What Was the Wannsee Conference?

The Wannsee Conference was held on January 20, 1942, near Berlin, Germany. Fifteen high-level German officials from various strategic agencies gathered to coordinate the necessary steps for the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question.” The conference and subsequent Wannsee Protocol dictated the establishment of the extermination camps in Europe, most notably in Poland. There is no written document specifying the decision of the Nazi policy towards Jews. As widely believed, the order for the total extermination of the European Jews was given by Adolf Hitler orally in 1941. As a result of the decision made during the Wannsee Conference, 1.7 million Jews were murdered between 1942 and 1943.

The leader of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, more commonly known as the Nazi Party, acquired control of the German state in January 1933. German President Paul von Hindenburg appointed Adolf Hitler as Chancellor. According to Hitler, the solution to overcoming unemployment and economic stagnation in the country was the exploitation of new territories. The Treaty of Versailles shrank Germany, depriving it of the Lebensraum, the “living space.” The policy dictated German expansion to the East to acquire land and resources to accommodate the needs of the German people.

Additionally, Adolf Hitler propagated the idea that the German race was inherently superior to other races. This concept became a focal point of the Nazy Party’s racial policies, seeking to persecute “racially inferior” ethnicities, particularly Jewish people. According to the Nazi Party, since Jews formed the wealthy elite during this time of acute economic distress in Germany, there had to be a mechanism to obtain their property.

Hitler succeeded in instilling in the German population the belief that they were oppressed in their own country as Jews controlled a significant portion of the capital. The Nuremberg Race Laws (the Reich Citizenship Law and the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor) from September 15, 1935 put an end to the socio-political equality of Jews in Germany. Jews were defined as a separate race and deprived of political rights. The laws prohibited intermarriages between Jews and Germans as well.

Antisemitic hysteria in Germany led to the mass robbery of Jewish synagogues and shops in 1938. Particularly violent appeared the night of November 9-10, which went down in history as the Crystal Night (Kristallnacht) because of the broken glass of Jewish buildings that littered German cities. Nazi authorities did not intervene, leading to even greater economic and political marginalization of the Jews.

In early 1939, Hitler tasked Hermann Goering to mobilize all sectors of the economy for war. This assignment brought numerous government agencies under his control, including a plan to expel the Jews from Germany.

On January 30, 1939, Hitler had already used a clearly defined vocabulary in his prophecy of the “destruction of international Jewry.” When the war against the Soviet Union (Operation Barbarossa) began on June 22, 1941, within months, millions of non-German Jews found themselves living in the realm of Nazi Germany. In 1940 and early 1941, the Nazis worked out several options for solving the Jewish “question”: offering the Soviet Union to accept the Jews of the Third Reich, the so-called “Madagascar Plan” (relocating all Jews to Madagascar), and the Nisko Plan (deporting Jews to the Lublin concentration camps in Poland). Only later materialized, and by the time the Wannsee Conference was held in January 1942, over one million Jews had already been persecuted.

The successful implementation of the mass extinction of the Jewish race required enhanced coordination and cooperation of the governmental agencies not only in Germany but throughout the remaining Axis-controlled Europe.

Reinhard Heydrich, widely known as the “God of Death” and “Hitler’s Hangman,” headed the conference, which was scheduled for December 9, 1941. The invitation included a letter dated July 31 from Hermann Göring authorizing Heydrich to implement all the necessary steps for the successful resolution of the Jewish Question.

Initially, the answer to the “question” entailed the deportation of Jews to the German-occupied territories in the Soviet Union. However, by the fall of 1941, it was clear that victory over the vast territories of the Soviet Union was not forthcoming, especially after the Red Army defeated German forces on December 5, 1941 near Moscow, banishing the prospects for a rapid victory.

In addition, in just two days, the United States entered World War II after Japan launched an attack on Pearl Harbor, and on December 11, Nazi Germany declared war on the United States. The geopolitical landscape was unstable and changing rapidly, so the Nazi plans needed to be modified accordingly. In early January 1942, Heydrich sent another invitation, setting the meeting date for January 20.

On January 20, 1942, in the Berlin suburb, in a grand villa overlooking Lake Wannsee, 15 high-level German officials gathered to discuss the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question.” All the participants of the Wannsee Conference were young and well-educated, with an average age of 42. Eight had PhDs in different fields, and seven were veterans of World War I.

Attendees of the conference were:

• Reinhard Heydrich, Head of the Reich Security Main Office, the SS, and the police agency responsible for implementing the Nazi plan to murder Jews in Europe during World War II;
• Otto Hofmann, Head of the SS Race and Settlement Main Office;
• Heinrich Müller, Chief of Amt IV (Gestapo);
• Karl Eberhard Schöngarth, Commander of the Security Police (SiPo) and the SD (intelligence agency of the Nazi Party) in the General Government;
• Gerhard Klopfer, Permanent Secretary, Nazi Party Chancellery;
• Adolf Eichmann, Head of Referat IV B4 of the Gestapo, Recording Secretary;
• Rudolf Lange, Commander of the SiPo and the SD for Latvia;
• Georg Leibbrandt, Undersecretary, Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories;
• Alfred Meyer, State Secretary and Deputy Minister of the Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories;
• Josef Bühler, State Secretary, General Government (Polish Occupation Authority);
• Roland Freisler, State Secretary, Ministry of Justice;
• Wilhelm Stuckart, State Secretary, Interior Ministry;
• Erich Neumann, State Secretary, Office of the Plenipotentiary for the Four-Year Plan;
• Friedrich Wilhelm Kritzinger, Permanent Secretary, Reich Chancellery;
• Martin Luther, Under-Secretary, Foreign Office.

