Wannsee Conference — Planning the Holocaust
Fifteen senior German officials met in a villa on a Berlin lake on 20 January 1942 and spent ninety minutes coordinating the murder of the Jews of Europe. The killing had already begun. The Einsatzgruppen had shot several hundred thousand people behind the eastern front since June 1941, Chełmno had been gassing people in vans since December, and construction had started at Bełżec. Wannsee was therefore not the decision but the administration of it: Heydrich, who chaired it, had been given authority over the final solution by Göring the previous July and used the meeting to establish that authority over the ministries whose cooperation he needed — the interior, justice, foreign office, the general government in Poland, the party chancellery. Adolf Eichmann took the minutes and produced a sanitised protocol in thirty copies, of which one survived and was found in 1947. It contains a table of the Jewish populations of every European country including neutral ones — Ireland, Sweden, Switzerland, Britain — totalling eleven million, and speaks of evacuation to the east, labour columns in which a large part would fall away through natural diminution, and appropriate treatment for the remainder. Much of the discussion recorded concerns definitions: what to do about people of mixed descent and those in mixed marriages. Eight of the fifteen held doctorates. The villa is now a memorial and education centre, and the protocol is the single clearest documentary proof of the intent behind the killing. None of the men in the room proposed doing something else. The protocol records objections about procedure and definition and none about the object, which is the reason the document has the standing it has.
- Year: 1942 CE
- Category: Political
