ‘the final solution of the Jewish Problem’.  Towards the end of September 1939, the SS/SD leader in charge of Jewish matters, Reinhard Heydrich, had made a distinction in a memo between the secret ‘final goal’ (Endziel) of Nazi anti-Jewish policy in Poland and the intermediate ‘short-term’ (kurzfristig) stages towards this goal (Heydrich to SiPo chief, 21.9.39; Longerich p253).   For those in the know, the ‘final goal’ at this time was the mass deportation of German and Polish Jews into reservations, by methods that would inevitably (and intentionally) result in mass death from starvation and privation.  Variants of this distinction surface in later documents (e.g. Nah- and Fernplan, Heydrich Nov.; Longerich p263), and in December 1939 the SD Jewish desk prepared an extensive memo on ‘die Endlösung des deutschen Judenproblems‘ (Longerich p265).   A memo by Eichmann from December 1940, entitled ‘Die Judenfrage’, contrasted the ‘initial solution [Anfangslösung] of the jewish Question by emigration’ with the ‘Endlösung der Judenfrage’ by mass deportation/resettlement (Umsiedlung) (Löw, Verfolgung u. Ermordung, vol. 3, p336).)  By the end of July 1941, after many vicissitudes in concept and plan, the invasion of the Soviet Union seemed finally to open a clear path to a murderous ‘final solution’.  Hitler’s deputy Göring, using authority given to him by Hitler, charged Heydrich with the task of:

 

carrying out all necessary preparations with regard to organizational, practical and material matters for bringing about a comprehensive solution [Gesamtlösung] of the Jewish question in the German sphere of influence in Europe… I [Hitler] further charge you to send me in due course a comprehensive plan [Gesamtentwurf] concerning the organizational, practical and material measures necessary for the accomplishment of the desired final solution the Jewish question [Endlösung der Judenfrage].

 

Now, how and why did this phrase, ‘Final solution of the Jewish Question’, come to be available to SS/SD bureaucrats?  Was it a term they coined as a bureaucratic convenience? Or if it wasn’t, where did it come from?  And is it best understood as a euphemism for something unspecified and unspeakable?  

 

Although it is now commonly abbreviated as Endlösung, ‘Final Solution’, the full phrase combines two elements:, as I have already said: ‘Final Solution’ and ‘the Jewish Question’.  The more familiar half, ‘Final Solution’, is a shorthand for the program that, by 1941, was to embrace the mass destruction of Europe’s Jewish populations.  But what about the rest of it – the Judenfrage, ‘the Jewish Question’, or Jewish Problem?   This word was in no way a Nazi coinage, and it’s worth looking into its history.  

The proposition that there was something called a ‘Jewish Question’ was a product of the emancipation of Jews in Europe in the broader transition from a post-feudal to a modern bourgeois political and social order, in which all [male] citizens were treated equally before the law, irrespective of religion or race.  As articulated from the late 18^th century, the Jewish Question can be reduced to this: How could anyone simultaneously be fully a citizen while also remaining fully a Jew?  Could a Jew be a regular member of civil society, or did he belong to an extraneous community, one that retained its own historic identity and difference? (Toury p95).  To put it the other way round, did the price of Jewish emancipation and citizenship have to be the renunciation of the Jewish diaspora’s historic ethno-religious identity?

 

This was a conundrum debated throughout Europe, but it was given extra salience in 19^th-century Germany.  As emancipation took off in the 1830s and 1840s, definitions of the Jewish Question and proposals for its ‘solution’ were canvassed in a lively pamphlet literature, authored by Jews and non-Jews alike.   What gave it an extra edge in Germany was the fact that what ‘Germany’ was, and who was a German, were not fully resolved even after the era of unification.   As a result, the Jewish Question became part of a larger ‘German Question’, where it remained a matter of contention at a deep political, ideological and emotional level.  Open controversy subsided in the mid-century, but it never entirely vanished, and it surfaced again, with a vengeance, in the 1880s and the 1890s.   

 

By the 1880s, the Question had mutated, and so had the character and tone of antisemitism (the term was coined by the journalist Wilhelm Marr in 1879).    Germany’s ‘Jewish Question’ had first been articulated as the challenge of Jewish emancipation and civic integration in the modern political order, but its resurgence was powered by the entry of Germany onto the geopolitical stage after 1871, and also by the shock of the long economic depression that took hold after 1873.  Jews as a group were alleged to have reaped huge economic and cultural benefits from their new opportunities in modernizing society, to the detriment of non-Jewish Germans.   In the hands of the increasingly organized antisemites, this claim was reimagined in increasingly violent terms, pillorying Jewish Germans as the perpetrators of a strategic campaign of racial domination that was poisoning the lifeblood of the German people.

