Wannsee Conference

On 20 January 1942, fifteen senior officials of the SS, the Nazi Party and the German state ministries met in a lakeside villa at Wannsee, on the edge of Berlin, to coordinate the deportation and murder of the Jews of Europe. The meeting was chaired by Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Reich Security Main Office. It did not take the decision to commit genocide, which was already under way, but its surviving minutes are among the clearest documents of how the bureaucracy of Nazi Germany organised the Holocaust.

Persecution of Jews in Germany began as soon as the Nazis took power in January 1933, with exclusion from the civil service and professions, boycotts and violence, and in 1935 the Nuremberg Laws stripped Jews of citizenship. After the invasion of Poland in 1939, SS task forces, the Einsatzgruppen, shot tens of thousands of civilians. With the attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941, Operation Barbarossa, these units began killing Jews on a vast scale, first men of military age and, from August, women, children and the elderly as well. By the end of 1941 hundreds of thousands had been murdered.

In a written order of 31 July 1941, Hermann Göring charged Heydrich with drawing up a "total solution of the Jewish question" across every territory Germany controlled, and with bringing all the agencies concerned into line.

Heydrich sent out invitations in late November 1941 for a meeting on 9 December, but postponed it as the war changed: the Red Army counter-attacked before Moscow, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and Germany declared war on the United States. Around this time Adolf Hitler told party leaders plainly that Europe's Jews would be annihilated at once, not once the war was won. Plans to deport Jews to the occupied Soviet territories gave way to extermination camps in occupied Poland, one of which, Belzec, was already being built. New invitations went out on 8 January 1942 for a meeting at a villa on the Großer Wannsee, owned by the SS security service.

The participants were state secretaries and senior officials from the interior, justice and foreign ministries, the Reich Chancellery, the Four Year Plan, the eastern territories ministry and the occupation government of Poland, together with SS officers including Heinrich Müller of the Gestapo and Adolf Eichmann, who took the minutes. Most were highly educated and several were lawyers.

Heydrich spoke for nearly an hour. Using euphemisms such as "evacuation to the east", he described how Europe would be combed from west to east and its Jews, estimated in a table drawn up by Eichmann at around 11 million, sent to Poland. Those fit for work would be used for road building in labour columns, where many would die; the survivors would be "treated accordingly". Much of the discussion concerned who counted as a Jew, particularly people of mixed descent and those in mixed marriages. Josef Bühler, from the occupied Polish administration, asked for the killing to begin there as soon as possible. The whole meeting lasted about ninety minutes. Eichmann later testified that, over drinks at the end, the participants spoke openly about methods of killing.

Eichmann condensed his notes into minutes edited by Heydrich, deliberately avoiding explicit language, and copies went to the participants. Nearly all were destroyed as Germany collapsed in 1945, but one, copy 16 of 30, belonging to the Foreign Office official Martin Luther, was found in 1947 by the American prosecutor Robert Kempner and used as evidence at the later Nuremberg trials.

Historians such as Peter Longerich and David Cesarani see the conference as a means for Heydrich to assert the SS's control over the "Jewish question" and to make the ministries accept, and share responsibility for, the deportations. None of the officials present objected to the principle. The villa opened as a memorial and museum on 20 January 1992, the fiftieth anniversary of the meeting.

Our 1938 map shows Nazi Germany and its neighbours on the eve of the war, and our 1945 map shows Europe after its defeat, with the Germany in which the meeting took place divided among the Allies.