Wannsee Conference

Wannsee Conference

The HolocaustThe Wannsee Conference was a meeting of senior officials of the Nazi German regime, held in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee on 20 January 1942. The purpose of the conference was to inform heads of Departments responsible for various policies relating to Jews, that Reinhard Heydrich had been appointed as the sole executor of the "Final solution to the Jewish question", and to obtain their agreement to subordinate their policies to him. In the course of the meeting, Heydrich presented a plan, presumably approved by Hitler, for the deportation of the Jewish population of Europe to German-occupied areas of the Soviet Union, and the use of the Jews fit for labour on road-building projects, in the course of which they would eventually die (the remnant being annihilated after completion of the projects); that plan was never fully implemented, however, as it was predicated on Germany winning its war against the Soviet Union, so that most of the Jews of German-occupied Europe were sent to extermination or concentration camps, or killed where they lived.

Background

The spectacular German successes of all the opening weeks of the invasion of the Soviet Union, "Operation Barbarossa", induced a mood of euphoria among the Nazi leadership, and led to an increasingly radical view of the "final solution" of the "Jewish question"—a question which became more urgent with the possibility of the four million Jews of the western Soviet Union coming under German control. [The minutes of the Wannsee Conference estimate the Jewish population of the Soviet Union as five million, including nearly three million in the Ukraine and 900,000 in Byelorussia.] On 16 July 1941, Hitler addressed a meeting of ministers, including Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, which discussed the administration of the occupied Soviet territories. He said that Soviet territories west of the Urals were to become a "German Garden of Eden", and that "naturally this vast area must be pacified as quickly as possible; this will happen best by shooting anyone who even looks sideways at us." [Christopher R. Browning, "The Origins of the Final Solution" (University of Nebraska Press 2004), 309. The quotations are from Martin Bormann's minutes of the meeting, which were presented in evidence at the Nuremberg Trials.]

Hitler's chief lieutenants, Göring and the SS chief Heinrich Himmler, took this and other comments by Hitler at this time (most of which were not recorded, but were attested to at postwar trials) as authority to proceed with a more radical "final solution to the Jewish question" ("Die Endlösung der Judenfrage"), involving the complete removal of the Jews from the German-occupied territories. On 31 July 1941 Göring gave a written authorisation to SS-Gruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, Chief of the Reich Main Security Office (RSHA) to "make all necessary preparations" for a "total solution of the Jewish question" in all the territories under German influence; to co-ordinate the participation of all government organisations whose co-operation was required; and to submit a "comprehensive draft" of a plan for the "final solution to the Jewish question". [Browning, "The Origins of the Final Solution", 315.]

Göring at this time was the second-most powerful figure in the Nazi regime, having been given the special rank of Reichsmarschall and designated as Adolf Hitler's successor. [Ian Kershaw, "Hitler" Volume II (W. W. Norton 2000), 396.] Heydrich would have understood any instruction from Göring also to carry the authority of Hitler. Heydrich also knew that his immediate superior, Himmler, was in favour of exterminating the Jews, and was at that moment directing his Einsatzgruppen to do just that across the newly-conquered Soviet territories. Rudolf Lange, commander of Einsatzkommando 2 in Latvia, wrote that his orders were "a radical solution of the Jewish problem through the execution of all Jews". [Richard Breitman, "The Architect of Genocide: Himmler and the Final Solution" (Pimlico 2004), 169.] In October the deportation of the Jews of Germany, Austria and the Czech lands to the east began. When trainloads of German Jews arrived at Riga in Latvia, Lange simply had them shot. But this was clearly not a feasible method of dealing with millions of people: the cost of ammunition alone was unacceptable, and it was observed that even SS troops were uncomfortable about shooting assimilated German Jews as opposed to "Ostjuden" or "Eastern Jews". [Breitman, "Architect of Genocide", 220, discusses Himmler's concerns about the effect on his men's morale of the mass killings of German Jews at Riga and elsewhere.] The head of the German civil administration in the Baltic area, Wilhelm Kube, objected to German Jews, "who come from our own cultural circle", being casually killed by German soldiers. [David Cesarani, "Eichmann: His Life and Crimes" (Vintage 2005), 110.]

