Wannsee Conference — Planning the Holocaust
On 20 January 1942, fifteen senior Nazi officials — eight of whom held doctorates — met for ninety minutes in a villa at Wannsee, a lakeside suburb of Berlin, to coordinate the 'Final Solution to the Jewish Question': the systematic murder of all Jews in German-controlled Europe. The conference, chaired by Reinhard Heydrich and minuted by Adolf Eichmann, did not decide to commit genocide — that decision had been made by Hitler and Himmler months earlier and killing operations were already underway — but coordinated the bureaucratic machinery of deportation, exploitation, and extermination across multiple agencies of the Nazi state. The minutes, discovered after the war, remain one of history's most chilling documents: the mass murder of eleven million human beings discussed in the bloodless language of logistics and bureaucracy. The Holocaust that followed killed approximately six million Jews — two thirds of European Jewry — along with millions of Soviet POWs, Polish civilians, Roma, disabled people, homosexuals, and political prisoners, by shooting, gassing, starvation, and forced labour.
- Year: 1942 CE
- Category: Political
