The Wannsee Conference

The Wannsee conference was a meeting of 15 high-ranking Nazi party and German government leaders held in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee on the 20th of January, 1942. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss the “final solution to the Jewish question in Europe”. The “final solution” was the Nazis code name for the intentional planned destruction, or genocide of all European Jews. The Nazis used the term “final solution” to hide their strategy of the mass murder from the rest of the world. The meeting was originally planned on the 8th of December but was postponed due to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Fifteen senior Nazi representatives were at the conference, mostly SS officers or civil servants . The majority of them were highly education …show more content…
The mobile killing squads were already slaughtering Jews that occupied the Soviet Union. Rather the Conference was the place where the “final solution” was formally revealed to non-nazi leaders . Reinhard Heydrich, who was SS chief Heinrich Himmler’s head deputy held the meeting with SS officer Adolf Eichmann creation a transcription of the minutes. Also high ranking party officials and SS-officers from the RSHA (Reich Security Main Office), Along with two representatives of the “Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories”. The minutes was a transcription of the conference, with only 30 copies made. They were sent by Eichmann to all of the attendees of the meeting. Most copies of the minutes were destroyed in an attempt to cover their tracks but Luther ’s copy was found by U.S prosecutor Robert Kempner. In the course of the conference Reinhard Heydrich outlined that European Jews would be rounded up from west to east and sent to extermination camps in the General Government and be murdered there. Heydrich emphasised that once the deportation process was complete, the exterminations would become a matter under awareness of the SS. Though, the matter of who was ‘Jewish’ and who wasn’t had always been tough question for the Nazis. They strongly believed that Jewish blood was different from other blood and that could be a way to tell. However, when that

Show More