During the second half of 1941, therefore, Heydrich and his staff worked on proposals to "evacuate" all Jews from Germany and the occupied countries to labour camps, either in occupied Poland or further east in the Soviet Union, which it was assumed would soon be completely conquered. There those who were unable to work would be killed, while the remainder would soon be worked to death. But the German defeat in front of Moscow in November–December led to a sharp change of emphasis. Euphoria was replaced by acceptance of a long war, and also by a realisation that food stocks were not sufficient to feed the entire population of German-occupied Europe. [Adam Tooze, "The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy" (Allen Lane 2006), 538–549, discusses the economic imperatives that lay behind the extermination of the Jews. During 1941 an acute labour shortage in the German armaments industry developed, requiring the importation of millions of workers from the occupied territories. If these workers, as well as the German people and the people of the more privileged western occupied countries such as France and the Netherlands, were to be adequately fed, there had to a sharp reduction in the number of "useless mouths", of whom the millions of Jews under German rule were, in the light of Nazi ideology, the most obvious example.] It was at this time the decision to proceed from "evacuation" to extermination was made. Speaking with Himmler and Heydrich on 25 October, Hitler said: "Let no-one say to me: we cannot send them into the swamp. Who then cares about our own people? It is good when terror precedes us that we are exterminating the Jews. We are writing history anew, from the racial standpoint." Himmler and Heydrich thus had implicit authorisation from Hitler to proceed with the extermination of the Jews. [Browning, "The Origins of the Final Solution", 370. Browning sources this quotation to Werner Jochmann (ed), "Monologe in Führerhauptquartier" (Hamburg 1980), 96–99. These stenographic records of Hitler's mealtime discussions at his headquarters have previously been published in English as "Hitler's Table Talk 1941–1944" (Weidenfeld and Nicolson 1953). Although the accuracy of the translation has been criticised, the gist of these statements by Hitler has thus been known for more than 50 years: yet some writers still assert that there is no evidence that Hitler directly authorised the extermination of the Jews.]

Planning the conference

By November, 1941, it was becoming known in the upper reaches of the Nazi leadership and the bureaucracy that Hitler intended all the Jews of Europe to be deported to the eastern territories and, one way or another, killed there. [The German historian Christian Gerlach has claimed that Hitler made his approval of a policy of extermination clear in a speech to senior officials in Berlin on 12 December (Christian Gerlach, "The Wannsee Conference, the Fate of German Jews, and Hitler's Decision in Principle to Exterminate All European Jews", "Journal of Modern History", December 1998, 759–812. This is not universally accepted, but it seems likely that a decision was made at around this time. On December 18, Himmler met with Hitler, and noted in his appointment book "Jewish question - to be exterminated as partisans". (Browning, "The Origins of the Final Solution", 410). On 19 December, Wilhelm Stuckert, Secretary of State at the Interior Ministry, told one of his officials: "The proceedings against the evacuated Jews are based on a decision from the highest authority. You must come to terms with it." (Browning, "The Origins of the Final Solution", 405).] Such a vast enterprise, involving the registration, assembly and transportation of millions of people, to be carried out at a time when Germany's infrastructure was under severe strain, was a massive logistical undertaking. It was also one which at least some elements of the German state apparatus might be expected to oppose, obstruct or fail to co-operate with. It thus became necessary to bring together representatives of all the relevant departments to explain to them what was intended and how it was to be carried out, and to make it clear that this undertaking was done on the highest authority of the Reich and could not be resisted.

On 29 November Heydrich sent out invitations to a meeting to be held on 9 December at the headquarters of the International Criminal Police Commission (the forerunner of Interpol, of which Heydrich at the time served as President) at 16 Am Kleinen Wannsee, in the comfortable lakeside suburb of Wannsee on the western edge of Berlin. He enclosed a copy of Göring's letter of 31 July to underline his authority. To show that this was a meeting of administrators to discuss implementing a policy already decided at the political level, those invited were mostly State Secretaries—senior bureaucrats in the government ministries. Ministries represented were Interior, Justice, the Four Year Plan and Occupied Eastern Territories. The Foreign Office was represented by an Undersecretary, because Heydrich suspected that the Secretary of State was an opponent of the regime. [This was Ernst von Weizsäcker, who had numerous connections to the German Resistance.] Also present were representatives of the Reich Chancellery, the Nazi Party Chancellery and the Race and Resettlement Main Office of the RSHA, and the head of the Gestapo. When Hans Frank, head of the General Government in occupied Poland, heard of the meeting, he demanded to be represented, and Heydrich quickly agreed. Also to be present was SS-Sturmbannführer Lange, invited because of his experience of killing German Jews in Latvia. Heydrich's right-hand man Eichmann was to take the minutes. [Browning, "The Origins of the Final Solution", 406.]