Adolf Eichmann’s secretary, Ingeburg Werlemann, took the conference notes, which were later edited by Eichman and Heydrich and presented as the Protocol of Wannsee. The meeting lasted only about 90 minutes.

Heydrich personally welcomed the attendees and introduced the agenda:

“Another possible solution of the [Jewish] problem has now taken the place of emigration—i.e., evacuation of the Jews to the east… Such activities are, however, to be considered provisional actions, but practical experience is already being collected, which is of greatest importance in relation to the future final solution of the Jewish problem.”

All the attendees of the conference, with excellent analytical skills, understood that the “evacuation to the east” meant the construction of additional concentration camps in Eastern Europe, even though the terms “extermination” and “kill” were never mentioned in the minutes of the meeting. Nevertheless, just a few months after the conference, the first poison gas chambers were set up in Eastern Poland, and the camps constructed there became widely known as the extermination camps.

Consequently, the earlier idea of Nazi officials to deport European Jews to the remote island of Madagascar in Africa was eventually abandoned due to its impracticality. Heydrich introduced a new plan: A new “final solution” would transfer Jewish people eastward into the forced labor camps for the construction of roads and rails. The everyday life of the Jews would be sufficiently hard that they’d succumb to “natural diminution,” and those who survived would receive “suitable treatment,” ensuring the complete annihilation of Jews through labor. The meaning of the term “suitable treatment,” unsurprisingly, remained vague in the Wannsee Protocol.

The imminent immigration of German, Austrian, and Czech Jews was declared a priority. The Jewish communities in the remaining countries would be treated later. The so-called transit ghettos would be set up before prisoners would reach their final destinations in the East. Theresienstadt, a small settlement near Prague, was among the first transit ghettos to be set up.

Heydrich presented statistics showcasing the number of Jewish communities residing in the Third Reich and across the European continent, mainly Fascist Italy, Romania, Hungary, and Slovakia—all of which were satellite or collaborator countries of Germany in World War II. The list was so scrutinized that even the Jewish population of 55,000 in Turkey and the even smaller Jewish community in Ireland were included. The total number of Jews affected by the “final solution” equaled 11 million people.

The discussion regarding the number of Jews to be migrated and the location of the camps was smooth and without significant complexities. Challenges arose over the actions with regards to the Mischlinge, the term that was codified during the Nuremberg Laws in 1935, representing people of mixed Aryan and Jewish descent. Sterilization as a key option was suggested, though the concept remained vague for the rest of the Nazi dictatorship.

The Wannsee Conference was over by 2 p.m., and Heydrich was highly satisfied with its results. His ideas enjoyed approval and readiness from the participants. Reportedly, all the attendees were in a great mood at the end, enjoying cigars and cognac by the fireplace.

The plan was executed promptly. Just about two months after the conference, on March 17, 1942, Nazi Germany executed the deportation of the Jewish communities from the Lublin ghetto in Bełżec, Poland.

During the Nuremberg Trials in 1947, American prosecutor Robert Kempner made a coincidental discovery in a mass of Nazi documents. He came across a cover page stamped in red ink with the following note: “Secret Reich Matter.” It was the remains of the minutes of the meeting of the Wannsee Conference. Since then, the Wannsee Conference has been publicly marked as the point from which the systematic execution of European Jews took shape in Nazi Germany.

However, many historians debate the extent of the importance the Wannsee Conference received from post-World War II researchers. By the time Heydrich gathered 14 high-level Nazi officials at a lavish villa, Adolf Hitler had already ordered the mass extermination of the Jews, and subsequent steps were already undertaken (a new extermination camp was under construction at Bełżec at the time of the conference, and other extermination camps were in the planning stages), many argue that the conference was the means to ensure the administrative support and readiness for cooperation from key Nazi institutions and governmental agencies.

Historian Laurence Rees refers to the conference as a meeting of “second-level functionaries.” The idea was reinforced by the fact that neither Hitler nor the other key Nazi officials (Heinrich Himmler and Hermann Goering, for example) were present.

From a different perspective, Eichmann’s biographer, David Cesarani, argues that the Wannsee Conference was utilized by Heydrich to enforce and strengthen his authority over the officials involved or to be involved in the implementation of the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question.” He noted:

“The simplest, most decisive way that Heydrich could ensure the smooth flow of deportations was by asserting his total control over the fate of the Jews in the Reich and the east and by cowing other interested parties into toeing the line of the RSHA (Reich Security Main Office).”

Indeed, the opening sentence of Heydrich’s speech announced his “appointment as the authorized person for the preparation of the final solution to the European Jewish question.”

Nevertheless, following the Wannsee Conference, several additional extermination camps were set up between 1942 and 1945 in Poland, including Chemno, Sobibór, Treblinka, Majdanek, and Auschwitz-Birkenau. In these facilities, an estimated 1.7 million Jews were murdered in 1942 and 1943.

The Wannsee Conference represents a pivotal chapter in the history of the Holocaust. It sheds light on the bureaucratic coordination of high-level Nazi officials throughout the formalization of Nazi Germany’s anti-Jewish policy, as historical research was hindered by the Nazi efforts to conceal evidence of their brutal actions.