July 31, 1941

Final Solution

Göring authorizes Heydrich to prepare a Europe-wide 'total solution' plan

The one-page letter mentioned no gas chambers, shootings or trains. It spoke in bureaucratic categories — organization, material, finance — and survived to become Nuremberg exhibit 710-PS.

31 July 1941: one page, signed Göring

On 31 July 1941, Hermann Göring signed a letter authorizing Reinhard Heydrich — chief of the Security Police and SD and head of the Reich Security Main Office — to make the organizational, practical and material preparations for a 'total solution' of the Jewish question within Germany's sphere of influence in Europe.

The letter reached backward and forward at once: it supplemented Heydrich's 24 January 1939 assignment concerning Jewish emigration and evacuation, and instructed him to coordinate with the affected central authorities and submit an overall draft of the measures for the desired 'final solution.'

What the words do and don't establish

The German text uses two distinct terms — Gesamtlösung (total or overall solution) and Endlösung (final solution) — a distinction lost in translations that render both terms with a single phrase. The letter's euphemistic wording never says 'kill'; its genocidal significance rests on its administrative context, subsequent policy, and how Heydrich used the authority.

It also does not document a Hitler order. Institutional histories place the letter within Hitler's anti-Jewish policy, but no written instruction from Hitler accompanies it, and historians continue to debate when and in what form Hitler authorized the Europe-wide murder program.

Not a beginning — an authorization

By 31 July, SS, police and military units were already carrying out mass shootings of Jewish communities in the occupied Soviet Union, where the invasion had brought millions more Jews under German control. The letter did not start the genocide; it gave Heydrich written authority from one of the regime's highest officials to coordinate all affected agencies.

Heydrich later relied on exactly that authority when he summoned government representatives to the Wannsee Conference in January 1942 — where the calculation on the table encompassed approximately eleven million Jews across Europe.

Sources

Researched 23 Aug 2026 5 sources 3 audit passes

How this was checked

Researched from the web into a fact sheet, rewritten from that sheet, then audited against it by a different model. How the pipeline works →

What the sources leave uncertain

The July 31 letter is authentic and securely dated.
The document does not say that Göring was acting on a specific instruction from Hitler that day. Historians agree Hitler authorized the European-wide murder program at some still-undetermined point in 1941, but the timing and form of that authorization remain debated.
The German letter uses both 'Gesamtlösung' (total/overall solution) and 'Endlösung' (final solution). Translations that reduce both to a single phrase lose this distinction.
The letter's euphemistic wording does not explicitly say 'kill.' Its genocidal significance rests on its administrative context, subsequent policy, and Heydrich's use of the authorization.