A series of events in December, 1941, forced the postponement of the meeting. On 5 December, the Soviet Army began its counter-offensive in front of Moscow, ending the dream of a rapid conquest of the Soviet Union. On 7 December, the Japanese attacked the United States at Pearl Harbor, and on 11 December Germany declared war on the U.S. These events caused the meeting to be delayed until 20 January, 1942. The German historian Christian Gerlach maintains that the postponement of the meeting had a deeper political cause. Götz Aly writes: "The postponement followed, one could assert, the political confusion that the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor had caused. But Gerlach substantiates with convincing details that the originally planned Wannsee Conference had had an entirely different theme than that which actually took place six weeks later. It had only been anticipated to discuss problems that occurred with the deportations of the (Greater) German Jews... Only after Hitler's speech of December 12 was Heydrich able, as Gerlach shows, to broaden the theme and fix a conference on the 'Final Solution of the European Jewish question'." [Götz Aly, "December 21 1941", originally published in "Berliner Zeitung", 13 December 1997, available online in English at the [http://www.holocaust-history.org/december-12-1941/ Holocaust History] website.]

The conference was to take place at a new venue, a villa at 56–58 Am Grossen Wannsee, a quiet residential street, across the [http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gro%C3%9Fer_Wannsee Grosser Wannsee] lake from the popular Wannsee beach. The villa, built in 1914, had been acquired by the SS in 1940 for use as a conference centre. [The history and description of the villa are given in the pamphlet "House of the Wannsee Conference Memorial Berlin" (Stadtvandel Verlag), available at the Memorial.] When the conference finally assembled at midday on 20 January those present were:
* SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich (Chief of the RSHA and Reichsprotektor of Bohemia-Moravia), presiding
* Dr Josef Bühler (Government of the General Government)
* Dr Roland Freisler (Reich Ministry of Justice)
* SS-Gruppenführer Otto Hofmann (Race and Resettlement Main Office, RuSHA)
* SA-Oberführer Dr Gerhard Klopfer (NSDAP Chancellery)
* Ministerialdirektor Friedrich Wilhelm Kritzinger (Reich Chancellery)
* SS-Sturmbannführer Dr Rudolf Lange (Commander of the SD for Latvia)
* Reichsamtleiter Dr Georg Leibbrandt (Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories)
* Martin Luther (Foreign Office)
* Gauleiter Dr Alfred Meyer (Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories)
* SS-Gruppenführer Heinrich Müller (Chief of Amt IV (Gestapo), Reich Security Main Office (RSHA))
* Erich Neumann (Director, Office of the Four Year Plan)
* SS-Oberführer Dr Karl Eberhard Schöngarth (SD, assigned to the General Government)
* Dr Wilhelm Stuckart (Reich Ministry for the Interior)
* SS-Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann (Head of Referat IV B4 of the Gestapo), minutes secretary

In preparation for the conference, Eichmann had prepared a list, by nation, of the numbers of Jews liable to be killed (pictured below). It was divided into two sections, (A) for those regions under Reich control and (B) for allies, neutral states and those at war with Germany. The numbers reflect actions already perpetrated by the Nazis. (Estonia is listed as "judenfrei", "Jew-free", because the thousand Jews that remained in Estonia after the German occupation had been almost completely massacred by the end of 1941.) [ [http://www.historycommission.ee/temp/conclusions.htm#crimiger1 Conclusions of the Estonian International Commission for the Investigation of Crimes Against Humanity] ] A translation: [Never Again, Martin Gilbert, p71.]

List A

*Germany (the old Reich): 131,800
*Austria: 43,700
*Eastern Territories: 420,000
*General Government: 2,284,000
*Bialystok (a city in northern Poland): 400,000
*Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia: 74,200
*Estonia: "Jew-free"
*Latvia: 3,500
*Lithuania: 34,000
*Belgium: 43,000
*Denmark: 5,600
*France (occupied): 165,000
*Vichy France (unoccupied until November 1942): 700,000
*Greece: 69,600
*Netherlands: 160,800
*Norway: 1,300

List B
*Bulgaria: 48,000
*England (assumed to mean United Kingdom): 330,000
*Finland: 2,300
*Ireland: 4,000
*Italy: 58,000
*Albania: 200
*Croatia: 40,000
*Portugal: 3,000
*Romania (with Bessarabia): 342,000
*Sweden: 8,000
*Switzerland: 18,000
*Serbia: 10,000
*Slovakia: 88,000
*Spain: 6,000
*Turkey: 55,500
*Hungary: 742,800
*USSR (excluding Bialystok): 5,000,000

A total in excess of 11,000,000 people.

