The Wannsee Conference

At around midday on 20 January 1942, fifteen men gathered in a villa at Am Großen Wannsee 56–58 in the Berlin district of Wannsee: senior officials of the Reich ministries, of Hitler’s chancellery and of the Party, of the occupation administration, and officers of the SS and police. The host was the head of the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) and Deputy Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia, SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich. The invitation spoke of a “discussion followed by breakfast”. The subject was the “final solution of the Jewish question in Europe”. The meeting lasted about an hour and a half, and we know its course from the minutes drawn up by the RSHA’s desk officer for Jewish affairs, SS-Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann.

It is not uncommon to read that the participants “decided that the final solution of the Jewish question would be resettlement and later extermination”. That description needs correcting. No decision to exterminate the Jews was taken at Wannsee, and there was no choice between resettlement and murder. By the time the officials sat down at the table, the Germans had been shooting Jews en masse in the occupied Soviet territories for seven months; since December they had been killing them with exhaust gas at Chełmno on the Ner; and at Bełżec they were building the first death camp with gas chambers. The conference served a different purpose: Heydrich wanted the ministries and the occupation authorities to acknowledge his leadership, to agree with the RSHA on the rules for deportations from all over Europe, and to become accomplices in the undertaking. The word “evacuation” in the minutes was a euphemism concealing the murder of the Jews, not their resettlement.

The road to the meeting

Heydrich had a formal mandate for convening the meeting. On 31 July 1941 Hermann Göring had authorised him to prepare a “total solution of the Jewish question in the German sphere of influence in Europe” and to involve other central agencies in the work. Between the summer and the winter of 1941 the Third Reich’s policy towards the Jews changed fundamentally. Behind the Eastern Front, the Einsatzgruppen, police battalions and SS brigades moved from killing Jewish men to murdering entire communities, women and children included. In the ravine of Babi Yar near Kiev more than 33,000 people were shot in the last days of September, and on 1 December the commander of Einsatzkommando 3, Karl Jäger, reported that his unit had killed more than 137,000 people in Lithuania. In the autumn Jews were forbidden to emigrate from the areas under German rule, and from mid-October Jews from the Reich, Austria and the Protectorate began to be deported to the ghettos of Łódź, Kaunas, Riga and Minsk. Some of them were murdered immediately on arrival: near Kaunas in November, and near Riga, in the Rumbula forest, on 30 November, together with thousands of Latvian Jews from the local ghetto. According to historians’ estimates, by the beginning of 1942 the Germans and their helpers had murdered several hundred thousand Jews – according to some estimates, close to a million.

On 29 November 1941 Eichmann sent out invitations on Heydrich’s behalf to a meeting set for 9 December. He enclosed a copy of Göring’s letter and mentioned that Jews from the Reich had been “evacuated” to the East since 15 October. The meeting was originally to be held at the headquarters of the International Criminal Police Commission, which Heydrich chaired, at Am Kleinen Wannsee 16, but it was soon moved to the guest house of the Security Police and SD at Am Großen Wannsee 56–58. This was a lavish villa built in 1914–1915 for the industrialist Ernst Marlier and bought in 1940 by a foundation that handled property matters for the SD.

On 8 December, the day before the appointed date, the meeting was cancelled. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hitler had summoned the Reichstag for 11 December, at which session he declared war on the United States; a surviving note speaks of the meeting being postponed “because of the session of the Reichstag”, of which Heydrich and some of those invited were members. Why the new date was set only for 20 January is not known. In the meantime, however, events took place that in the eyes of many historians changed the context of the meeting. On 12 December Hitler addressed the Party leaders, the Gauleiters and Reichsleiters at the Reich Chancellery. Joseph Goebbels noted in his diary the next day that on the Jewish question the Führer had decided to make a clean sweep: he had prophesied to the Jews that if they once again brought about a world war, they would meet their own annihilation in it; this had not been an empty phrase – the world war had come, and the annihilation of Jewry must be its inevitable consequence. The German historian Christian Gerlach regarded this speech as the announcement of a fundamental decision to murder all the Jews of Europe, and the postponement of the meeting as a consequence of that decision; most scholars do not attribute such significance to a single day and see Hitler’s words in December as one stage in a radicalisation that lasted from the summer of 1941 to the spring of 1942. On 16 December the Governor-General, Hans Frank, told his officials in Kraków that he had been told in Berlin to “liquidate” his Jews himself, and announced a “great meeting” at Heydrich’s office. New invitations were sent out on 8 January 1942.

