Wannsee Conference

For the film, see The Wannsee Conference (film).

The villa at 56–58 Am Großen Wannsee, where the Wannsee Conference was held, is now a memorial and museum.

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The Wannsee Conference was a meeting of senior officials of the Nazi German regime, held in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee on 20 January 1942. The purpose of the conference was to inform administrative leaders of Departments responsible for various policies relating to Jews that Reinhard Heydrich had been appointed as the chief executor of the "Final solution to the Jewish question". In the course of the meeting, Heydrich presented a plan for the deportation of the Jewish population of Europe and French North Africa (Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia) to German-occupied areas in eastern Europe, and the use of the Jews fit for labour on road-building projects, in the course of which they would eventually die according to the text of the Wannsee Protocol, the only extant copy of the minutes of the meeting. Instead, as Soviet and Allied forces gradually pushed back the German lines, most of the Jews of German-occupied Europe were sent to extermination or concentration camps, or killed where they lived. As a result of the efforts of historian Joseph Wulf, the Wannsee House, where the conference was held, is now a Holocaust Memorial.

Background

The ideology of Nazism brought together elements of antisemitism, racial hygeine, and eugenics, and combined them with pan-Germanism and territorial expansionism with the goal of obtaining more Lebensraum for the Germanic people. Nazi Germany attempted to obtain this new territory by attacking Poland and the Soviet Union, intending to deport or kill the Jews and Slavs living there, who were viewed as being inferior to the Aryan master race.

Discrimination against Jews began immediately after the Nazi seizure of power on 30 January 1933. The Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, was passed on 7 April, excluded most Jews from the legal profession and the civil service. Similar legislation soon deprived Jewish members of other professions of the right to practise. Violence and economic pressure were used by the regime to encourage Jews to voluntarily leave the country. Jewish businesses were denied access to markets, forbidden to advertise in newspapers, and deprived of access to government contracts. Citizens were harassed and subjected to violent attacks and boycotts of their businesses.

In September 1935 the Nuremberg Laws were enacted. These laws prohibited marriages between Jews and people of Germanic extraction, extramarital relations between Jews and Germans, and the employment of Jewish women under the age of 45 as domestic servants in German households. The Reich Citizenship Law stated that only those of Germanic or related blood were defined as citizens. Thus Jews and other minority groups were stripped of their German citizenship. A supplementary decree issued in November defined as Jewish anyone with three Jewish grandparents, or two grandparents if the Jewish faith was followed. By the start of World War II in 1939, around 250,000 of Germany's 437,000 Jews emigrated to the United States, Palestine, Great Britain, and other countries.

On 31 July 1941 Hermann Göring gave written authorization to SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, Chief of the Reich Main Security Office (RSHA), to prepare and submit a plan for a "total solution of the Jewish question" in territories under German control and to coordinate the participation of all involved government organisations. The resulting Generalplan Ost (General Plan for the East) called for deporting the population of occupied Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union to Siberia, for use as slave labour or to be murdered. The minutes of the Wannsee Conference estimated the Jewish population of the Soviet Union to be five million, with another three million in Ukraine.

In addition to eliminating Jews, the Nazis also planned to reduce the population of the conquered territories by 30 million people through starvation in an action called the Hunger Plan. Food supplies would be diverted to the German army and German civilians. Cities would be razed and the land allowed to return to forest or resettled by German colonists. Harvests were poor in Germany in 1940 and 1941 and food supplies were short, as large numbers of forced labourers had been brought into the country to work in the armaments industry. If these workers—as well as the German people—were to be adequately fed, there must be a sharp reduction in the number of "useless mouths", of whom the millions of Jews under German rule were, in the light of Nazi ideology, the most obvious example.

