Hermann Göring orders Reinhard Heydrich to draft Final Solution plan

On 31 July 1941 Hermann Göring, acting on Adolf Hitler’s directives, sent a written order to SS‑and‑SD chief Reinhard Heydrich. The memo demanded a comprehensive administrative, material and financial plan for the "final solution of the Jewish question" across all German‑occupied territories. It placed the task under the newly created Reich Central Office for Jewish Emigration, centralising persecution and paving the way for systematic deportations, property confiscation and mass murder. The order, written in euphemistic bureaucratic language, marked the shift from ad‑hoc anti‑Jewish measures to coordinated genocide that later became known as the Holocaust.

The directive referenced the earlier 24 January 1939 decree that had already consolidated Jewish persecution under a single authority, further embedding the murder plan within the Nazi state apparatus.