The Wannsee Conference

Podcast Transcript

On January 20, 1942, one of the most infamous meetings in human history took place.

Fifteen high-ranking Nazi officials gathered in the Berlin Suburb of Wannsee to come up with a “Final Solution of the Jewish Question.”

They discussed who would be eliminated and how, all without the slightest hint of emotion or remorse.

In around ninety minutes, the fate of millions was decided.

Learn about the Wannsee Conference and how the “Final Solution” was enacted on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

In 1933, Adolf Hitler became the Chancellor of Germany. And just one year later, he had consolidated enough power to become “Füher” or Leader of Germany.

To understand how this led to the horrors of the Holocaust, we have to understand the beliefs that drove the Nazi Party.

One of Hitler’s main ideological goals was “lebensraum,” or living space. The core idea of lebensraum is that for a nation to thrive, it needs to expand its territory.

In Nazi Germany’s case, this expansion would be done through conquering and then colonizing other European countries.

Hitler and the Nazi’s eyed territory in Eastern Europe, in particular the Soviet Union and Poland.

Lebensraum was highly intertwined with the racial policies of the Nazis. The Germans believed that the white, “aryan” race was superior to others. Lebensraum was designed to drastically increase the number of Aryans to ensure the race’s survival.

Lebensraum was the primary ideology that contributed to the outbreak of World War II, which I explored in my episode on Operation Barbarossa.

To the Nazis, the biggest threat to the Lebensraum policy was the Jews.

Here, it is essential to note that the Nazis’ theories on race and their ideas of Lebensraum were inherently intertwined.

The antisemitic beliefs of the Nazis deemed the Jews to be dangerous and evil. They were supposedly taking over Germany and had betrayed Germany in World War I. They were perceived as “dirty” and “sneaky,” and would destroy German culture if left unchecked.

To combat the perceived threat, the Nazis began to target Jews.

Starting almost immediately after Hitler was elected, the party began to limit the rights of Jews.

Laws were enacted to exclude Jewish people from civil service positions and limit the number of Jewish people in schools. Race Laws were established, and Jews were forced to wear a badge to publicly identify themselves.

After World War II began with the invasion of Poland in 1939, anti-Semitic policies continued, as did the Lebensraum policy.

By 1942, the Nazis had annexed Poland, conquered Denmark and Norway, occupied France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Yugoslavia, and Greece, and were in the middle of their invasion of the USSR.

Their policy of Lebensraum was progressing, and they were inching closer and closer to achieving their goal of conquering Eastern Europe.

However, with this new land, the Nazis were having a problem.

Between 1940 and 1941, Germany faced a massive food and supply shortage.

Additionally, the war situation was starting to turn against Germany.

Japan had just attacked Pearl Harbor, and Hitler had declared War on the US. This gave Germany a new enemy to deal with in the West. To add to this, the Red Army had finally started to push back the Germans from the Soviet Union.

With too many “useless mouths” to feed and Jews being perceived as a threat to the security of the Reich, Hitler finally decided that it was time to come up with a solution to what the Nazi’s called the Jewish Question.

To address this question, Hitler convened a conference of top Nazi officials at Wannsee on the outskirts of Berlin on January 20, 1942.

Hitler, however, did not want his name attached to the meeting, as if the records were to get out, he could be blamed.

Additionally, a few of the other top Nazis were not present. Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, and Herman Göring, the Commander of the Luftwaffe, were also not present, though they were aware of the meeting.

Various heads of ministries responsible for Jewish issues were invited to the Conference. A total of 15 invitees were in attendence.

The Conference was led by Reinhard Heydrich, the Chief of the Reich Security Office, who had created a plan for the Final Solution the year before.

As the meeting guests arrived, Heidrich and his recording secretary, Aldof Eichmann, provided the attendees with a list of compiled numbers of Jews from both occupied and unoccupied countries in Europe.

These numbers were separated into two groups: the A group, comprising countries under direct control, and the B countries, which were either allied, neutral, or at War.

The meeting opened with Heydrich, who described the anti-Jewish measures enacted by the Nazis.

They then went into the number of Jews who had emigrated from Europe before discussing how many were still left on the Continent.

They estimated that there were 11 million Jews in Europe, and roughly half of that number was under German control.

Heydrich then noted that Himmler had banned Jewish emigration and that the new Jewish solution was to evacuate them to the East.

It is clear through the meeting notes that Evacuate was code for elimination or death.

Heydrich stated that the meeting would be for the development of a “practical execution of the Final Solution” and that Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia would get priority in the solution of the Jewish problem.

This was due to housing issues caused by Allied bombing, as well as the need for space for laborers.