At the time of the Wannsee Conference, the killing of Jews in the Soviet Union had already been underway for some months. Right from the start of Operation Barbarossa—the invasion of the Soviet Union—Einsatzgruppen (special task forces) were assigned to follow the army into the conquered areas and round up and kill Jews. In a letter dated 2 July 1941 Heydrich communicated to his SS and Police Leaders that the Einsatzgruppen were to execute Comintern officials, ranking members of the Communist Party, extremist and radical Communist Party members, people's commissars, and Jews in party and government posts. Open-ended instructions were given to execute "other radical elements (saboteurs, propagandists, snipers, assassins, agitators, etc.)." He instructed that any pogroms spontaneously initiated by the occupants of the conquered territories were to be quietly encouraged. On 8 July, he announced that all Jews were to be regarded as partisans, and gave the order for all male Jews between the ages of 15 and 45 to be shot. By August the net had been widened to include women, children, and the elderly—the entire Jewish population. By the time planning was underway for the Wannsee Conference, hundreds of thousands of Polish, Serbian, and Russian Jews had already been killed.

The initial plan was to implement Generalplan Ost after the conquest of the Soviet Union. European Jews would be deported to occupied parts of Russia, where they would be worked to death in road-building projects. Between the date the invitations to the conference went out (29 November) and the date of the cancelled first meeting (9 December), the situation changed. The war was still ongoing, and transporting masses of people into a combat zone was impossible. Somewhere around the time of the failed offensive against Moscow in December 1941, Hitler resolved that the Jews of Europe were to be exterminated. Heydrich decided that since mass deportations to the Soviet Union would not be possible, the Jews currently living in the General Government would be killed in extermination camps set up in occupied areas of Poland, as would Jews from the rest of Europe.

Planning the conference

Letter from Reinhard Heydrich to Martin Luther, Undersecretary at the Foreign Office, inviting him to the Wannsee Conference (Wannsee Conference House Memorial, Berlin)

On 29 November, Heydrich sent invitations for a meeting to be held on 9 December at the headquarters of the International Criminal Police Commission (the forerunner of Interpol, of which Heydrich at the time served as President) at 16 Am Kleinen Wannsee (in the comfortable lakeside suburb of Wannsee on the western edge of Berlin). He enclosed a copy of Göring's letter of 31 July to indicate his authority in the matter. As this was to be a meeting of administrators to discuss implementation of a policy already decided at the executive level, those invited were mostly state secretaries, i.e., chief administrative (subministerial) officers of government ministries. The ministries to be represented were Interior, Justice, the Four Year Plan and Occupied Eastern Territories. The Foreign Office was to be represented by an undersecretary, since Heydrich suspected that State Secretary Weizsäcker was not fully aligned with the objectives of the regime. Also invited were representatives of the Reich Chancellery, the Nazi Party Chancellery, the Race and Resettlement Main Office of the RSHA and Gestapo chief Müller. When Hans Frank, head of the General Government in occupied Poland, heard of the meeting, he demanded to be represented and Heydrich agreed. SS-Sturmbannführer Lange was invited for his experience in executing German Jews in Latvia. Heydrich's right-hand man Eichmann was to take the minutes.

Developments in early December 1941 disrupted the original meeting plans. On 5 December, the Soviet Army began a counter-offensive in front of Moscow, ending the prospect of a rapid conquest of the Soviet Union. On 7 December, the Japanese attacked the United States at Pearl Harbor, causing the U.S. to declare war on Japan the next day. To fulfill its obligations under its Tripartite Pact with Italy and Japan, the Reich government immediately began preparing to issue a declaration of war on the U.S. on 11 December. Some meeting invitees were involved in these preparations, so Heydrich postponed the meeting without rescheduling it on 8 December. In early January 1942, Heydrich sent new invitations to a meeting to be held on 20 January. German historian Christian Gerlach sees in Heydrich's postponement the exploitation of an opportunity to broaden the original objective. Götz Aly wrote, "The postponement followed, one could assert, the political confusion that the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor had caused. But Gerlach substantiates with convincing details that the originally planned Wannsee Conference had an entirely different theme from that which actually took place six weeks later. It had been anticipated only to discuss problems that occurred with the deportations of the (Greater) German Jews... Only after Hitler's speech of 12 December was Heydrich able, as Gerlach shows, to broaden the theme and fix a conference on the 'Final Solution of the European Jewish question'."