 

The existence of this ‘Jewish Question’ logically implied the need for an answer, the more so since ‘the Jews’ were conflated in antisemitic discourse with the crisis of modernity itself.  Thus the existence of a menacing ‘Jewish Question’ that demanded a radical solution was widely trumpeted in late nineteenth-century Germany.  By then the argument was no longer about the terms of Jewish emancipation, but about its allegedly corrosive results.  Emancipation had been intended to remove confessional Judaism as a formal impediment to full citizenship.  But in the eyes of antisemites this strategy had failed.  Jews remained Jews.  They were on the march to destroy Germany, and the question for antisemites was how emancipation could be reversed: How could Germany resolve its Jewish Question once and for all?

 

Antisemitic ideology also gathered fresh momentum from the penetration of a new biologized concept of race into political discourse.  This embodied the idea that a people was an organic racial community that was vulnerable to physical menaces from external forces.  A language of infections and parasites was emerging on the further reaches of antisemitic polemics.  With this, Jews could be represented not just as cultural aliens who could never be German, but as physical threats that must be eliminated.   

 

I want to spend a moment more on this.   The late 19^th-century pamphlet literature was replete with calls and proposals for the solution of the Jewish question, for a ‘complete and lasting solution [volle und dauernde Lösung] of the Jewish Question’, for a ‘fundamental and final solution [gründliche und endgültige Lösung]’.  I’m quoting here from an 1897 text by a complicated figure, Carl Friedrich Heman, a pastor in the evangelical church whose father was a convert from Judaism and himself also a pastor.  Heman was a fount of all the usual antisemitic stereotypes; at the same time he collaborated with the Zionist pioneer Theodor Herzl and helped him to organize the first World Zionist Congress in 1897.  Like others, Heman insisted that ‘The Jewish question can be solved by no one other than the Jews themselves’, which deliberately implies that they are responsible for their Question.  He called on the Jews to recognize that only Zionism could deliver a ‘thoroughgoing (gründlich) solution of the Jewish Question’.  Zionism offered a geopolitical solution to the question that emancipation had failed to solve in the realm of culture and identity.   Thus Herzl’s own groundbreaking publication of 1896, Der Judenstaat, was subtitled ‘Considerations for a Modern Solution to the Jewish Question’ (Versuch einer modernen Lösung der Judenfrage).  Zionism promised to remove the Jewish Question from Germany by removing the Jews. 

 

‘Removal’ was supposedly the antonym of ‘assimilation’, and was a common trope of both antisemites and Zionists.   But it was an empty or elastic term, available to be filled with a range of possible meanings, from removal of difference by assimilation, to a vaguer invocation of removal by emigration or expulsion, or potentially something more severe.   In my reading for this lecture, I was struck by a characteristic rhetorical move in this antisemitic literature, in which an author conjured the possibility that removal might mean physical destruction, only to dismiss it.  In 1933, for example, the theologian Gerhard Kittel listed four possible answers to the Jewish Question, starting with ‘Ausrottung’, a word that is usually translated as extermination. Kittel immediately dismissed this as not a serious proposition. [cf other examples in Jünginger p269]   But…. The technical term for this rhetorical gesture is apophasis:  pretending to deny what is actually affirmed. 

 

Similarly, Heman, whom I cited a moment ago, put it like this:

‘The Jews are our misfortune!’ we have called into the forest [Wald] of the people.  Is it any surprise that the people’s voice echoes back in response: Strike the Jews dead and our misfortune will be at an end!  If you don’t want to hear such crude answers you ought not to pose the question in terms that rationally allow only this answer. (Heman, c.p61)

 

In other words, to frame a political issue as a Question was to insist on the necessity of a solution and to anticipate the most radical possible option.  In the words of one historian, ‘The familiar questions of the 19^th century [the Irish Question, the Eastern Question etc] were not genuine inquiries … They were weapons.’  (Beacock LARB).   In its most extreme form, the strategy carried the promise that resolving the Question at issue was the key to resolving the ills of modernity itself: a powerful weapon indeed.