The participants

Fifteen men sat at the table. The RSHA and the SS were represented by Heydrich; the head of the Gestapo, SS-Gruppenführer Heinrich Müller; Eichmann; the head of the SS Race and Settlement Main Office, SS-Gruppenführer Otto Hofmann; the commander of the Security Police and SD in the General Government, SS-Oberführer Eberhard Schöngarth; and the commander of the Security Police and SD in Latvia, SS-Sturmbannführer Rudolf Lange, who had personally directed the executions of Jews near Riga. The state and the Party were represented by the State Secretary of the Interior Ministry, Wilhelm Stuckart, co-author of the commentary on the Nuremberg Laws; the State Secretary of the Justice Ministry, Roland Freisler; the State Secretary in the Office of the Plenipotentiary for the Four-Year Plan, Erich Neumann; the State Secretary of the General Government, Josef Bühler; the Under-Secretary of State at the Foreign Office, Martin Luther; Ministerial Director Friedrich Wilhelm Kritzinger of the Reich Chancellery; Gerhard Klopfer of the NSDAP Party Chancellery; and two representatives of the Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories: Gauleiter Alfred Meyer, deputy to Minister Alfred Rosenberg, and Georg Leibbrandt. Shorthand notes were taken by Eichmann’s secretary, who is not named in the minutes.

These were not the leaders of the Third Reich. Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, Göring and Goebbels were not at Wannsee. Most of the participants were senior officials of the second rank, no fewer than eight of them holders of doctorates, mainly in law. It was precisely their presence that gave the meeting its weight: representatives of ministries that had not until then been formally initiated into the “final solution” were to hear that it was directed by the RSHA, and to agree to co-operate.

The meeting and the minutes

Heydrich spoke for almost an hour. He recalled that Göring had appointed him plenipotentiary for the preparation of the final solution of the Jewish question in Europe, and that overall direction lay with Himmler as Reichsführer-SS and Chief of the German Police. He summarised the policy pursued so far: by October 1941 some 537,000 Jews had emigrated from the Reich, Austria and the Protectorate. Now, “with the prior approval of the Führer”, emigration had been replaced by the “evacuation of the Jews to the East”. These actions, he said, were however to be regarded only as “temporary measures”, which would provide “practical experience” for the coming final solution.

He then presented a table prepared by Eichmann. The “final solution” was to cover some 11 million Jews throughout Europe, including those in neutral and enemy countries beyond Germany’s reach: 330,000 in England, 4,000 in Ireland, 18,000 in Switzerland and more than 55,000 in the European part of Turkey. The General Government was assigned 2,284,000 Jews, the Białystok district 400,000, Ukraine more than 2.9 million, the Soviet Union as a whole 5 million, and Hungary 742,800. Estonia was described as “free of Jews” (judenfrei), and the figures for Lithuania and Latvia were by then only a fraction of their pre-war levels, because the table took account of the victims of the executions of the preceding months.

The most frequently quoted passage of the minutes describes what awaited the deportees. In the course of the final solution, it says, the Jews were to be sent to the East for labour, under appropriate direction and in a suitable manner. Those fit for work would be led into these areas in large labour columns, the sexes separated, to build roads, in the course of which a large proportion would no doubt drop out through natural diminution. Any remnant that might finally survive – being undoubtedly the most resilient part – would have to be “treated accordingly”, since, representing a natural selection, it would, if released, form the germ cell of a new Jewish revival. Most historians read “treated accordingly” as the official term for killing. Neither in this sentence nor anywhere else do the minutes speak openly of gas chambers or shooting; about the fate of those unfit for work they say nothing at all.

Europe was to be “combed through from west to east”, but because of the housing shortage and other “socio-political necessities” the Reich and the Protectorate would come first. German Jews were to be taken first to “transit ghettos” and from there further east. Jews over 65, severely wounded First World War veterans and holders of the Iron Cross First Class were to be sent to an “old people’s ghetto” in Theresienstadt, which at a stroke would cut off the “numerous interventions” on their behalf. Heydrich also discussed the allied and occupied countries: in France the registration of the Jews would “probably” go ahead without difficulty, Romania had already appointed a commissioner for Jewish affairs, and an adviser on the matter would soon have to be imposed on Hungary. The Foreign Office representative, Luther, warned that difficulties might arise in the Scandinavian countries.

The longest dispute concerned the people whom Nazi law defined as “persons of mixed blood” (Mischlinge), and mixed marriages. Under Heydrich’s proposal, “Mischlinge of the first degree” – people with two Jewish grandparents – were in principle to be treated as Jews, except for those married to persons “of German blood” and having children with them; those who remained in the Reich were to be sterilised. “Mischlinge of the second degree” were in principle to be treated as Germans. Stuckart considered these principles unworkable in administrative practice and proposed the compulsory sterilisation of all “Mischlinge of the first degree” and the dissolution of mixed marriages by law. The matter was not settled and was referred to further meetings. Neumann of the Four-Year Plan office asked that Jews employed in industries vital to the war effort should not be deported until replacements were found, to which Heydrich replied that this was already the rule.

