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The Wannsee Conference THE WANNSEE CONFERENCE Yad Vashem 20 JANUARY 1942 Today I will once more be a prophet: If the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevization of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe! Extract from Hitler's Reichstag speech of 30 January 1939 The Wannsee Conference The Wannsee Conference The Wannsee Conference took place on 20 January 1942 at a secluded villa on the shore of Lake Wannsee, a few miles from Berlin. Fifteen senior Nazi and German government officials had been summoned by SS General Reinhard Heydrich, the chief of the Reich Security Main Office and head of the German secret police, who told them he had just been appointed Plenipotentiary for the Preparation of the Final Solution of the European Jewish Question . Eight of the fifteen participants held academic doctoral degrees; clearly this was not a group of men unable to grasp what was being discussed. Nor were they going to be overcome with surprise or Yad Vashem shock, for Heydrich was not talking to the uninitiated or the squeamish. It took less than two hours for them to make their decisions about future actions and measures against the Jews, which they called the Final Solution . The delegates met to discuss progress so far and to co-ordinate their actions so that their task was carried out more efficiently, with a view to complete success – the murder of all the Jewish people in Europe. With the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 ( Operation Barbarossa ), mobile killing squads known as Einsatzgruppen had begun operating along the Eastern Front. The murders carried out by the Einsatzgruppen would eventually result in the deaths of approximately 2 million Jews, thousands of Roma/Sinti and Communists, as well as local priests and teachers. However, the process of face-to-face killing was taking its toll on members of the killing squads. Delegates at the meeting were tasked with finding ways of killing at a distance that would prove less labour intensive and more efficient. At the Wannsee Conference, the participants discussed at length the ‘evacuation’ and the ‘resettlement’ of the Jews and concluded that an efficient method for their disposal was necessary to eliminate as much residue as possible and to spare those operating the system from negative psychological trauma. Those present at the meeting at Wannsee were sworn to secrecy. They were warned to destroy any notes they made and not to discuss the proceedings of the meeting amongst themselves or with anyone else, once the meeting concluded. One set of minutes from the proceedings has survived marked ‘Top Secret’ (see notes on the origins of the text, page 5). Participants at the conference were drawn from various departments of the SS and the German General Government (see list of delegates). Heydrich’s brief was to co-ordinate the work of Hitler’s Chancellery, the SS Race and Resettlement Office, the Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories, the Ministry of the Interior, the Justice Ministry, the Foreign Office and several other government departments. Much of the meeting was taken up with debates about how a Jew was defined, a subject which the lawyers in the Justice Ministry wanted specified. They wanted the Nuremberg Racial Laws of 1935 clarified with respect to the large numbers of people with mixed backgrounds – one Jewish parent or grandparent – and whether they should be sterilised or killed. The head of the German Four Year Plan, Erich Neumann, responsible for the disposal of Jewish property was present along with Adolf Eichmann, in charge of the Gestapo’s Jewish Affairs Section, and his chief, Heinrich Müller, the head of the Gestapo. Delegates were concerned with both the costs of the process of murder and the potential financial profits to be made from slave labour and confiscation of Jewish property. All of those present contributed to finding the Final Solution to the Jewish Question – the plan to murder all the Jews of Europe. Heydrich told the meeting: ‘In the course of the practical implementation of the Final Solution, Europe will be combed from west to east’. 