The venue for the rescheduled conference was changed to a villa at 56–58 Am Großen Wannsee, a quiet residential street across the Großer Wannsee from the popular Wannsee beach. The villa, built in 1914, had been purchased from Friedrich Minoux in 1940 by the SS for use as a conference centre.

Attendees

List of attendees

Name	Photo	Title	Organisation	Superior
SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich		Chief of the RSHA Deputy Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia Presiding	Schutzstaffel	Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler
Dr. Josef Bühler		State Secretary	General Government of Poland	Governor-General Dr. Hans Frank
SS-Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann		Head of Referat IV B4 of the Gestapo Recording secretary	Gestapo, RSHA, Schutzstaffel	Chief of Amt IV SS-Gruppenführer Heinrich Müller
Dr. Roland Freisler		State Secretary	Reich Ministry of Justice	Reich Minister of Justice Dr. Franz Schlegelberger
SS-Gruppenführer Otto Hofmann		Head of the SS Race and Settlement Main Office (RuSHA)	Schutzstaffel	Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler
SS-Oberführer Dr. Gerhard Klopfer		Permanent Secretary	Nazi Party Chancellery	Chief of the Party Chancellery Martin Bormann
Friedrich Wilhelm Kritzinger		Permanent Secretary	Reich Chancellery	Reich Minister and head of the Reich Chancellery Dr. Hans Lammers
SS-Sturmbannführer Dr. Rudolf Lange		Commander of the SiPo and the SD for the General-District Latvia Deputy of the Commander of the SiPo and the SD for the Reichskommissariat Ostland.	SiPo and SD, RSHA, Schutzstaffel	SS-Brigadeführer and Generalmajor der Polizei Dr. Franz Walter Stahlecker
Dr. Georg Leibbrandt		Reichsamtleiter	Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories	Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories Dr. Alfred Rosenberg
Martin Luther		Under Secretary	Reich Foreign Ministry	Reich Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop
Dr. Alfred Meyer		Gauleiter State Secretary and Deputy Reich Minister	Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories	Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories Dr. Alfred Rosenberg
SS-Gruppenführer Heinrich Müller		Chief of Amt IV (Gestapo)	Reich Main Security Office (RSHA), Schutzstaffel	Chief of the RSHA SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich
Erich Neumann		State Secretary	Office of the Plenipotentiary for the Four Year Plan	Plenipotentiary of the Four Year Plan Hermann Göring
SS-Oberführer Dr. Karl Eberhard Schöngarth		Commander of the SiPo and the SD in the General Government	SiPo and SD, RSHA, Schutzstaffel	Chief of the RSHA SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich
Dr. Wilhelm Stuckart		State Secretary	Reich Interior Ministry	Reich Minister of the Interior Dr. Wilhelm Frick

In preparation for the conference, Eichmann drafted a list of the numbers of Jews in the various European countries. Countries were listed in two groups, "A" and "B". "A" countries were those under direct Reich control or occupation (or partially occupied and quiescent, in the case of France); "B" countries were allied or client states, neutral, or at war with Germany. The numbers reflect actions already completed by Nazi forces; for example, Estonia is listed as judenfrei ("free of Jews"), since the 4,500 Jews who remained in Estonia after the German occupation had been exterminated by the end of 1941.

English translation:

[List] A.

Eichmann's list

• Old Reich [Germany proper]: 131,800
• Ostmark [Austria]: 43,700
• Eastern Territories [Polish areas annexed by the Reich]: 420,000
• General Government [occupied Polish lands]: 2,284,000
• Bialystok [district in eastern Poland, under German civil administration]: 400,000
• Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia: 74,200
• Estonia: free of Jews
• Latvia: 3,500
• Lithuania: 34,000
• Belgium: 43,000
• Denmark: 5,600
• France/occupied territory: 165,000
  • unoccupied territory: 700,000
• Greece: 69,600
• Netherlands: 160,800
• Norway: 1,300

[List] B.