For comparison see "Jewish Lists" of the Korherr Report of January 18, 1943.

Proceedings

Heydrich opened the conference with an account of the anti-Jewish measures taken in Germany since the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, reporting that between 1933 and 1941, 530,000 German and Austrian Jews had emigrated. [The [http://prorev.com/wannsee.htm Minutes of the Wannsee conference] are available online. All direct quotes of Wannsee Conference proceedings are taken from this translation. The reliability of the minutes as an accurate record of the meeting will be discussed later in this article.] This speech was based on a briefing paper written for him the previous week by Eichmann, who after his experiences in organizing the forced emigration of the Viennese Jews in 1938, had become the leading German expert on the practicalities of solving the "Jewish question". [Cesarani, "Eichmann", 112.]

Heydrich reported that there were approximately eleven million Jews in the whole of Europe, of whom half a million were in countries not under German control. [This figure includes, however, the entire estimated five million Soviet Jews. In fact a large number of these either lived in areas not under German control or had been evacuated already. It is likely that about three million Soviet Jews were actually in German-occupied areas in 1942, although many had already been killed by the Einsatzgruppen. The figure of 700,000 Jews in "unoccupied France" included Jews living in the French territories of Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia.] He stated that since it was no longer possible for European Jews to emigrate, another, "final", solution would have to be found to the "Jewish question". He reported that "another possible solution of the problem has now taken the place of emigration, i.e. the evacuation of the Jews to the East".

It is sometimes asserted that the Wannsee Conference decided on no more than the "evacuation" of the Jewish population of Europe to the east, with no reference to killing them. [For a typical example, see the Holocaust denialist website [http://www.zundelsite.org/zundel_persecuted/april22-06-genie.html The Zundelseit] .] In fact Heydrich made the fate of those "evacuated" clear:

:"Under proper guidance, in the course of the final solution the Jews are to be allocated for appropriate labor in the East. Able-bodied Jews, separated according to sex, will be taken in large work columns to these areas for work on roads, in the course of which action doubtless a large portion will be eliminated by natural causes. The possible final remnant will, since it will undoubtedly consist of the most resistant portion, have to be treated accordingly, because it is the product of natural selection and would, if released, act as the seed of a new Jewish revival".

Thus, Heydrich stated more or less openly that the majority of the Jews were to be worked to death through hard physical labour somewhere in the occupied eastern territories, while the "remnant," the strongest and fittest and thus most dangerous from the Nazi point of view, would be "treated accordingly". No-one at the meeting can have doubted the meaning of these expressions. The historian Christopher Browning observes: "No less than eight of the fifteen participants held the doctorate. Thus it was not a dimwitted crowd unable to grasp what was going to be said to them. Nor were they going to be overcome with surprise or shock, for Heydrich was not talking to the uninitiated or squeamish." [Browning, "The Origins of the Final Solution", 411.]

Heydrich went on to say that in the course of the "practical execution of the final solution", Europe would be "combed through from west to east", but that Germany, Austria and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, would have priority "due to the housing problem and additional social and political necessities". This was a reference to increasing pressure from the regional Nazi Party leaders in Germany, the Gauleiters, for the Jews to be removed from their areas to allow accommodation for Germans made homeless by Allied bombing, as well as for labourers being imported from occupied countries. The "evacuated" Jews, he said, would first be sent to "transit ghettos" in the General Government, from which they would be transported to the East.

Heydrich said that to avoid legal and political difficulties, it was important to define who was a Jew for the purposes of "evacuation." He outlined categories of people who would be exempted. Jews over 65 years old, and Jewish World War I veterans alike, who had been severely wounded or who had won the Iron Cross, would be sent to the "model" concentration camp at Theresienstadt. "With this expedient solution", he said, "in one fell swoop many interventions will be prevented." [In the event the exemption for Jews over 65 was only sporadically observed. In any case the food situation at Theresienstadt was such that many people sent there rapidly died. Later many people were shipped from Theresienstadt to their deaths at Auschwitz.]

