On January 20, 1942, 15 leading representatives of the Nazi bureaucracy met at Wannsee in Berlin. Their topic:the organization of the systematic mass murder of Jews.
The murder of the European Jews was planned and systematically carried out by the National Socialists. Although the paths that led to mass murder are winding, one date is particularly linked to the bureaucratically organized crime:January 20, 1942, the day of the Wannsee Conference.
Wannsee Conference:beginning or continuation?
The notorious conference began on a winter afternoon in an SS villa on Berlin's Wannsee. Reinhard Heydrich, head of the notorious Security Police and Security Service (SD), had invited to a meeting "followed by breakfast". 15 men came - state secretaries, heads of the Nazi administration in occupied Eastern Europe and high-ranking SS leaders. The only item on the agenda:the organization and implementation of the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question".
To this day, historians differ on how to assess the conference, because the murder of the Jews was already in full swing in January 1942. Heydrich had already been commissioned with the murder of the Jews of Europe by Reich Marshal Hermann Göring and SS Chief Heinrich Himmler in early 1941. The common assumption that the "final solution to the Jewish question" was only decided at the conference does not correspond to the historical facts.
Organization of the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question"
The majority of researchers assume that it was primarily about the organization and implementation of the genocide. Heydrich wanted to secure the cooperation of the conference participants and demonstrate to them his new power in the "Jewish question". As early as July 1941, he had received authorization from Göring to "make all the necessary organizational, factual and material preparations for an overall solution to the Jewish question in the German sphere of influence in Europe".
Heydrich's "Judenreferent" Adolf Eichmann, who drew up the minutes of the meeting, later stated during his interrogation during the trial against him in Jerusalem that his boss was in an exceptionally good mood after the meeting. In fact, none of those present questioned Heydrich's authority to set guidelines.
Wannsee Conference:symbol of bureaucratic mass murder
After the war, when American investigators found the 16th copy of the paper for Undersecretary of State Luther from the Foreign Office, the conference became a symbol for mass murder ordered by the state. The document - the authenticity of which Holocaust deniers are still trying to question - provides information about who took part in the conference and makes it clear that an entire bureaucratic apparatus was involved in the murder of the Jews.
For millions of Jews, the journey to the concentration camps ended in death.The participants discussed the cooperation of their authorities in the forthcoming deportation of all Jews in Europe to the conquered territories in the east. The protocol records "the evacuation" of a total of more than eleven million European Jews "to the East, after appropriate prior approval by the Führer." The "Jews able to work (...) were to be taken to these areas "in large work columns, separating the sexes, building roads", "whereby a large part will no doubt drop out due to natural decline". The "possibly remaining remainder" should be "treated accordingly" "since this is undoubtedly the most resilient", which "representing a natural selection is to be addressed as the nucleus of a new Jewish structure upon release (see the experience of history ).
The treatment of "half-Jews" and "mixed marriages" was also discussed intensively. However, Heydrich's attempt to expand the circle of those affected beyond those defined as "Jews" by the Nuremberg Race Laws of 1935 was unsuccessful.
Entire state apparatus involved in the Holocaust
The Wannsee Conference was an important stage in the organization of the planned genocide of the Jews, but it was not the prelude:since the German invasion of the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941, Heydrich's task forces had been busy systematically murdering Soviet Jews. The death camps in the east were already under construction. As early as September, Hitler had issued the deportation order for the Jews still remaining in the Reich. And the genocide had been practiced according to plan in the "General Government" since October, also to make room for the Jews from the Reich. With the declaration of war on the USA in December, Hitler issued verbal orders for the "final solution of the Jewish question" in the world war, which was now escalating into a global conflict.
Holocaust
The term stands for the mass murder of Jews under the Nazi regime from 1939 to 1945. More than six million people in Europe fell victim to the systematic extermination.
The word Holocaust originally comes from the Greek (=completely burned) and designated burnt offerings. In the 1940s, British authors first used the term for the murders of Jews, and from the late 1950s it also became popular in the USA. The word spread in Germany after it was used in a US television film in 1979.
Many Jews use the Hebrew term Shoah (=calamity, catastrophe) instead of Holocaust. It exclusively refers to the murder of Jews, while Holocaust is also sometimes used in other contexts.
With the Wannsee Conference, the murder of all European Jews became a written goal of German government policy. With the conference, Heydrich not only secured the approval of the ministries, he also made the state secretaries jointly responsible. The meeting marks the point at which the organization of the genocide was codified after a decision had already been made at the highest level of leadership. Now there was no turning back:The entire state apparatus was now involved and jointly responsible for a hitherto unthinkable crime.
House of the Wannsee Conference is now a memorial
Today the "House of the Wannsee Conference" provides information with a comprehensive exhibition about the planned genocide of the European Jews.