Wannsee Conference (1942)

Tue Jan 20, 1942

Image: The villa “Am Großen Wannsee 56–58”, where the Wannsee Conference was held, now a memorial and museum [ushmm.org]

On this day in 1942, leading Nazi officials met at a villa in Wannsee, Berlin, to discuss the “Jewish question”. Here, the policy of the “Final Solution” i.e., mass extermination of the Jewish people, was explicitly implemented.

The conference was attended by 15 high-ranking party and state officials, headed by Reinhard Heydrich, SS Lieutenant-General and head of the Reich Security Main Office. Other important attendees included Heinrich Müller, chief of the Gestapo, and Adolf Eichmann, who was executed in 1962 for war crimes in Jerusalem.

Because a policy of mass extermination had already been de facto decided on at this point (especially as mass killings of Jews had already begun in occupied Europe), the historical importance of the meeting was not recognized by those present.

The purpose of formalizing the logistics behind the “Final Solution’s” implementation was simply to emphasize that, once the deportations had been completed, the fate of the deportees became an internal matter of the SS, totally outside the purview of any other agency.

Heydrich himself estimated there were around 11 million Jews in Europe who would be targeted for extermination - an estimated six million in total would be killed during the Holocaust.

On January 20th, 1992, on the fiftieth anniversary of the conference, the site was finally opened as a Holocaust memorial and museum known as the Haus der Wannsee-Konferenz (House of the Wannsee Conference).

“Those who suffer from conspiracy phobia are fond of saying: ‘Do you actually think there’s a group of people sitting around in a room plotting things?’ For some reason that image is assumed to be so patently absurd as to invite only disclaimers. But where else would people of power get together - on park benches or carousels?”

- Michael Parenti

• Date: 1942-01-20
• Learn More: encyclopedia.ushmm.org, en.wikipedia.org.
• Tags: #Fascism.
• Source: www.apeoplescalendar.org