Bühler declared that the General Government would welcome the start of the “final solution” on its territory, since transport there posed no problem and most of its two and a half million Jews were unfit for work and, as “carriers of disease”, represented an “exceptional danger”. He asked that “the Jewish question in this territory be solved as quickly as possible”. At the end, as the minutes record, “various types of possible solutions” were discussed, and Bühler and Meyer proposed that certain preparatory work be carried out on the spot, “while avoiding alarming the population”.

The minutes, known as the Wannsee Protocol, were drawn up by Eichmann on the basis of the shorthand notes, and Müller and Heydrich revised them several times. At his trial in Jerusalem in 1961 Eichmann testified that Heydrich had told him to put the blunt remarks into official language, and that in the unofficial part of the meeting, over cognac, there had been talk of killing, eliminating and annihilating. He also said that Heydrich had been pleased: he had expected resistance from the ministries and had met with readiness to co-operate instead. These accounts come from a defendant who was trying to escape the death penalty, and historians treat them with caution, but no other source contradicts them.

The surviving copy

Thirty copies of the minutes were made, stamped “Secret Reich Matter” (Geheime Reichssache). On 26 February 1942 Heydrich sent them out to the participants. Most were destroyed at the end of the war. Only copy number 16, sent to Luther at the Foreign Office, survived. In 1943 Luther fell out with the Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, and was sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp, while the files of his department were evacuated rather than destroyed. In March 1947 members of the staff of Robert Kempner, the American prosecutor preparing the Ministries Trial, found the minutes among the captured files of the Auswärtiges Amt. The document became one of the key pieces of evidence in the Nuremberg trials and is today one of the most frequently cited sources on the history of the Holocaust. For years deniers claimed it was a forgery; historians who studied its history and compared it with other files have shown these claims to be groundless.

What the conference changed

Today historians agree on the main points. The Wannsee Conference was not the moment at which it was decided to murder the Jews of Europe; such decisions could be taken only by Hitler, in agreement with Himmler, and they were not made at a table of second-rank officials. The museum that now occupies the villa calls the belief that the genocide was decided there an “almost irreversible error of historiography and journalism”. The meeting was rather an act of co-ordination and subordination. The ministries accepted that the deportees were the exclusive concern of the SS and raised no objection to the principle of deportation itself; Peter Longerich considers this the most important outcome of the meeting and the main reason why Heydrich had detailed minutes drawn up and circulated. The participants became complicit, and in the years that followed their offices helped with the deportations, the plundering of property and the legal humiliation of the victims.

For historians the minutes are also a record of a moment of transition. They show the intention of subjecting all the Jews of the continent to the “final solution”, including those in countries the Germans did not control, but they do not yet settle how many victims would die of labour, hunger and disease and how many would be murdered outright. The British historian Mark Roseman writes that the conference was not very important for the course of the Holocaust; its significance lies in the fact that the minutes survived. Other scholars point out that after Wannsee the deportations extended to the entire area under German rule, and that in the General Government the killing ceased to be confined to those unfit for work.

Place in the war

As early as 29 January 1942 the first follow-up meeting was held at the Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories, at which a broad definition of “Jew” for the occupied Soviet territories was agreed. Further meetings, on 6 March and 27 October 1942 at Eichmann’s office in the Kurfürstenstraße, returned to the question of the “Mischlinge” and mixed marriages; neither compulsory divorce nor mass sterilisation was introduced in the Reich during the war. In occupied Poland the deportations from the Łódź Ghetto to Chełmno were already under way, and in mid-March 1942 Bełżec began operating. In Operation Reinhard, named, according to the prevailing view, after Heydrich, some one and a half million Jews, mainly from the General Government, were murdered at Bełżec, Sobibór and Treblinka by the autumn of 1943. From the summer of 1942 trains from France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Slovakia, and later also from Greece, Italy and Hungary, headed for Auschwitz-Birkenau. By the end of the war the Germans and their helpers had murdered some six million Jews.

The fates of the participants show how unevenly the perpetrators were called to account. Heydrich died on 4 June 1942 after the assassination attempt in Prague. Freisler was killed in an air raid on Berlin in February 1945, Lange and Meyer took their own lives in the last months of the war, Luther died soon after his release from the camp, and Müller vanished without trace in May 1945. Schöngarth was executed in 1946 on the sentence of a British military court for the murder of a shot-down Allied airman, and Bühler in 1948 in Kraków on the sentence of the Supreme National Tribunal. Hofmann received 25 years’ imprisonment at Nuremberg and was released in 1954; Stuckart received just under four years in the Ministries Trial, which were offset against his internment. Kritzinger and Neumann died before trial or soon after the war, and the proceedings against Leibbrandt and Klopfer were discontinued; Klopfer, the last surviving participant in the meeting, died in Ulm in 1987. Eichmann, abducted from Argentina by Israeli intelligence in 1960, was tried in Jerusalem and hanged in 1962. Since January 1992 the villa by the lake has housed the House of the Wannsee Conference (PL), a memorial and educational centre that tells the story of the crime through the documents of the officials who organised it.