The situation of people who were in a racial sense half or quarter Jews, and of Jews who were married to non-Jews, was more complex. Under the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, their status had been left deliberately ambiguous. Heydrich announced that "mischlings" (mixed-race persons) of the first degree (persons with two Jewish grandparents), would be treated as Jews. This would not apply if they were married to a non-Jew and had children by that marriage. It would also not apply if they had been granted written exemption by "the highest offices of the Party and State." Such persons would instead be sterilised.

"Mischlings of the second degree" (persons with one Jewish grandparent) would be treated as Germans unless they were married to Jews or mischlings of the first degree, or had a "racially especially undesirable appearance that marks him outwardly as a Jew", or had a "political record that shows that he feels and behaves like a Jew". Persons in these latter categories would be deported even if married to non-Jews.

In the case of mixed marriages, Heydrich advocated a policy of caution, "with regard to the effects on the German relatives". If such a marriage had produced children who were being raised as Germans, the Jewish partner would not be deported. If they were being raised as Jews, they might be deported, or sent to Theresienstadt, depending on the circumstances. [In practice these rules were enforced in a haphazard and capricious way according to the decisions of local Nazi leaders. In some places even "full Jews" with non-Jewish spouses were not deported (the Dresden writer Victor Klemperer was an example). In other places everybody with Jewish connections was deported regardless of official exemptions. Conflict over the fate of Jews in mixed marriages eventually led to the Rosenstrasse protest of 1943.]

It is important to note that these exemptions applied only to German and Austrian Jews (and were not always observed even in regard to them). In most of the occupied countries, Jews were rounded up and deported "en masse", and anyone who lived in or identified with the Jewish community in a given place was regarded as a Jew. [Browning, "The Origins of the Final Solution", 414.] One of the few exceptions to this was France, where the Vichy French regime, in exchange for ready co-operation, was able to apply its own rules, affecting mainly refugees and recent immigrants rather than French-born Jews. Heydrich commented: "In occupied and unoccupied France, the registration of Jews for evacuation will in all probability proceed without great difficulty", but in fact the great majority of French-born Jews survived. [For this see Michael R. Marrus and Robert O. Paxton, "Vichy France and the Jews" (Stanford University Press 1981).] In Denmark, relatively few Jews were ultimately exterminated, due to strong opposition by the King and the populace. [ [http://www.ushmm.org/research/library/faq/details.php?topic=04#01 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum website] ]

More difficulty was anticipated with Germany's allies, Romania and Hungary. "In Romania the government has [now] appointed a commissioner for Jewish affairs", Heydrich said, but in fact the deportation of Romanian Jews was slow and inefficient despite the high degree of popular anti-Semitism. "In order to settle the question in Hungary", Heydrich said, "it will soon be necessary to force an adviser for Jewish questions onto the Hungarian government". The Hungarian regime of Miklós Horthy continued to resist German interference in its Jewish policy until 1944, when Horthy was overthrown and 500,000 Hungarian Jews sent to their deaths by Eichmann. [On Romania, see Cesarani, "Eichmann", 151–55. On Hungary, see Cesarani, 159–95.]

Heydrich spoke for nearly an hour. Then followed about thirty minutes of questions and comments, followed by some less formal conversation. [ Browning, "The Origins of the Final Solution", 413.] Luther from the Foreign Office urged caution in Scandinavia, "Nordic" countries where public opinion was not hostile to the small Jewish populations and would react badly to unpleasant scenes. Hofmann and Stuckart pointed out the legalistic and administrative difficulties over mixed marriages, arguing for compulsory dissolution of marriages to prevent legal disputes and for the wider use of sterilisation as an alternative to deportation. Neumann from the Four Year Plan argued for the exemption of Jews who were working in industries vital to the war effort and for whom no replacements are available. Heydrich (keen not to offend Neumann's boss Hermann Göring) assured him that these Jews would not be "evacuated". [Göring and his subordinates made persistent efforts to prevent skilled Jewish workers, whose labour was an important part of the war effort, being deported and killed. But by 1943 Himmler was a much more powerful figure in the regime than Göring, and eventually all categories of skilled Jews lost their exemptions. This is discussed by Tooze, "The Wages of Destruction", 522–29.] There were questions about the mischlings and those in mixed marriages: the details of these complex questions were put off until a later meeting. [A meeting of 17 ministerial representatives was held at the Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories on 29 January. It decided that in the eastern territories all mischlings were to be classed as Jews, while in western Europe the German standard would be applied. (Browning, "The Origins of the Final Solution", 414.)]

