How the Wannsee Conference Shaped the Holocaust's Genocidal Machinery

There is a grim statistic that tells the story of the Nazi Final Solution like nothing else does. In mid-March, 1942, 75-80% of the Holocaust’s victims were still alive, with the remaining having died over the 30 months since the second world war began in September 1939. By mid-February, 1943, the ratio had been reversed.

What is it that caused this dramatic acceleration in the extermination of Europe’s Jews? What trigggered this diabolic rush to liquidate an entire people, after an essentially stop-go killing operation had played out for many months? Did something happen during the intervening 11 months – in the ongoing war or outside it – that explains this?

The answer to that question is, no, nothing that happened during those 11 months holds a definitive clue to this puzzle. The answer, rather, lies in what took place about a month before this ghastly bloodletting began in deadly earnest. The venue was an elegant, early 20th-century country villa, located in the idyllic western Berlin suburb of Wannsee and set inside a stunning, lush green garden, commanding sweeping views over the Great Wannsee lake. And the event that set in motion the goriest mass murder of civilians in recorded history was what we now know as the Wannsee Conference.

Setting the stage

In the late morning of January 20, 1942, Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA), chaired a meeting of senior officials of the government, the Nazi Party, civilian administrations in the occupied territories, the Schutzstaffel (SS) and the Gestapo to discuss and settle the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question.”

Heydrich had made it a point to enclose with his invite to the participants, sent out several weeks in advance, Hermann Goering’s note to him from July 31, 1941, authorising Heydrich to make “all necessary organizational, factual, and material preparations for a total solution to the Jewish Question in Europe.” In the Nazi pecking order at that point, Goering was second to Adolf Hitler alone.

The participants, 15 in total, included Gestapo chief Heinrich Muller; Adolf Eichmann, head of the RSHA’s Jewish Emigration Office; Otto Hofman, who headed the SS Race and Settlement Office; Dr Gerhard Klopfer, permanent secretary, Nazi Party Chancellery; Friedrich Kritzinger, permanent secretary to the Reich Chancellory; Martin Luther, under-secretary in the Foreign Ministry; Dr Roland Freister, state secretary, Ministry of Justice; Dr Alfred Meyer, state secretary, Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories; Dr Wilhelm Stuckart, state secretary to the Interior Ministry; and Dr Josef Buehler, state secretary to the General (Polish Occupation) Government.

Clearly, meticulous planning had gone into making sure that all the agencies that would eventually be vital components of the killing machine were involved in the deliberations. The Ministry of Justice, for example, would be required to pitch in frequently with decrees on how to “legally” dispossess Jews of their properties, or how to settle the racial status of children born of mixed-race marriages so that they could be dispatched to their death in strict compliance of law. The Foreign Ministry’s services would need to be requisitioned to persuade friendly governments (Rumania, Hungary or Vichy France) to treat the Jews living within their jurisdictions in line with the Nazi genocidal project. The Reich Chancellery had to be on the same page as Heydrich’s SS – the project’s lead manager – at all stages, so that logistic support (by way of, say, adequate railway rolling stock for ferrying Jews to the death camps) was available to the SS on tap.

Laying the foundation for genocide

Heydrich piloted the proceedings, which comprised a 90-minute presentation he made followed by a half-hour question-and-answer session. He surveyed Nazi racial policy and its “achievements” up until 1941, but contended that a reorientation was necessary now that the escalating war was making Jewish emigration, the cornerstone of the policy, less viable. Besides, the war was also opening up great “new possibilities in the East” for getting rid of the Jews.

Against this background, Hitler had decided that the time was ripe for the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question” and thus, to put to rights the racial disequilibrium in the German Reich (and elsewhere in Europe). The SS had been identified as the nodal agency for the project and Heydrich was the plenipotentiary entrusted to drive it. The ministries and organisations represented at the conference were expected to provide support to the SS for the project’s successful completion.

The key component of the plan, Heydrich said, was evacuation to the East (presumably conquered parts of the Soviet Union). Evacuated Jews would be deployed for manual work on construction and other projects, where harsh living and working conditions would ensure that “a large number will undoubtedly drop out through natural reduction,” as the conference minutes – “protocol” in German – record. Those who would survive “will have to be given suitable treatment because they unquestionably represent the most resistant part and therefore constitute a natural selection that, if released, will become the germ cell of a renewed Jewish revival.”

An important prerequisite for the evacuation to be a successful process was a precise identification of the right candidates for the evacuation. And a significant part of the discussions revolved around how to treat Mischlinge, or “part-Jews” as defined by the Nuremberg Race Laws, and their offspring – both “first-degree Mischlinge” (those with two Jewish grandparents out of four) and “second-degree Mischlinge” (those with one Jewish grandparent). This aspect, incredibly, consumed the most time, as the protocol reveals, with a whole range of scenarios – with regard to the marital status, spouse’s racial identity, the offspring (if there were any) and even whether the children had been born prior to or after the notification of the Nuremberg Laws – coming into play in the decision to evacuate a person. Fabled German thoroughness, one imagines, was at work here.

