House of the Wannsee Conference, now a memorial: Here officials of the Nazi regime discussed plans to murder Jews
Photo: imago stock&people
Who invited to the Wannsee Conference on January 20, 1942, and why?
Reinhard Heydrich invited and chaired the meeting, known as the »Wannsee Conference«, in a villa on the Großer Wannsee in Berlin.
He was chief of the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) and deputy Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia.
In July 1941 Heydrich was commissioned by the "Reichsmarschall" Hermann Goering to prepare the organizational measures for the "final solution of the Jewish question".
The reasons for the invitation were also the problems that had arisen with the mass killings and deportations that had already taken place in 1941.
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Reinhard Heydrich
Photo: AGB Photo / IMAGO
Conference participants were 15 representatives of the middle and higher management levels of institutions of the Nazi regime.
Among other things, it was about the question, which was controversial among the National Socialists, of how to deal with the “mixed blood” – according to their racist definition.
According to the minutes, another key objective of the conference, which lasted only about an hour and a half, was to organize the “final solution to the European Jewish question” “in a pan-European framework” from then on.
It was about the responsibilities, the coordination of the deportations and the murder of Jews, the spatial and temporal sequence.
Who attended the Wannsee Conference?
In addition to Reinhard Heydrich, these 14 other functionaries of the National Socialist regime attended the conference:
Adolf Eichmann, head of the RSHA's department for »Jewish and eviction matters«;
he kept minutes
Otto Hofmann, Head of the Race and Settlement Main Office of the SS
Rudolf Lange, Commander of the Security Police and Security Service (SD) in Latvia
Heinrich Müller, Head of the Secret State Police (Gestapo)
Eberhard Schöngarth, Commander of the Security Police and the SD in the General Government in occupied Poland
Josef Bühler, State Secretary of the Government of the General Government and Deputy Governor General
Roland Freisler, State Secretary in the Reich Ministry of Justice
Gerhard Klopfer, Ministerial Director in the Party Chancellery
Friedrich Wilhelm Kritzinger, Ministerial Director in the Reich Chancellery
Georg Leibbrandt, Head of the Political Department in the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories
Alfred Meyer, deputy minister in the same ministry
Martin Luther, Undersecretary of State in the Foreign Office
Erich Neumann, State Secretary in the authority responsible for the four-year plan
Wilhelm Stuckart, State Secretary in the Reich Ministry of the Interior
Why did the conference take place at Wannsee?
There are no documents for this.
Historians suspect that the villa's idyllic location on the outskirts of the city was intended to ensure a relaxed and glamorous atmosphere.
The villa was also owned by the »Nordhav« Foundation, a charity of the SD, and served as a guest house.
This spoke for the secrecy of the domestic staff, who entertained the gathered perpetrators with coffee and cognac.
Why weren't Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels, Heinrich Himmler and other high-ranking Nazis at the conference?
It was the task of the conference participants to create a framework for the organizational implementation of the further persecution and extermination of the Jews.
Only official bureaucrats were necessary for this, without the presence of members of the top leadership of the Nazi regime.
Was the mass extermination of the Jews decided at the Wannsee Conference?
No, the extermination of the European Jews was not decided in the Wannsee villa - it had already begun before.
As early as the summer and fall of 1941, the Nazis had systematically murdered Jews in the occupied territories of the Soviet Union.
Nevertheless, as the historian Peter Longerich analyses, the Wannsee Conference was a »point of change«: In the course of it »the when, how and where of the 'final solution' was redefined«.
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Document of the Wannsee Conference: Eleven million European Jews in the sights of the murder planners
Photo: Jan Bauer / AP
From now on, there was a consensus in the Nazi regime to carry out the mass murder during the war throughout Nazi-controlled Europe.
According to the protocol, around eleven million Jews were considered;
it said:
"In large work columns, with the sexes separated, the able-bodied Jews will be taken to these areas to build roads, whereby a large part will no doubt be lost due to natural decline. The remaining stock, if any, will have to be treated accordingly, since this is undoubtedly the most resistant part.«
The sparsely worded wording »treated accordingly« in the protocol as a key document confirms the intention of the National Socialist leadership to carry out systematic genocide.
