Wannsee Conference

The Wannsee Conference was a meeting of senior officials of the Nazi German regime, held in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee in January 1942. The purpose of the conference was to plan the "Final solution to the Jewish question" - the killing of all the 11 million Jews of Europe, a process now known as the Holocaust.

Background

The spectacular German successes of 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 Ukraine and 900,000 in Byelorussia. On 16 July 1941, Hitler addressed a meeting of ministers 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."

Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, then Hitler's designatied successor and a man with many official positions, and the Schutzstaffel (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 "solution to the Jewish question," involving the complete removal of the Jews from the German-occupied territories.

On 31 July 1941, Göring gave a written authorisation to SS-Obergruppenführer 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."

Göring at this time was the second most powerful figure in the Nazi regime, newly designated as Adolf Hitler's successor. Heydrich would have understood any instruction from Göring as being authorised by 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." 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 way of dealing with millions of people: the cost of ammunition alone was unacceptable, and even SS troops were uncomfortable about shooting assimilated German Jews, as opposed to "foreign" eastern Jews. 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.

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 unable to work would be killed, while the rest 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 there were insufficient food stocks to feed the entire population of German-occupied Europe.

Adam Tooze 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.

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.

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. Such a vast enterprise, involving the registration, assembly and transportation of millions of people, to be carried 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 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 bureacrats 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 rightly suspected that the Secretary of State was an opponent of the regime. 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.

A series of events in December 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. 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 as 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'."

The conference was to take place at a new venue, a villa at 56-58 Am Grossen Wannsee, a quiet residential street, across the 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. 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 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)
• Dr. 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))
• Dr. 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

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. This speech was based on a briefing paper written for him the previous week by Eichmann, who after his experiences in organising the forced emigration of the Viennese Jews in 1938, had become the leading German expert on the practicalities of solving the "Jewish question."

Heydrich reported that there were approximately 11 million Jews in the whole of Europe, of whom half a million were in countries not under German control. 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. 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 a the seed of a new Jewish revival."

Thus, Heydrich stated more of 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."

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 so that accommodation could be found 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, as well as Jewish World War I veterans 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.

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 one or two non-Jewish grandparents and who identified as Jews or practised Judaism), 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.

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. The only real exception to this was in 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.

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 was 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.

Heydrich spoke for nearly an hour. Then followed about 30 minutes of questions and comments, followed by some less formal conversation. 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." There were questions about the mischlings and those in mixed marriages: the details of these complex questions were put off until a later meeting.

Finally Bühler of the General Government in 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. 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") 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 1961. Eichmann told his questioners that towards the end of the meeting cognac was served, and that after that the conversation became less restrained. "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."

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." 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 20 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." 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 at the Wannsee Conference.

Interpretation

The Wannsee Conference lasted for about 90 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." 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."

Fate of those attending

In order of death

• Reinhard Heydrich was assassinated in Prague in June 1942.
• 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 30 April 1945. His fate is unknown, but he probably died in Berlin in the next few days.
• Martin Luther finished the war in a concentration camp after falling out with Foreign Minister Ribbentrop, and 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 Krakow 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 died in January 1987.

Dramatisation

The events of the Conference have been dramatised in two films. A 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 an English-language production, Conspiracy, appeared, with Kenneth Branagh as Heydrich and Stanley Tucci as Eichmann.