Wannsee Conference and the "Final Solution"

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National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Md.

Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the SD (Security Service) and Nazi governor of Bohemia and Moravia. Place uncertain, 1942.
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WANNSEE CONFERENCE AND THE "FINAL SOLUTION"

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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 the "Final Solution." Reinhard Heydrich, SS chief Heinrich Himmler's head deputy and head of the Reich Main Security Office, held the meeting in order to involve key members of the German ministerial bureaucracy, including the Foreign and Justice Ministries, whose cooperation was needed to implement the killing measures.

The "Final Solution" was the Nazis' code name for the deliberate, carefully planned destruction of European Jewry. The Wannsee Conference determined the way in which Hitler's decision to solve the "Jewish Question" through systematic mass murder was to be transmitted to the appropriate ministries and bureaucracies. Invitees to the conference did not deliberate whether such a plan should be undertaken, but instead discussed the realization of a decision that had already been made.

At the time of the Wannsee Conference, most participants were already aware that the National Socialist regime had embarked on the mass murder of Jews. Some had learned of the actions of the Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing units), which were already slaughtering tens of thousands of Jews in the German-occupied Soviet Union. Others were aware of the killing of Jews in a "local solution to the Jewish question" in Serbia. None of the officials present at the meeting objected to the policy announced by Heydrich.

Heydrich indicated that approximately 11,000,000 Jews were eventually to be subjected to the "Final Solution," with the Nuremberg Laws serving as a basis for determining who was a Jew. "Under suitable supervision, the Jews shall be...taken to the east," Heydrich announced, "and deployed in appropriate work....Able-bodied Jews, separated by sex, will be taken to those areas in large work details to build roads, and a large part will doubtlessly be lost through natural attrition. The surviving remnants...will have to be treated appropriately..." Despite the euphemisms which appeared in the protocols of the meeting, the aim of the Wannsee Conference was clear: the coordination of a policy of genocide of European Jews.