Last night, Senator Fraser Anning used his first speech to Parliament to argue that all Muslims should be banned from migrating to Australia.
He said there should be a national vote to decide who can enter Australia, calling this the “final solution”.
Senator Anning says he won’t be apologising for using that phrase — “If people want to take it of context, that is entirely up to them,” he said — but his use of language most commonly associated with the Nazis has been condemned by both the Coalition and Labor.
Here’s how the term came to prominence and why it’s so controversial.
Its first significant use was in July 1941, roughly two years into World War II
Andrew Bonnell, Associate Professor in History at the University of Queensland, says that’s when Hitler’s lieutenant Hermann Goering wrote to another high-ranking Nazi, Heinrich Himmler’s deputy Reinhard Heydrich, and commissioned him with carrying out what the Nazis called “the final solution of the Jewish question”.
“That was in a sense the commencement of what we today refer to most commonly as the Holocaust,” Dr Bonnell explained.
The following January, the notorious Wannsee Conference was convened by the leaders of Nazi and German state agencies.
There, they discussed how to implement the final solution and coordinate their efforts towards the mass deportation of Jews to extermination camps and killing fields.
It’s estimated that 6 million Jews were killed in the Holocaust.
The Nazis used vague language to try to hide the horror of what they were doing
Dr Bonnell says the term “final solution” served an ideological function by describing the existence of Jews as a problem.
But it was also a deliberate euphemism.
“In the Nazis’ own written communications, orders and so forth, they always used euphemistic language to disguise, even from themselves, the enormity of what they were doing,” Dr Bonnell said.
He said another example of euphemistic Nazi language was using the phrase “special treatment” to refer to the mass murder of Jews.
And the Nazis were even more vague when speaking publicly.
“There was talk of ‘removing’ the Jews from Europe and ‘resettling’ Jews in the east,” Dr Bonnell said.
Until the 1970s, the phrase ‘final solution’ was used by Western historians more than ‘Holocaust’
Dr Bonnell says historians were usually careful to put the phrase in inverted commas due to the fact that it was Nazi terminology.
“Anyone who’s got any sort of awareness of the history would simply avoid using it in relation to any group of human beings,” he said.
Dr Bonnell says people in public life have a responsibility to be careful when using racially loaded terms, or language associated with anti-Semitism or fascist ideologies.
“If you think it through, what does ‘final solution’ mean in relation to a part of a population? What sort of social problems can be definitively put out of the world in the way that term implies?” he said.
Dvir Abramovich, chairman of the Anti-Defamation Commission and an expert on Jewish culture, called Senator Anning’s speech “historical trivialisation of the worst kind imaginable”.
“Mr Anning is entitled to his views, but he discredits himself and his argument by irresponsibly referencing an evil plan that led to the calculated murder of six million Jews and millions of others in the Holocaust,” he said.