Finally Bühler of the General Government in occupied Poland stated that::"the General Government would welcome it if the final solution of this problem could be begun in the General Government, since on the one hand transportation does not play such a large role here nor would problems of labor supply hamper this action. Jews must be removed from the territory of the General Government as quickly as possible, since it is especially here that the Jew as an epidemic carrier represents an extreme danger and on the other hand he is causing permanent chaos in the economic structure of the country through continued black market dealings.".

Omissions

The above account is based on the minutes taken by Eichmann, copies of which were sent by Eichmann to all the participants after the meeting. [Cesarani, "Eichmann", 117–118.] Most of these copies were destroyed at the end of the war as participants and other officials sought to cover their tracks. It was not until 1947 that a copy of the minutes (known from the German word for "minutes" as the "Wannsee Protocol" [The minutes are headed "Besprechungsprotokoll", translated as "Discussion minutes".] ) was found in the papers of Undersecretary Martin Luther, who had died in May 1945. By this time the more important participants in the meeting were dead or missing (Heydrich, Müller, Eichmann), and most of the others denied knowledge of the meeting or claimed that they could not remember what had occurred there. Only Kritzinger ever showed any genuine remorse for his role in preparing the Final Solution.

There were, however, significant omissions in the minutes. These were not fully elucidated until the interrogation and trial of Eichmann in Israel in 1962. Eichmann told his questioners that towards the end of the meeting cognac was served, and that after that the conversation became less restrained. [Cesarani, "Eichmann", 113.] "The gentlemen were standing together, or sitting together", he said, "and were discussing the subject quite bluntly, quite differently from the language which I had to use later in the record. During the conversation they minced no words about it at all…they spoke about methods of killing, about liquidation, about extermination". [Browning, "The Origins of the Final Solution", 413.]

Eichmann recorded that Heydrich was pleased with the course of the meeting. He "gave expression to his great satisfaction", and allowed himself a glass of cognac, although he rarely drank. He "had expected considerable stumbling blocks and difficulties", Eichmann recalled, but instead he had found "an atmosphere not only of agreement on the part of the participants, but more than that, one could feel an agreement which had assumed a form which had not been expected". [Browning, "The Origins of the Final Solution", 414.] At the conclusion of the meeting Heydrich gave Eichmann firm instructions about what was to appear in the minutes. They were not to be verbatim: Eichmann would "clean them up" so that nothing too explicit appeared in them. He said at his trial: "How shall I put it—certain over-plain talk and jargon expressions had to be rendered into office language by me". As a result, the last twenty minutes of the meeting, in which, as Eichmann recalled, words like liquidation and extermination were freely used, were summed up in one bland sentence: "In conclusion the different types of possible solutions were discussed". [Cesarani, "Eichmann", 114.] Thus the minutes must be read in conjunction with Eichmann's testimony to get as near as is possible to a full account of what took place.

Interpretation

The Wannsee Conference only lasted about ninety minutes, and for most of its participants it was one meeting among many in a busy week. The enormous importance which has been attached to the conference by postwar writers was not evident to most of its participants at the time. The Wannsee Conference made no fundamental decisions about the extermination of the Jews. Such decisions, as everybody at the meeting understood, were made by Hitler, in consultation, if he chose, with senior colleagues such as Himmler and Göring, and not by officials. They knew that in this case the decision had already been made, and that Heydrich was there as Himmler's emissary to tell them about it. Nor did the conference engage in detailed logistical planning. It could hardly do so in the absence of a representative of the Transport Ministry or the German Railways.

