Peter Longerich - Wannsee: The Road to the Final Solution

Auswrtiges Amt (Foreign Ministry)

Akten zur deutschen auswrtigen Politik

Auslandsorganisation der NSDAP (NSDAP/AO)

Archivum Panstwowe w Lublinie

Bundesarchiv, Abteilung Berlin

Bundesarchiv Militrarchiv, Abteilung Freiburg

Berlin Document Center

Centre de documentaton Juive Contemporaine

Durchgangsstrae

Deutschnationale Volkspartei (German National Peoples Party)

Einsatzgruppe

Einsatzkommando

Geheimes Staatspolizeiamt

Geheime Staatspolizei

Geschichte und Gesellschaft

Holocaust and Genocide Studies

Hherer SS- und Polizeifhrer (Higher SS and Police Leader)

Historische Zeitschrift

Institut fr Zeitgeschichte, Munich

International Military Tribunal

Konzentrationslager (also Kl)

Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (National Socialist German Workers Party)

Osobyi Archive, Moscow (special archive)

Politisches Archiv des Auswrtigen Amtes, Berlin

Reichsgesetzblatt

Reichssicherheitshauptamt (Reich Security Head Office)

Sturmabteilung

Sicherheitsdienst

Sonderkommando

Schutzstaffel

SS- und Polizeifhrer (SS and Police Leader)

Staatsarchiv

Staatsanwaltschaft

The National Archives, London

The Trial of Adolf Eichmann

Trials of War Criminals Before the Nuremberg Military Tribunals

Vertreter des Auswrtigen Amtes (Foreign Ministry representative)

Die Verfolgung und Ermordung der europischen Juden durch das nationalsozialistische Deutschland 19331945

Vierteljahrshefte fr Zeitgeschichte

Verordnungsblatt fr das Generalgouvernement

SS-Wirtschafts- und Verwaltungshauptamt (SS Business and Administration Head Office)

YIVO Institute for Jewish Research

Zentrale Stelle Ludwigsburg

On 20 January 1942 fifteen men met at a luxury villa on the Wannsee, a lake on Berlins western outskirts. They had been invited by Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Reich Security Head Office (RSHA), and were almost all high-ranking representatives of the Nazi state, the Nazi Party, and the SS. They included four state secretaries, two further senior officials of equivalent rank, and an undersecretary. The villa, now the House of the Wannsee Conference, occupies an exceptionally attractive position on the lake, its imposing approach road opening out onto a large circular drive in front of the house itself. The site still gives visitors today a clear impression of the original owners ambition to create a grand, almost palatial, property in a striking setting. Its extensive, carefully designed park, its series of spacious and impressive rooms giving onto the park and the lake, its three terraces stretching the length of the garden side, and its conservatory complete with marble fountain were created to proclaim the success and refinement of its owner, a wealthy businessman, in the second decade of the twentieth century. The beautiful location contrasts starkly, however, with the purpose of that meeting in 1942. The villa had been taken over by the SS to provide accommodation for its guests, and the meeting was called to discuss the final solution to the Jewish question. The surviving minutes of the meeting record that the aim was to discuss precisely who was to be targeted and how to deport a total of 11 million people, subject them to extremely harsh forced labour, and kill any who survived or were no longer capable of work by some other method. The meeting was to conclude with breakfast.

The fifteen men included ten university graduates, nine of them qualified lawyers, eight of whom had a doctorate. The minutes suggest that they discussed these matters in a purposeful, business-like, and informed manner in comfortable surroundings and in a positively idyllic setting. While expressing a variety of different views on matters of detail, not a single one of them raised concerns about the project as a whole, namely the murder of 11 million Jews.

Today the minutes of the Wannsee Conference are seen as synonymous with the coldblooded, bureaucratically organized, and industrialized mass murder of the European Jews, as an almost unfathomable document capturing how the Nazi systems ideologically driven impulse to destroy was translated on the orders of the regimes highest authority into state action and mercilessly executed. In the words of the historian Wolfgang Scheffler at the opening of the House of the Wannsee Conference in 1992, No other document presents more clearly the overarching plan to exterminate the European Jews.

The immense importance of the minutes of the Wannsee Conference lies not only in the fact that they display the blatant cynicism and contempt for humanity of high-ranking representatives of the Nazi regime. The minutes are unique because, more than any other document, they demonstrate with total clarity the decision-making process that led to the murder of the European Jews. This decision-making processin other words, the proposals, meetings, instructions, and arrangements in which Hitler, Himmler, Heydrich, and other leading Nazi political figures were involvedtook place for the most part orally; to the extent that documents were generated at all, they were destroyed as far as possible or, if they survived, were written in the language of obfuscation. They did not survive, moreover, as a single corpus but were scattered far and wide. Those who initiated and organized this mass murder intended to cover their tracks systematically. Reconstructing the decisive sequences of events is thus a laborious task, for, although evidence is provided by many thousands of documents, some questions necessarily remain unanswered and thus there is considerable scope for interpretation.