 

This summary of ‘the Jewish Question’ and its ‘(Final) Solution’ opens a somewhat neglected perspective on the (discursive) treatment of the ‘Final Solution of the Jewish Question’ in Nazi Germany.  I have come to think that it is not so much that ‘Final Solution’ was employed in Nazi policy circles as a deliberate euphemism (although I’ve called it this myself).  Nor was it that the Nazis add the menacing ‘Final’ to an existing more neutral term (as Lucy Dawidowicz has claimed).  In fact, the alleged need for a final or lasting solution of the Jewish Question had been openly canvassed in Germany, and in increasingly violent terms.  By the 1930s the idea was already, so to speak, partially domesticated.  It was a commonplace of Nazi antisemitic propaganda, where it was combined with the most violent and threatening language, calling for Jews to be treated like infectious bacilli.   If Nazi usage filled the word with the most radical meaning possible, I think this is not so much because it was being treated as a euphemism, but more because the word could be exploited as a kind of lexical alibi, a palimpsest of layered meanings, drawing on decades of polemics and threats that were now being turned into action. 

 

As a name for the destruction of the European Jews, the ‘Final Solution of the Jewish Question’ burst any remaining restraints on its meaning when it was absorbed into the postwar (west) German and Anglo-European academic and journalistic lexicon.  Because it had been employed by Nazi ideologues, bureaucrats, and murderers, it has usually been demarcated by scare quotes.  To study the ‘Final Solution’ was to step into this world of Nazi leaders’ decisions, their orders and their bureaucracies, and historians began to pose questions about the precise process by which the Final Solution emerged as policy and practice.    Among them:  When was the decision to annihilate the Jewish race reached?  Precisely when, how, and why did the term ‘Final Solution’ come to bear its eventual certainty of wholesale physical extermination, as opposed to denoting some lesser project of isolation or removal?  Was this the result of an explicit Hitler order, or the product of some more diffuse path of convergent decisions and acts? 

 

These questions sidelined other perspectives than those of the Nazi oficials and the structures within which they worked. What explanatory light, after all, could the victims throw on the process of their own destruction?  In this ‘Final Solution of the Jewish Question’, the Jews were all too obviously invisible except as body-counts and  as the objects of Nazi decisions and acts. 

 

The eventual emergence of the ‘victims’ into greater prominence and agency was one of the conditions for the displacement of ‘Final Solution’ by ‘Holocaust’, and it was largely the product of multiple changes in academic and popular culture which gathered momentum from the late 1970s.   Historians and their readerships were no longer satisfied with focussing on the politics and policies of major actors, nor evaluating them in solely institutional terms.  We began to consider the experiences of those beyond the traditional circuits of power, the people who were conventionally represented as the objects rather than the subjects of history.  We became interested in looking more widely at subjective experience.  We asked how people understood themselves and grasped their situations in terms of their own complex beliefs and motives, rather than simply as the targets of others’ ideology and actions.   

 

There is no neat chronology to this uneven process of the expansion and substitution of historical horizons, but I think its essential meaning can be encapsulated in one striking and ingenious example.  In her well-known book The War Against the Jews 1933-1945,  published in 1975, the American historian Lucy Dawidowicz divided the text into two parts, ‘The Final Solution’ and ‘The Holocaust’.  But this division did not, as you might think, reflect the USHMM chronology that I quoted at the beginning of this lecture.  Both parts of Dawidowicz’s book covered the entire history from 1933 to 1945.  The division was thematic, and Dawidowicz’s language declared this.  Part I, ‘The Final Solution’, attempted to answer the question of ‘how it was possible for a modern state to carry out the systematic murder of a whole people for no other reason than that they were Jewish’ (p17).   By contrast Part II, ‘The Holocaust’, described ‘the Jewish response to the Final Solution’ (p19).  I can’t think of a more succinct way to illustrate the difference I have been trying to explain.

 

So far I have attempted to explain the first part of my title, ‘From ‘the Final Solution of the Jewish Question…’, and I’d now like to turn to the second part, ‘…to the Holocaust’. 

 

‘Holocaust’ is a Greek word that entered English and other languages through the Septuagint as the Greek translation of the Hebrew korban ‘olah, a burnt offering.  By the 20^th century if not before, the word had lost its exclusively religious meaning, and was also applied in academic and public debate to secular disasters or tragedies, as well as to massacres of both Jews and non-Jews (e.g. Armenians).  But the terms adopted by Jewish historians in the 1940s and 1950s reinstated a religious or sacral meaning, and pointed intentionally to a history of suffering unique to the Jewish people. They included the Hebrew words churbn and Shoah, signifying respectively destruction (of the Temples) and disaster or tragedy.  