1 Eichmann presented the delegates at the meeting with a list of countries, setting out the number of Jews living in each, whom the Nazis intended to deport to their deaths. Estonia (Estland) was marked as being Judenfrei (Jew-free) as almost all of Estonia’s 1,000 Jews had already been murdered. There were two figures for France: one for the area including Paris that had been occupied by Germany after June 1940, the other, much larger, for ‘Unoccupied France’. still under French rule (with its capital at Vichy), which included the Jews of Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia. Ireland appears on the list with 4,000 Jews. It took the men at the Wannsee Conference just a couple of hours to implement a new phase in the murder of the Jews: to mass shootings, maltreatment and starvation was added a fourth method of killing: murder by Yad Vashem poison gas . Two months before the Wannsee Conference took place, 1,200 German political prisoners had been taken from Buchenwald concentration camp to a euthanasia centre where thousands of disabled Germans had already been gassed to death. The political prisoners were murdered by the same method. The meeting was part of a process designed to implement the destruction of the 11 million Jews described in the document presented by Eichmann. The conference concluded with the request by Heydrich that the participants offer him appropriate support during the carrying out of the tasks involved in the Final Solution, which he received unanimously. The Nazis ultimately succeeded in killing two thirds of Europe’s Jews. Background The Final Solution involved an array of organisations, not only the Nazi administration and police forces, but also the army and industry. Private companies supplied crematory ovens, gas vans and poison gas. The army bolstered the killing squads and carried out its own killings. Various branches of the state administration organised deportation trains, decided on timetables and priorities, processed victims’ possessions, and cajoled and rewarded foreign governments who rounded up Jews to be killed. Local co-operation and collaboration played important roles. The traumatic experiences suffered by Germany since their defeat in World War I provided fertile ground for the foundations of the ideaological ambitions of the Nazi Party. If Nazi propaganda had not succeeded in turning many Germans into rabid antisemites in Hitler’s own image, Nazi policies had certainly succeeded in isolating German Jewry from the rest of society. The Jews had increasingly become an abstract phenomenon to whose fate Germans could be indifferent; they did not think of them as fellow citizens and human beings with whom they could identify and empathise. At the Wannsee Conference, the Chief of the Security Police and the SD, Reinhard Heydrich, gave a short report of the struggle which was being carried out thus far against this enemy: 1. The expulsion of Jews from every sphere of life of the German people 2. The expulsion of Jews from the living space (Lebensraum) of the German people 2 The Wannsee Conference For quite a long time, emigration and resettlement were considered as viable possibilities, made all the more attractive by getting the Jews to pay for it themselves! However, the German invasion of Poland in September 1939 was an event of decisive importance in the evolution of the Nazi policies that led toward the Final Solution: it initiated a quest for a new approach to the Nazis' Jewish problem. Over 2 million Polish Jews fell into German hands, and some 1.8 million remained at the end of the year when the borders between the German and Russian zones were closed. Until the absorption of Poland, a solution to the Jewish question had been sought with reference only to German Jews, despite the addition of the Jews of Austria, the Sudetenland and the Protectorate. The prospect of a solution through emigration and resettlement remained feasible and still offered the hope of a Germany ultimately free of Jews ( Judenfrei ). However, the outbreak of war now threatened to restrict even further the already fast diminishing avenues of emigration, while the conquest of Poland provided Germany with additional Jews on an unprecedented scale. Present at the Wannsee Conference Government Representatives Bühler Dr Josef, Administration of the Governor General in Krakow, State Secretary Freisler Dr Roland, Reich Ministry of Justice, State Secretary Kritzinger, Friedrich Wilhelm, Reich Chancellery Permanent Secretary Leibbrandt Dr Georg, Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories, Permanent Secretary Luther Martin, Foreign Office, Undersecretary of State Mayer Dr Alfred, Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories, State Secretary Neumann Erich, Office of the Plenipotentiary for the Four Year Plan, State Secretary Stuckart Dr Wilhelm, Reich Ministry of the Interior, State Secretary SS Representatives Eichmann Adolf, Reich Security Main Office (RHSA), Director of Section IV B 4: Jewish Affairs and Expulsions Heydrich Reinhard, Head of the Security Police and SS Security Service (SD), Head of Reich Security Main Office (RHSA), Acting Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia Hoffman Otto, Head of the SS Race and Settlement Main Office Klopfer Dr Gerhard, Party Chancellery, Permanent Secretary Lange Dr Rudolf, Commander
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