Did Hitler comment on the Wannsee Conference?
A month later, Hitler publicly summed up the results of the conference without mentioning the Wannsee Conference itself.
On February 24, 1942, he announced in a statement on the 22nd anniversary of the founding of the NSDAP: »My prophecy will be fulfilled that this war will not destroy Aryan humanity, but that the Jew will be exterminated.«
What were the consequences of the conference?
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Deportation (in Paris 1942): New waves of persecution and murder
Photo: INTERFOTO
After the conference, the Nazi regime accelerated and expanded the persecution and extermination.
In the spring of 1942 there were two new waves of deportation in the »Greater German Reich«.
In addition, in March 1942, large-scale deportations of Jews from Slovakia and France began.
Soon after, the murder planners were also active in the Netherlands and Belgium.
What became of the participants at the Wannsee Conference?
SS Obergruppenfuhrer Reinhard Heydrich, organizer of the Wannsee Conference, died in Prague on June 4, 1942 as a result of an assassination attempt by Czech resistance fighters supported by the British secret service.
Roland Freisler, feared President of the People's Court from August 1942 and responsible for numerous death sentences, died in an air raid in Berlin in February 1945.
Adolf Eichmann (in April 1961 at the trial in Jerusalem)
Photo: Getty Images
After the end of the war, Adolf Eichmann initially lived under a false name in the Lüneburg Heath and then fled to South America via one of the »rat lines«.
In 1960, the Israeli secret service Mossad kidnapped him from Argentina.
He was tried in Israel, sentenced to death and executed in 1962.
Rudolf Lange took his own life in February 1945 during the fighting in Poland to avoid being taken prisoner.
Alfred Meyer also committed suicide towards the end of the war in 1945.
Heinrich Müller most likely died when Berlin fell in early May 1945.
Martin Luther's life ended a few days after the surrender in May 1945 at the age of 49 in Soviet custody.
Otto Hofmann was sentenced in 1948 by a US military court to 25 years in prison for crimes against humanity and war crimes.
In 1954 he was pardoned and worked as a commercial clerk.
He died in 1982.
Eberhard Schöngarth was sentenced to death and executed by a British military court in 1946 for the murder of a captured Allied pilot.
Josef Bühler was sentenced to death and hanged in Poland in 1948.
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George Leibbrandt
Photo:
ullstein picture
From 1945 to 1949, Georg Leibbrandt was in the "automatic arrest" planned by the Allies for Nazi functionaries.
A case against him for murder was dropped in 1950.
Leibbrandt, who was fluent in Russian, worked for Chancellor Konrad Adenauer in 1955 as an adviser on the repatriation of German prisoners of war from the Soviet Union.
He then headed the office of Salzgitter AG in the federal capital Bonn, where he died in 1982.
Gerhard Klopfer was interned by the Americans in 1946, interrogated several times but not charged and, after his release from prison in 1949, classified by a main tribunal as »less incriminated«.
A preliminary investigation into participation in the Wannsee Conference was discontinued in 1962.
Friedrich Wilhelm Kritzinger was the only participant who admitted the criminal nature of the Wannsee Conference in interrogations after the war.
He was released from American custody due to illness and died in 1947.
Erich Neumann was interned after the end of the war, released in 1948 and died in 1951.
Wilhelm Stuckart, at the end of the war also a member of the last »Reich government« under Admiral Dönitz, was accused of »crimes against humanity« in the Wilhelmstrasse trial in 1947. The court sentenced him to three years, ten months and 20 days in prison. In 1950, a denazification committee in Hanover classified him as a "follower". Stuckart was promoted to Lower Saxony state chairman of the right-wing party »Association of Expellees and Disenfranchised« and campaigned for the end of denazification. He then became a member of the neo-Nazi Socialist Reich Party (SRP), which was banned by the Federal Constitutional Court in 1952. Stuckart died in 1953.
The documentary
»The Conference – How the Holocaust Was Organized«
is shown on
SPIEGEL History
and on demand.