 

By the early 1950s, Shoah had acquired a capital S and a definite article (the Shoah), as well as canonical status in official Israeli discourse.   ‘Holocaust’ then became more familiar internationally through the reportage on the Eichmann trial in 1961, apparently as a mistranslation of Shoah by English-speaking journalists (Michman).  The wide publicity given to the trial prompted a new wave of public interest in the history of Nazism and the destruction of the European Jews, to which journalism and popular publications responded (Levin 1968, Dawidowicz 1975).  As this literature expanded through the 1970s and 1980s, so ‘holocaust’ too was vested with the additional authority of a capital letter and a definite article, and was claimed for exclusive reference to ‘the’  Holocaust.   This word was more rapidly absorbed into the English-speaking world, most notably in the USA, than in Germany.  In the USA, president Jimmy Carter convened his Commission on the Holocaust in 1978 to develop plans for ‘the establishment and maintenance of an appropriate memorial to those who perished in the Holocaust’.  It was chaired by a survivor, Elie Wiesel, and indicatively its membership was composed almost entirely of faith leaders, not historians.  

 

In Germany, by contrast, ‘Final Solution’ remained the standard term.  When ‘Holocaust’ appeared in the titles of foreign books, the German translation was likely to substitute or add the more familiar term ‘Endlösung’, final solution  (eg. Martin Gilbert atlas).  When the US TV series ‘Holocaust’ was broadcast in Germany in 1979, press coverage felt it necessary to explain the title.  (Glasenapp p144). 

 

That TV series is usually credited as another major turning-point in the growth of public awareness of the history of what was now being widely identified as the Holocaust.  This popular groundswell paralleled the growing audibility of ‘survivor’ voices, as well as the expansion of academic research.   In west Germany, scholarly controversies erupted into public debate in the 1980s and 1990s, as a new generation sought to come to terms with their country’s past (Historikerstreit, Goldhagen; Wehrmacht exhibition). Elsewhere in Europe, national and international campaigns for memorialization proliferated (USHMM finally opened 1993, Berlin memorial 1995).  The year 2000 saw the UN Declaration on Holocaust Remembrance, and in 2005 came the adoption of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, on the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, which we are observing today.

 

[OMIT Whether ‘the’ Holocaust comprehended other victim groups of Nazi persecution and mass murder still divides opinion, although I think it has become less contentious than it was when groups such as gays or Roma and Sinti were first striving for recognition as collective victims.  The UK Holocaust Memorial Day Trust makes a delicate but instructive distinction when it declares that its mission is ‘to remember 6 million Jews murdered during the Holocaust, alongside the millions of people murdered under Nazi persecution of other groups and during more recent genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur’.] 

 

It’s clear that the word ‘Holocaust’ now commands international recognition, although in deference to Israeli usage the UN Declaration simultaneously refers to it as the Shoah.  But some historians remain uneasy about the sacral resonance of the term and prefer not to use it.  We felt that it risked identifying the event as somehow ‘uniquely unique’, at a certain level beyond understanding, and almost literally withdrawn from the kind secular ‘history’ we aspire to write.  Historians are bound to believe that any event, no matter how horrifying and unprecedented, is in principle subject to the tools of rational historical explanation, and that these will not diminish its enormity.   

 

When I finished my reading for this lecture, I was left with the conclusion that it’s not that one term is right and the other wrong, but that we should be recognize that both have their problems.  As far as the ‘Final Solution’ is concerned, there is obviously something distasteful about using language freighted with its Nazi heritage as a historical marker, and even fencing it round with scare quotes doesn’t seem quite sanitizing enough.   And in the case of ‘Holocaust’, I am not convinced by the distinction offered by the USHMM encyclopaedia that I mentioned at the start of this lecture – that Holocaust should denote the entire 1933-45 period of Nazi rule and Final Solution the mass murders of 1941-5.  That victims claim the rights of naming – holocaust, nakba, holodomyr – should also obviously be honoured; but even if the religious overtones of Holocaust are no longer so loud, the term needs to be understood more as cultural construction than as historical event (Cesarani).   

 

Still, to look for total transparency in language is a fools’ errand.  Instability and indeterminacy are inherent in language; our efforts at precision often fail, yet perhaps do so productively   The least we can do is make ourselves aware of where language comes from, what contexts it migrates in and out of, and what unregistered baggage it carries.   And I think that in all our efforts at narrative and explanation, language will nevertheless claim the last word. 

 

(Chabad Oxford, 28 January 2026 - not to cited without permission)