• Bulgaria: 48,000
• England [i.e. United Kingdom]: 330,000
• Finland: 2,300
• Ireland: 4,000
• Italy including Sardinia: 58,000
• Albania: 200
• Croatia: 40,000
• Portugal: 3,000
• Romania including Bessarabia: 342,000
• Sweden: 8,000
• Switzerland: 18,000
• Serbia: 10,000
• Slovakia: 88,000
• Spain: 6,000
• Turkey (European portion): 55,500
• Hungary: 742,800
• USSR: 5,000,000 [including subtotals for:]
  • Belarus exclusive of Bialystok: 446,484
  • Ukraine: 2,994,684

Total: over 11,000,000

Proceedings

The conference room at the Wannsee Conference House, 2006

Heydrich opened the conference with an account of the anti-Jewish measures taken in Germany since the Nazi seizure of power in 1933. He said that between 1933 and October 1941, 537,000 German, Austrian, and Czech Jews had emigrated. This information was taken from a briefing paper prepared for him the previous week by Eichmann who, after his experience in organizing the forced emigration of the Viennese Jews in 1938, had become the leading expert on the practicalities of solving the "Jewish question".

Heydrich reported that there were approximately eleven million Jews in the whole of Europe, of whom half were in countries not under German control. He explained that since further emigration of European Jews had been prohibited by Himmler, "another possible solution of the problem has now taken the place of emigration, i.e. the evacuation of the Jews to the East"; this would be a "provisional" solution, but "practical experience" was already being collected for the "future final solution of the Jewish question".

Holocaust denialists claim that the Wannsee Conference decided on no more than the "evacuation" of the Jewish population of Europe to the east, with no reference to killing them. But in fact, Heydrich made the ultimate fate intended for the evacuees clear:

Under proper guidance, in the course of the final solution the Jews are to be allocated for appropriate labor in the East. Able-bodied Jews, separated according to sex, will be taken in large work columns to these areas for work on roads, in the course of which action doubtless a large portion will be eliminated by natural causes. The possible final remnant will, since it will undoubtedly consist of the most resistant portion, have to be treated accordingly, because it is the product of natural selection and would, if released, act as the seed of a new Jewish revival.

After appropriate prior approval by the Führer, emigration as a possible solution has been superseded by a policy of evacuating Jews to the East.

—Heydrich addressing the Wannsee conference

Historian Christopher Browning observes: "No less than eight of the fifteen participants held the doctorate. Thus it was not a dimwitted crowd unable to grasp what was going to be said to them. Nor were they going to be overcome with surprise or shock, for Heydrich was not talking to the uninitiated or squeamish."

Heydrich went on to say that in the course of the "practical execution of the final solution", Europe would be "combed through from west to east" but that Germany, Austria, and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia would have priority "due to the housing problem and additional social and political necessities". This was a reference to increasing pressure from the regional Nazi Party leaders in Germany, the Gauleiters, for the Jews to be removed from their areas to allow accommodation for Germans made homeless by Allied bombing, as well as for laborers being imported from occupied countries. The "evacuated" Jews, he said, would first be sent to "transit ghettos" in the General Government, from which they would be transported eastward. Heydrich said that to avoid legal and political difficulties, it was important to define who was a Jew for the purposes of "evacuation". He outlined categories of people who would be exempted. Jews over 65 years old, and Jewish World War I veterans who had been severely wounded or who had won the Iron Cross, might be sent to Theresienstadt concentration camp. "With this expedient solution," he said, "in one fell swoop many interventions will be prevented."

The situation of people who were half or quarter Jews, and of Jews who were married to non-Jews, was more complex. Under the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, their status had been left deliberately ambiguous. Heydrich announced that "Mischlings" (a Nazi pejorative for mixed-race persons) of the first degree (persons with two Jewish grandparents) would be treated as Jews. This would not apply if they were married to a non-Jew and had children by that marriage. It would also not apply if they had been granted written exemption by "the highest offices of the Party and State." Such persons would be sterilised or deported if they refused sterilisation.

"Mischlings of the second degree" (persons with one Jewish grandparent) would be treated as Germans unless they were married to Jews or Mischlings of the first degree, or had a "racially especially undesirable appearance that marks him outwardly as a Jew", or had a "political record that shows that he feels and behaves like a Jew". Persons in these latter categories would be killed even if married to non-Jews.

