The Wannsee Conference was a meeting of fifteen senior Nazi officials, held on 20 January 1942 in a villa overlooking the Wannsee lake in the Berlin suburbs. It lasted around 90 minutes. The lunch and the brandy that followed lasted longer. The minutes, drafted by Adolf Eichmann at Heydrich’s instruction, run to fifteen pages and survive in a copy found in 1947 by an American researcher in a captured German Foreign Ministry file. The Wannsee Protocol is the most-cited single document of the Holocaust. It is also one of the most misunderstood. The Wannsee Conference is not the meeting at which the decision was made to murder the Jews of Europe. The decision had already been made. Wannsee is the meeting at which the decision was communicated to the senior civil servants of the Reich ministries who would have to make it work.
The setting
The villa was a former industrialist’s house at Am Grossen Wannsee 56 to 58 that had been requisitioned by the Reich Security Main Office. The participants were fifteen men, mostly in their thirties and forties, mostly with doctoral degrees, mostly senior figures in the SS or in one of the Reich ministries that would be involved in the deportations. They were lawyers, economists, foreign ministry officials, and SS officers from the central administration of the killing programme. They had been assembled by Heydrich, the head of the Reich Security Main Office and Himmler’s deputy. The chair was Heydrich himself.
The agenda
Heydrich opened the meeting with a presentation. He set out the failure of the previous policy of forced emigration. He set out the new policy: the deportation of all European Jews to occupied eastern territories. He listed the Jewish populations of every country in Europe, from Estonia to Ireland and from Norway to Albania. The list totalled around eleven million people, including the Jewish populations of countries the regime did not control, such as Britain, Switzerland, Spain, Sweden and the European territories of Turkey. The implication was clear: the Jewish populations of countries the regime did not yet control were intended to be killed when the regime did control them.
Heydrich then explained the operational concept. Jews would be assembled, transported east, and put to forced labour. The natural reduction (naturliche Verminderung) of the labouring population, through the deliberately lethal conditions, would handle the majority. The remnant who survived the labour, being the strongest and most resistant, would have to be dealt with appropriately, treated accordingly, since otherwise they would form the seed of a new Jewish presence in Europe. The phrasing was the bureaucratic euphemism. Every man in the room understood what was meant.
The discussion
The discussion that followed concerned the practical and legal questions. Who counted as a Jew under the policy? How would the German Jewish veterans of the First World War be handled? What about the Mischlinge of the first and second degree? What about Jews in mixed marriages, particularly those married to non-Jewish German citizens? What about the Jews of the German allies and German-occupied territories: would the policy be applied uniformly, or did each country require separate negotiation?
The Foreign Ministry’s representative, Martin Luther, asked about the Jewish populations of the Nordic countries (Denmark, Norway and Sweden) and suggested that the implementation in those countries would be politically difficult. The Justice Ministry’s representative, Roland Freisler, raised the legal complications around mixed marriages. Eichmann, taking the minutes, recorded each query and the agreed disposition. Heydrich treated each question as administrative rather than fundamental: the policy was settled, the only matter for discussion was how it would be done.
The minutes record that the meeting moved to general discussion (Aussprache) at a particular point. Eichmann, asked at his Israeli trial in 1961 what the general discussion had consisted of, answered that it had been a frank conversation about the technical questions of the killing, including the question of which methods would be most efficient. The minutes themselves are euphemistic throughout. Eichmann’s testimony, given by a man who had been there, fills in what the document does not record.
What was decided at Wannsee
The Wannsee Conference did not decide that the Jews of Europe would be killed. That decision had been made earlier, in stages, in the second half of 1941, at the level of Hitler, Himmler and Heydrich. By the time the Wannsee meeting took place in January 1942, the killing was already in full swing. The Einsatzgruppen had murdered around 500,000 Jews in the occupied Soviet territories. The Chełmno extermination camp had been operational for six weeks. The first transports of Jews from the Reich had already been sent to the eastern killing sites. Wannsee was a coordinating meeting, not a deciding meeting.
What Wannsee did decide was who would do what. The Reich Security Main Office, under Heydrich, would have central authority. The Foreign Ministry would handle the diplomatic side of deportations from allied and neutral countries. The Justice Ministry would handle legal questions. The Interior Ministry would handle the registration and identification side. The Reichsbahn (German railway) was not represented at the meeting but was assumed to be available. The civil servants of the Reich ministries had been told, in effect, that the killing was now official policy and that their cooperation was expected.
The discovery of the document
The minutes survived because of an administrative oversight. Heydrich had ordered all copies of the protocol destroyed. The copy that survived was filed by accident in the wrong department of the Foreign Ministry, where it was overlooked when the destruction order came through. The American researcher Robert Kempner, working through captured German files for the Nuremberg prosecution in 1947, found the document and recognised its significance immediately. He used it at the subsequent Ministries Trial in 1947 to 1948.
The protocol is one of the cleanest pieces of documentary evidence in the entire Holocaust record. It is dated. It is signed. It names the participants. It records the policy. It cannot be argued away. The deniers have, over the years, attempted various lines of argument against it. The lines have all failed under scrutiny.
What happened to the participants
Of the fifteen men at the conference, eight survived the war. Of those eight, two were eventually tried and convicted: Wilhelm Stuckart, the senior Interior Ministry representative, was convicted at the Ministries Trial and sentenced to time served. Otto Hofmann, the head of the SS Race and Settlement Main Office, received a 25-year sentence and was paroled in 1954. Eichmann, who took the minutes, was kidnapped from Argentina by Israeli intelligence in 1960, tried in Jerusalem in 1961, convicted, and executed in 1962. Heydrich was assassinated by Czech resistance fighters in Prague in June 1942, six months after the conference. The villa is now a Holocaust memorial and museum, the House of the Wannsee Conference (Haus der Wannsee-Konferenz), open to visitors.
Why Wannsee matters
The Wannsee Protocol is the document that demonstrates, in the clearest possible terms, that the Holocaust was a deliberate, planned policy of the Nazi state, communicated through the senior civil service, and intended to encompass every Jew in Europe. It cannot be characterised as a wartime improvisation. It cannot be characterised as the work of a few isolated fanatics. The men in the room were the senior civil servants of a modern industrial state, and they sat down to lunch having just been told that they were to organise the murder of eleven million people. None of them objected. None of them resigned. None of them refused.
See also
Sources
- Mark Roseman, The Wannsee Conference and the Final Solution: A Reconsideration, Metropolitan Books, 2002
- Christopher Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, University of Nebraska Press, 2004
- Peter Longerich, The Wannsee Conference: The Path to the Final Solution, Oxford University Press, 2021
- The Wannsee Protocol, US National Archives, Document 1947-PS
- USHMM: The Wannsee Conference