The House of the Wannsee Conference ( The Meeting of Minds On The Final Soluton ] Murder All 11,000,000 Jews

NEVER FORGET HISTORY: WANSEE CONFERENCE: Nazi-Germany’s Final Solution [ Exterminate All 11,000,000 Jews}

• 1942 Wannsee Conference. The Final Solution Opening Statement by the SS General. “What is our goal in four years? Response: “Occupy the White House. “

On January 20, 1942, 15 high-ranking Nazi Party and German government officials gathered at a villa in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee to discuss and coordinate the implementation of what they called the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question."

The mass murder of the Jews by Nazi Germany and its collaborators required the coordination and cooperation of governmental agencies throughout Axis-controlled Europe.

The Wannsee Conference was a high-level meeting of German officials to discuss and implement the so-called “Final Solution of the Jewish Question” (mass killing).

The SS envisioned that some 11 million Jews, some of them not living on German-controlled territory, would be eradicated as part Goals of the Conference.

The "Final Solution" was the code name for the systematic, deliberate, physical annihilation of the European Jews. At some still undetermined time in 1941, Adolf Hitler authorized this European-wide scheme for mass murder. Heydrich convened the Wannsee Conference

to inform and secure support from government ministries and other interested agencies relevant to the implementation of the “Final Solution”

• to disclose to the participants that Hitler himself had tasked Heydrich and the RSHA with coordinating the operation.

The men at the table did not deliberate whether such a plan should be undertaken, but instead discussed the implementation of a policy decision that had already been made at the highest level of the Nazi regime.

Coordinating the "Final Solution"

At the time of the Wannsee Conference, most participants were already aware that the Nazi regime had engaged in mass murder of Jews and other civilians in the German-occupied areas of the Soviet Union and in Serbia. Some had learned of the actions of the Einsatzgruppen and other police and military units, which were already slaughtering tens of thousands of Jews in the German-occupied Soviet Union. Others were aware that units of the German Army and the SS and police were killing Jews in Serbia. None of the officials present at the meeting objected to the "Final Solution" View This Term in the Glossary policy that Heydrich announced.

Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the SD (Security Service) and Nazi governor of Bohemia and Moravia. [LCID: 91199]

Portrait of Reinhard Heydrich

Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the SD (Security Service) and Nazi governor of Bohemia and Moravia. Place uncertain, 1942.

National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD

Heydrich indicated that approximately 11,000,000 Jews in Europe would fall under the provisions of the "Final Solution." In this figure, he included not only Jews residing in Axis-controlled Europe, but also the Jewish populations of the United Kingdom, and the neutral nations (Switzerland, Ireland, Sweden, Spain, Portugal, and European Turkey). For Jews residing in the Greater German Reich and holding the status of subjects of the German Reich, the Nuremberg Laws would serve as a basis for determining who was a Jew.

Heydrich announced that

“during the course of the Final Solution, the Jews will be deployed under appropriate supervision at a suitable form of labor deployment in the East. In large labor columns, separated by gender, able-bodied Jews will be brought to those regions to build roads, whereby a large number will doubtlessly be lost through natural reduction. Any final remnant that survives will doubtless consist of the elements most capable of resistance. They must be dealt with appropriately, since, representing the fruit of natural selection, they are to be regarded as the core of a new Jewish revival.”

The participants discussed a number of other issues raised by the new policy, including the establishment of the Theresienstadt camp-ghetto as a destination for elderly Jews as well Jews who were disabled or decorated in World War I, the deferment until after the war of “Final Solution” measures against Jews married to non-Jews or persons of mixed descent as defined by the Nuremberg laws, prospects for inducing Germany's Axis partners to give up their Jewish populations, and preparatory measures for the “evacuations.”

Despite the euphemisms which appeared in the protocols of the meeting, the aim of the Wannsee Conference was clear to its participants: to further the coordination of a policy aimed at the physical annihilation of the European Jews.