What, then, was the purpose of the meeting? Eichmann's biographer David Cesarani says that Heydrich's main purpose was to impose his own authority on the various ministries and agencies involved in Jewish policy matters, to avoid any repetition of the disputes that had arisen over the killing of the German Jews at Riga in October. "The simplest, most decisive way that Heydrich could ensure the smooth flow of deportations", he writes, "was by asserting his total control over fate of the Jews in the Reich and the east, and [by] cow [ing] other interested parties into toeing the line of the RSHA". [Cesarani, "Eichmann", 111. The sentence is ungrammatical in the original.] This would explain why most of the meeting was taken up with a long speech by Heydrich, the contents of which would not have been news to most of those present, and why so little time was spent discussing practical questions. It was also important to obtain the consent of the Foreign Ministry and the Four Year Plan, the ministries most likely to object (on diplomatic and economic grounds) to the mass killing of the Jews.

The leading German historian Peter Longerich agrees, but suggests a second motive: to make all the leading ministries accomplices in Heydrich's plan.

:"From Heydrich’s point of view," he writes, "the main purposes of the conference were, firstly, to establish the overall control of the deportation programme by the RSHA over a number of important Reich authorities and thereby, secondly, to make the top representatives of the ministerial bureaucracy into accomplices and accessories to, and co-responsible for, the plan he was pursuing. To reiterate: the plan was to exile all Jews in the present and future areas under German rule to Eastern Europe, where they were to be exposed to extraordinarily harsh living conditions and fatally exhausted or murdered. Heydrich had pursued this deportation plan since the beginning of 1941; in July 1941, Göring had given him the authority to execute it; and with the first deportation of Jews from central Europe in October, the first stage in that pan-European design had been realized. With his first invitation to the conference, Heydrich had waited until the second wave of deportations to Riga, Minsk and Kovno had already begun. He clearly wanted to present the representatives of the supreme Reich authorities with a "fait accompli". [Peter Longerich, "The Wannsee Conference in the Development of the 'Final Solution'", available online at the [http://www.ghwk.de/engl/kopfengl.htm House of the Wannsee Conference: Memorial and Educational Site website] .]

Fate of those attending

In order of death
* Reinhard Heydrich died in Prague on 4 June 1942 as a result of injuries sustained during the May 27 attack made by Czech assassins para-dropped from England.
* Roland Freisler was killed in an air-raid in Berlin in February 1945.
* Rudolf Lange was killed in action in Poland in February 1945.
* Alfred Meyer killed himself in April 1945.
* Heinrich Müller was last seen in Berlin on 29 April 1945. His fate is unknown, but he probably died in Berlin in the next few days.
* Martin Luther finished the war in a German concentration camp after falling out with Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop in 1943. After being freed by the Soviets, Luther died in Berlin in May 1945.
* Karl Eberhard Schöngarth was executed for war crimes (killing British prisoners of war) in May 1946.
* Friedrich Wilhelm Kritzinger was acquitted of war crimes and died in October 1947.
* Josef Bühler was tried in Poland for war crimes and executed in Kraków in July 1948.
* Erich Neumann was briefly imprisoned and died in mid-1948.
* Wilhelm Stuckart was imprisoned for four years before being released for lack of evidence in 1949. He was killed in a car accident in November, 1953.
* Adolf Eichmann was executed in Israel in May 1962.
* Georg Leibbrandt was charged with war crimes but the case against him was dismissed in 1950. He died in June 1982.
* Otto Hofmann was sentenced to 25 years in prison for war crimes, but was pardoned in 1954. He died in December 1982.
* Gerhard Klopfer was charged with war crimes but was released for lack of evidence. He became a tax advisor, later dying in January 1987.

Dramatization

The events of the Conference have been dramatized in two films.
*The 1984 German television film "Wannseekonferenz" ("The Wannsee Conference") runs 85 minutes—exactly the length of the conference itself, with a script derived from the minutes of the meeting.
*In 2001 the BBC/HBO film "Conspiracy" starred Kenneth Branagh as Heydrich and Stanley Tucci as Eichmann and was also scripted according to the exact timeframe and minutes of the original meeting.

The Wannsee conference is central to the plot of the alternate-historical novel "Fatherland" by Robert Harris.

ee also

* Reich Chancellery meeting of 12 December 1941

References

External links

* [http://www.ghwk.de/engl/kopfengl.htm House of the Wannsee Conference: Memorial and Educational Site]
* [http://www.ghwk.de/deut/proto.htm Facsimile pages of the Wannsee Protocol] (in German)
* [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqbWOYO6bAg Adolf Eichmann testifies about the Wannsee Conference] (in German with Japanese subtitles)
* [http://prorev.com/wannsee.htm Minutes from the Wannsee conference] , archived by the Progressive Review


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