Facsimiles of the minutes of the Wannsee Conference and Eichmann's list, presented under glass at the Wannsee Conference House Memorial.

In the case of mixed marriages, Heydrich advocated a policy of caution "with regard to the effects on the German relatives". If such a marriage had produced children who were being raised as Germans, the Jewish partner would not be killed. If they were being raised as Jews, they might be killed or sent to Theresienstadt depending on the circumstances. These exemptions applied only to German and Austrian Jews, and were not always observed even for them. In most of the occupied countries, Jews were rounded up and killed en masse, and anyone who lived in or identified with the Jewish community in any given place was regarded as a Jew. One of the few exceptions to this was France, where the Vichy French regime, in exchange for its ready cooperation, was able to apply its own rules, affecting mainly refugees and recent immigrants rather than French-born Jews.^{[citation needed]} Heydrich commented, "In occupied and unoccupied France, the registration of Jews for evacuation will in all probability proceed without great difficulty", but in fact the great majority of French-born Jews survived. In Denmark, very few Jews were ultimately exterminated due to strong opposition from both the king and the populace and the actions of Danish partisans in evacuating most of the Jewish population to Sweden.

More difficulty was anticipated with Germany's allies Romania and Hungary. "In Romania the government has [now] appointed a commissioner for Jewish affairs", Heydrich said. But in fact the deportation of Romanian Jews was slow and inefficient despite the high degree of popular antisemitism. "In order to settle the question in Hungary," Heydrich said, "it will soon be necessary to force an adviser for Jewish questions onto the Hungarian government". The Hungarian regime of Miklós Horthy continued to resist German interference in its Jewish policy until 1944, when Horthy was overthrown (by Nazi intervention) and 500,000 Hungarian Jews sent to their deaths by Eichmann.

Heydrich spoke for nearly an hour. Then followed about thirty minutes of questions and comments, followed by some less formal conversation. Luther from the Foreign Office urged caution in Scandinavia and other "Nordic" countries where public opinion was not hostile to the small Jewish populations and would react badly to unpleasant scenes. Hofmann and Stuckart pointed out the legalistic and administrative difficulties over mixed marriages, arguing for compulsory dissolution of marriages to prevent legal disputes and for the wider use of sterilisation as an alternative to deportation. Neumann from the Four Year Plan argued for the exemption of Jews who were working in industries vital to the war effort and for whom no replacements were available. Heydrich (keen not to offend Neumann's boss Hermann Göring) assured him that these Jews would not be killed. There were questions about the Mischlings and those in mixed marriages, but the details of these complex questions were put off until a later meeting.

Finally, Bühler of the General Government in occupied Poland stated that "the General Government would welcome it if the final solution of this problem could be begun in the General Government, since on the one hand transportation does not play such a large role here nor would problems of labor supply hamper this action. Jews must be removed from the territory of the General Government as quickly as possible, since it is especially here that the Jew as an epidemic carrier represents an extreme danger and on the other hand is causing permanent chaos in the economic structure of the country through continued black market dealings."

The conference concluded with the following policies:

• Immigration: "An accelerated emigration of the Jews from the territory of the Reich...to purge German living space of Jews by legal means. 537,000 Jews were compelled to emigrate...[by] 1941"

• Evacuation to Labor Camps: "In the course of the final solution...Jews are to be utilized for work in the East in a suitable manner. In large labor columns and separated by sexes, Jews capable of working will be dispatched to these regions to build roads, and in the process a large number of them will undoubtedly drop out by way of natural attrition. Those who ultimately should possibly get by will have to be given suitable treatment because they unquestionably represent the most resistant segments and therefore constitute a natural elite that, if allowed to go free, would turn into a germ cell of renewed Jewish revival." "Jews now working in essential war industries cannot be evacuated as long as there are no replacements for them."

• Old People's Ghettos: "The intention is not to evacuate Jews over the age of 65 but to send them to an old people’s ghetto Theresienstadt has been earmarked for this purpose. In addition to these age groups – and of the 280,000 Jews who lived in the Altreich [Germany] and the Ostmark [Austria] on October 1, 1941, some 30% are over 65 – the old people’s ghetto will also receive Jews with war injuries and Jews with war decorations (EK I) [Iron Cross First Class]. With this convenient solution the many intercessions [for exemptions from deportation to the East] will be eliminated at one blow."

