Genocide by Attrition 37 onto their clothing and white armbands on the sleeve became the two most widely used symbols.45 Failure to comply with this order resulted in severe penalties, including fines, imprisonment, or summary execution.46 The requirement augmented an already existing one that all paperwork had to identify the holder’s religion, the purpose of which was to prevent people who did not look stereotypically “Jewish” from removing their badges or armbands in an effort to pass as “Aryans.”47 The Nazis did not invent the practice of requiring Jews to wear badges. The use of badges dates to the Middle Ages when some Christian and Muslim communities forced Jews to wear them to instantly identify Jews from others, making them more open to scrutiny and/or abuse.48 But the Nazis not only revived the practice; they expanded its symbolic use beyond the everyday stigmatization and humiliation—a strategy that official propaganda continually reinforced. Adolf Hitler’s own writing exemplified this. He wrote: [The Jew] is and remains the eternal parasite, a parasite that spreads more and more like a harmful bacillus, as well as inviting only a favorable culture medium. The effect of its existence, however, is similar to that of parasites: where it occurs, the host people die after a shorter or longer time.49 The badges, in combination with the racialized identity documents, made it easier for perpetrators to directly control the physical movements of Jews in and out of the ghettos and to coordinate their forced deportations on a massive scale.50 As part of this process, the regime issued the Eleventh Decree in November of 1941, which was specific to German Jews.51 The decree officially ended the possibility of emigration, and it legalized the confiscation of Jewish property, including bank accounts, homes and apartments, and other personal belongings, as the Nazis began to send Jews east to German-occupied Poland and parts of German-occupied Soviet territory for extermination.52 Historians widely agree that the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question” was not the result of any one single decision.53 By 1942, the war, then being fought on multiple fronts, posed both opportunities and obstacles to the “Final Solution.” However, the infamous Wannsee Conference in 1942, held outside of Berlin, marked the public unveiling of the “Final Solution.”54 By the conference’s end, the Schutzstaffel or SS, Hitler’s elite paramilitary “political soldiers,” assumed centralized control over all aspects of the Final Solution with the stated goal of killing approximately 11 million Jews.55 This figure included not only Jews residing in German-occupied Europe, but also those living in Great Britain as well as Europe’s six neutral countries.56 By the end of the war, the Nazi regime had succeeded in killing an estimated six million Jews through privation (i.e., the systematic denial of adequate food, water, shelter, and medical care), open-air mass shootings, and in extermination camps with gassing facilities, including at Belzec, Sobibor, Chelmo, Treblinka, and Auschwitz-Birkenau.57 45 Yad Vashem, “Badge, Jewish,” website, https://www.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf/Microsoft%20Word%20-%205953.pdf, p. 1. 46 Ibid. 47 U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, “Jewish Badge: During the Nazi Era,” website, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/ content/en/article/jewish-badge-during-the-nazi-era. 48 Ibid. 49 Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (Munich: Eher Verlage, 1942), p. 334. 50 Ibid. 51 Peter Longerich, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 66; Martin Dean, “The Development and Implementation of Nazi Denaturalization and Confiscation Policy Up to the Eleventh Decree to the Reich Citizenship Law,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Vol. 16, No. 2, 2002, p. 225. 52 Ibid. 53 Christopher Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939 – March 1942 (New York: Bison Books, 2007). 54 Ibid. 55 Ibid. 56 Ibid. U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, “Wannsee Conference and the “Final Solution,’” website, https://encyclopedia. ushmm.org/content/en/article/wannsee-conference-and-the-final-solution. 57 British Library, “Anti-Jewish Decrees,” website, https://www.bl.uk/learning/histcitizen/voices/info/decrees/decrees.html.