Heydrich then went on to explain that the “evacuated” Jews would need to be sent to transit ghettos, then be sent East.

The first issue the meeting needed to discuss was what people were considered to be legally Jewish who could be sent to camps.

They ended up deciding that Jews who were over 65 or who were awarded an Iron Cross during World War I would not be executed, but sent to a separate Concentration Camp.

However, those at the meeting were struggling with what Jewish racial percentages should be deported.

They decided that those who had two Jewish grandparents would be Jews. However, if they married a non-Jew and had children, this would not apply, but they would be sterilized.

A person with one Jewish grandparent would be German unless they married a Jew or a person with two Jewish grandparents. They also would not be German if they looked or acted like a Jew. If they looked or acted that way, they would be treated as a Jew.

Mixed marriages would be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. If the Jew and non-Jew were raising the child as a German, the parent would not be killed; however, if they were being raised Jewish, they would be.

However, even though these were the official racial policies, they often weren’t upheld. Jews were still rounded up en masse, and it usually didn’t matter what their actual background was.

The meeting then moved to discuss non-German countries like France, Romania, and Hungary, and what they should do about their Jews. They decided that Jews in these countries would be forcefully deported to extermination camps.

In Hungary, by the end of the war, 600,000 Jews had been deported and executed.

Heydrich held the initial discussion for about an hour before opening the floor to questions from the attendees.

Issues were more focused on the administrative and legal issues surrounding the “evacuation of Jews” rather than moral qualms.

One concern was with mixed marriages, where it was suggested that the marriages simply be dissolved or that sterilization be made mandatory.

Another concern was evacuating Jews who were working in vital industries to the war effort. This concern was easily negated when Heydrich said they simply wouldn’t be sent to camps or killed.

A common misconception is that the Wannsee Conference is what started the holocaust, but that is not true.

Mass killings were occurring both in Poland and the Soviet Union, and extermination camps were already under construction.

The decision to kill the Jews had already been made from higher up; this meeting was to define who would be considered Jewish, to outline the implementation process, and to make sure the various parts of the Nazi apparatus cooperated with the Final Solution and that everyone was on the same page.

Most, if not all, of the people who attended the Conference were well aware of the mass killings already occurring in the East that the military and police were committing.

For example, during Operation Barbarossa, the SS Einsatzgruppen were ordered to shoot all Jews between the ages of 15 and 45.

This system had two major drawbacks from the Nazi perspective. One was that it was a waste of ammunition, and the other was a massive psychological burden on the Nazi soldiers, so a different solution that was less mentally taxing and wasteful was needed.

One of the main things discussed at the conference was the best way to commit murder without mentally harming the troops.

Though they did not formally decide on the use of poison gas, they were exploring the most efficient options to commit mass murder, and poison gas was suggested.

Experimentation with gas had been occurring before the Wannsee Conference. At Chelmno, a death camp located in Poland, they had been experimenting with mobile gas vans.

Despite not yet committing to gas, the policy of experimentation was clear, and they began to implement it after the meeting concluded. Following the Conference, five extermination camps were built, bringing the Nazi total to six.

Following more experimentation with gas, it was found that gas was the most efficient form of killing and was better mentally for the troops who no longer wanted to kill women and children.

Following these results, Gas Chambers began to be constructed in three camps in Poland: Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka.

These chambers used Carbon Monoxide, which they would generate from diesel engines.

To maximize efficiency and eliminate as much panic as possible, the Germans would tell the Jews and other victims arriving in cattle cars that they were being brought to a shower.

However, this was still not fast enough for the Final Solution.

They found that solution at the Auschwitz Concentration Camp.

Here, they experimented with a chemical called Zyklon B on 600 Soviet and 250 sick prisoners. They found it was fast, easy to use, efficient, and inexpensive. The successful results led to it becoming the main weapon of the Final Solution.

At the end of the war, approximately six million Jews died in concentration camps, and five million non-Jews were also killed, leading to a total of 11 million victims.

Of this number, 2.7 million were killed by the Camps established after the Wannsee Conference.

At the end of the War, when it was clear the Nazis were losing, they attempted to erase all evidence of the crime.

This was also done with the Wannsee Conference papers. Of the thirty copies of the meeting minutes, all but one were destroyed.

The only notes that survived were those of an attendee named Martin Luther, an undersecretary in the Foreign Office. This copy was used in the Nuremberg Trials as proof of the genocide. Without this copy, we might never have known that the meeting had taken place.

Overall, the impact of the Wannsee Conference was enormous.

Fifteen people in a single room decided the fates of millions of people in a single day. The attendees showed no remorse or concern about their potential victims. The lives of these people were, to them, just a logistical problem to be solved.