• Classification of Mixed Jews: "During the implementation of the plan for the final solution its basis, as it were, should be the Nuremberg Laws, whereby the solution of the problem of mixed marriages [Mischehen] and mixed parentage [Mischlinge] must likewise be a prerequisite for the definitive settlement of the questions."

• Sterilization to Remain in Reich: "Any first-degree Mischling to be exempted from evacuation will be sterilized in order to prevent any progeny and to settle the Mischling problem once and for all. Sterilization will be voluntary, but it is the precondition for remaining in the Reich. The sterilized Mischling will henceforth be exempt from all restrictive regulations to which he was previously subjected." "State Secretary Stuckart suggested that forced sterilization be embarked upon."

Omissions

View of the Großer Wannsee lake from the villa at 56–58 Am Grossen Wannsee, where the conference was held.

The above account is based on the minutes taken by Eichmann, copies of which were sent by Eichmann to all the participants after the meeting. Most of these copies were destroyed at the end of the war as participants and other officials sought to cover their tracks. It was not until 1947 that a copy of the minutes (known from the German word for "minutes" as the "Wannsee Protocol") was found by Robert Kempner, lead U.S. prosecutor before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, in the papers of Undersecretary Martin Luther, who had died in May 1945. By this time the more important participants in the meeting were dead or missing (Heydrich, Müller, Eichmann), and most of the others denied knowledge of the meeting or claimed that they could not remember what had occurred there. Only Kritzinger ever showed any genuine remorse for his role in preparing the Final Solution.

The minutes of the Wannsee Conference, however, do not mention killing. These omissions were not fully elucidated until the interrogation and trial of Eichmann in Israel in 1962. Eichmann told his questioners that towards the end of the meeting cognac was served, and that after that the conversation became less restrained. "The gentlemen were standing together, or sitting together", he said, "and were discussing the subject quite bluntly, quite differently from the language which I had to use later in the record. During the conversation they minced no words about it at all ... they spoke about methods of killing, about liquidation, about extermination".

Eichmann recorded that Heydrich was pleased with the course of the meeting. He "gave expression to his great satisfaction", and allowed himself a glass of cognac, although he rarely drank. He "had expected considerable stumbling blocks and difficulties", Eichmann recalled, but instead he had found "an atmosphere not only of agreement on the part of the participants, but more than that, one could feel an agreement which had assumed a form which had not been expected". At the conclusion of the meeting Heydrich gave Eichmann firm instructions about what was to appear in the minutes. They were not to be verbatim: Eichmann would "clean them up" so that nothing too explicit appeared in them. He said at his trial: "How shall I put it — certain over-plain talk and jargon expressions had to be rendered into office language by me". As a result, the last twenty minutes of the meeting, in which, as Eichmann recalled, words like "liquidation" and "extermination" were freely used, were summed up in one bland sentence: "In conclusion the different types of possible solutions were discussed". Thus the minutes must be read in conjunction with Eichmann's testimony to get as near as is possible to a full account of what took place.

Interpretation

Reinhard Heydrich

The Wannsee Conference lasted only about ninety minutes, and for most of its participants it was one meeting among many in a busy week. The enormous importance which has been attached to the conference by postwar writers was not evident to most of its participants at the time. Heydrich did not call the meeting to make fundamental new decisions on the Jewish question. Massive killings of Jews in the conquered territories in the Soviet Union and Poland (e.g. at Chelmno) were ongoing and new extermination camps were in preparation at the time of the conference. They knew that in this case the decision had already been made, and that Heydrich was there as Himmler's emissary to tell them about it. Nor did the conference engage in detailed logistical planning. It could hardly do so in the absence of a representative of the Transport Ministry or the German Railways.

German historian Peter Longerich has written that one motive for Heydrich's calling the conference was to ensure that all the leading ministries were accomplices in his plan.

From Heydrich’s point of view", he writes, "the main purposes of the conference were, firstly, to establish the overall control of the deportation programme by the RSHA over a number of important Reich authorities and thereby, secondly, to make the top representatives of the ministerial bureaucracy into accomplices and accessories to, and co-responsible for, the plan he was pursuing. To reiterate: the plan was to exile all Jews in the present and future areas under German rule to Eastern Europe, where they were to be exposed to extraordinarily harsh living conditions and fatally exhausted or murdered. Heydrich had pursued this deportation plan since the beginning of 1941; in July 1941, Göring had given him the authority to execute it; and with the first deportation of Jews from central Europe in October, the first stage in that pan-European design had been realized. With his first invitation to the conference, Heydrich had waited until the second wave of deportations to Riga, Minsk and Kovno had already begun. He clearly wanted to present the representatives of the supreme Reich authorities with a fait accompli.

Longerich further argued,

As we do not know the exact words used in the conference, and since Eichmann's statements incriminating third parties can only be trusted with certain reservations, the minutes should not be used as a basis for speculations about what was 'actually' said... Instead it should be read as a guideline authorized by Heydrich and revealed to representatives of a number of authorities by the RSHA, which had been commissioned to deal with the final solution of the Jewish question... On 20 January 1942, Heydrich had two chief concerns: the deportations had to be accepted (everything that happened after the deportations was an internal SS matter, and no longer had to be agreed with other institutions). Secondly, the category of those to be evacuated had to be established: the status of Mischlinge and those married to non-Jews had to be clarified... However, by being included in the detailed discussion of the problems surrounding Mischlinge and 'mixed marriages', the representatives of the ministerial bureaucracy came to share knowledge of and responsibility for the 'Final Solution'. For, with the concerns they raised against the inclusion of the marginal groups in the deportations, the representatives of the ministerial bureaucracy had made it plain that they had no concerns about the principle of deportation per se. This was indeed the crucial result of the meeting and the main reason why Heydrich had detailed minutes prepared and widely circulated.

Eichmann's biographer David Cesarani agrees with Longerich's interpretation, that Heydrich's main purpose was to impose his own authority on the various ministries and agencies involved in Jewish policy matters, to avoid any repetition of the disputes that had arisen over the killing of the German Jews at Riga in late November. "The simplest, most decisive way that Heydrich could ensure the smooth flow of deportations", he writes, "was by asserting his total control over the fate of the Jews in the Reich and the east, and [by] cow[ing] other interested parties into toeing the line of the RSHA". This would explain why most of the meeting was taken up with a long speech by Heydrich, the contents of which would not have been news to most of those present, and why so little time was spent discussing practical questions. It was also important to obtain the consent of the Foreign Ministry and the Four Year Plan, the ministries most likely to object (on diplomatic and economic grounds) to the mass killing of the Jews.

Fates of the attendees

In order of death:

• Reinhard Heydrich died in Prague on 4 June 1942 as a result of injuries sustained during a May 27 attack by Czech and Slovak soldiers parachuted in from England.
• Roland Freisler was killed in a USAAF air-raid in Berlin in February 1945.
• Rudolf Lange was said to have been killed in action in Poland in February 1945 but his exact fate remains unclear.
• Alfred Meyer killed himself in April 1945.
• Heinrich Müller was last seen in Berlin on 29 April 1945. His fate is unknown, but he probably died in Berlin in the next few days.
• Martin Luther finished the war in a German concentration camp after falling out with Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop in 1943. After being freed by the Soviets, Luther died in Berlin in May 1945.
• Karl Eberhard Schöngarth was executed for war crimes (killing British prisoners of war) in May 1946.
• Friedrich Wilhelm Kritzinger was acquitted of war crimes and died in October 1947.
• Josef Bühler was tried in Poland for war crimes and executed in Kraków in July 1948.
• Erich Neumann was briefly imprisoned and died in mid-1948.
• Wilhelm Stuckart was imprisoned for four years before being released for lack of evidence in 1949. He was killed in a car accident in November, 1953.
• Adolf Eichmann managed to escape to Argentina where he lived under a false identity. In 1960 he was captured by the Mossad, imprisoned in Israel, tried, convicted and sentenced to death, being finally executed in May 1962.
• Georg Leibbrandt was charged with war crimes but the case against him was dismissed in 1950. He died in June 1982.
• Otto Hofmann was sentenced to 25 years in prison for war crimes, but was pardoned in 1954. He died in December 1982.
• Gerhard Klopfer was charged with war crimes but was released for lack of evidence. He became a tax advisor, later dying in January 1987.

Wannsee House Holocaust Memorial

In 1965, historian Joseph Wulf tried to have the Wannsee House made into a Holocaust memorial and document centre. But the Senate of Berlin did not want Holocaust memorials and spurned Joseph Wulf. In his last letter to his son David, 2 August 1974, Wulf wrote, "I have published 18 books about the Third Reich and they have had no effect. You can document everything to death for the Germans. There is a democratic regime in Bonn. Yet the mass murderers walk around free, live in their little houses, and grow flowers." Deeply despondent over the death of his wife and the collapse of his plans for a document centre, Wulf committed suicide, age 61, by jumping from the fifth floor window of his Berlin apartment, Giesebrechtstraße 12, Charlottenburg. In 1992 the Wannsee House became a Holocaust memorial. The Joseph Wulf Bibliothek/Mediothek on the second floor holds thousands of books on Nazism, anti-Semitism, and the Jewish genocide, along with many videos, microfilm texts and original Nazi era documents. Wulf's last letter is on display in Berlin’s Jewish Museum.

See also

• Reich Chancellery meeting of 12 December 1941

Bibliography

• Aly, Götz (13 December 1997). "December 21, 1941". Berliner Zeitung (Berliner Verlag). Archived from the original on 24 April 2013. Retrieved 19 May 2013. 
• Breitman, Richard (1991). The Architect of Genocide: Himmler and the Final Solution. Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press. 
• Browning, Christopher R. (2004). The Origins of the Final Solution : The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939-March 1942. Comprehensive History of the Holocaust. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. ISBN 0-8032-1327-1. 
• Cesarani, David (2005). Eichmann: His Life and Crimes. Vintage. 
• Evans, Richard J. (2005). The Third Reich in Power. New York: Penguin. ISBN 978-0-14-303790-3. 
• Evans, Richard J. (2008). The Third Reich at War. New York: Penguin. ISBN 978-0-14-311671-4. 
• Gerlach, Christian (December 1998). "The Wannsee Conference, the Fate of German Jews, and Hitler's Decision in Principle to Exterminate All European Jews" (PDF). Journal of Modern History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press) 70 (4): 759–812. 
• Kershaw, Ian (2008). Hitler: A Biography. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 978-0-393-06757-6. 
• Lehrer, Steven (2000). Wannsee House and the Holocaust. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. p. 134. ISBN 978-0-7864-9144-5. 
• Longerich, Peter (2000). "The Wannsee Conference in the Development of the 'Final Solution'" (PDF). Holocaust Educational Trust Research Papers (London: The Holocaust Educational Trust) 1 (2). ISBN 0-9516166-5-X. 
• Longerich, Peter (2010). Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-280436-5. 
• Longerich, Peter (2012). Heinrich Himmler: A Life. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-959232-6. 
• Marrus, Michael R.; Paxton, Robert O. (1981). Vichy France and the Jews. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. ISBN 0-8047-2499-7. 
• Roseman, Mark (2002). The Villa, The Lake, The Meeting: Wannsee and the Final Solution. London; New York: Allen Lane. ISBN 0-71-399570-X. 
• Snyder, Timothy (2010). Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin. New York: Basic Books. ISBN 978-0-465-00239-9. 
• Tooze, Adam (2006). The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy. London; New York: Allen Lane. ISBN 978-0-713-99566-4. 

External links

• The Wannsee Conference on the Yad Vashem website
• House of the Wannsee Conference: Memorial and Educational Site
• Adolf Eichmann testifies about the Wannsee Conference (in German with Japanese subtitles)
• Minutes from the Wannsee conference, archived by the Progressive Review