Coordination for mass murder

That was as far as the Jews of the Reich (Germany, Austria and Bohemia-Moravia) were concerned. But the Final Solution was also to encompass all the Jews of Europe, and the continent “will be combed through from West to East,” obviously to render Europe judenrein, or “cleansed” of Jews. Eichmann had painstakingly constructed an accounting of the distribution of the European Jewry across various regions and countries and that document formed the basis of the deliberations. Of all the countries, Estonia was proudly mentioned as already judenrein, thanks to the “hard work” done by the Occupation authorities there. The different geographies and their special features were briefly discussed, the emphasis throughout being on the total of 11 million Jews in the Final Solution’s crosshairs. Otherwise, no niceties (like the possible exclusion of part-Jews from the project’s jurisdication) enter the discussion here. Clearly, delicate German sensitivities were likely to be hurt if hairs were not split over Jews from other countries.

The drafting of the protocol was a remarkable piece of work in itself. The document bristles with dark hints about the fate that awaited the Jews, but steers clear of all specificities. “Execution” or “elimination,” much less “shooting” or “gassing,” shows up nowhere in the minutes, and the cleverly aspetic “evacuation” takes their place with aplomb. This was Eichmann’s handiwork, who doubled up as the “recording secretary” to the conference. He worked extensively on the first draft prepared by a stenographer-secretary, excising all “vulgarisms” and aligning the protocol’s general tone with standard officialese – as he himself testified at his 1961 trial in Jerusalem, perhaps with a touch of pride.

But, as carefully sanitised as they are, do the minutes yet reflect any disquiet or unease in the participants with regard to the scope of the Final Solution? Did the attendees express any reservations at all – moral, ethical or even professional? Hardly. Some discussions did happen, of course, and there were mild disagreements over a few purely “technical” issues. For example, state four-year-plan secretary Erich Neumann wasn’t sure if the war economy wouldn’t suffer a setback if Jews employed in war industries were to be evacuated immediately. On the other hand, interior secretary Stuckart interjected at one point that the myriad issues linked to the evacuation of the Mischlinge could “constitute endless administrative work.” He suggested “forced sterilisation” of the entire Mischlinge population instead. And not one of those present seemed the least troubled by what the Final Solution envisaged for, say, Jewish/part-Jewish children, though that issue came up frequently in the course of the morning.

What the protocol also bears out is that the Final Solution took none of the Wannsee attendees by surprise. That’s because the project for the systematic destruction of Europe’s Jews had been underway for some months before Wannsee and no senior level party or government functionary could have been unaware of that development. The Chelmno death camp, which used poison gas for mass murder, near Lodz in occupied Poland had been commissioned by November, 1941. Around the same time, the Belzec death camp, with its elaborate gassing infrastructure and mass grave sites, had also been readied for operation.

Even before that, across occupied Poland and the Soviet Union, mobile gas vans had often been pressed into service for mass killings, not to speak of the orgies of mass shootings by the SS-Einsatzgruppen and Reserve Police units in parts of the USSR and Poland since July, 1941 (The Babi Yar massacre in Ukraine of September 1941 and the Bialystok carnage of July that year are examples). These murder campaigns were all essentially genocidal in nature and communists, partisans, Russian prisoners of war, Gypsies and Romanis also accounted for a significant proportion of their victims.

So, the Wannsee Conference could hardly claim to have kicked off the Holocaust. What it did, however, was streamline the Holocaust’s processes by establishing a formal command structure and clear lines of communication and coordination between the agencies involved. After Wannsee, a bureaucratic behemoth stepped in to organise the process of destruction on an industrial scale. The mass murder project, hitherto episodic and disorderly, metamorphosed into a fine-tuned killing machine.

Hitler’s decision: The final go-ahead

It is inconceivable, however, that something like the Holocaust could have been initiated without Hitler’s express clearance, and the Fuehrer’s formal go-ahead came in course of his meeting with senior Nazi functionaries at the Reich Chancellery in the afternoon of December 12, 1941, more than a month before Wannsee. Joseph Goebbels’s post-meeting diary entry read, “Regarding the Jewish question, the Fuehrer has decided to make a clean sweep. He prophesied to the Jews that, if they brought about a world war, they would experience their own annihilation. That was not just a phrase. The world war is here, the annihilation of the Jews must be the necessary consequence.” The world war had, of course, begun in right earnest with the US joining the fray on December 7, 1941. Europe’s Jews, in terms of Hitler’s perverse logic, had invited upon their heads their own perdition.

It is plausible that Hitler’s resolve to eradicate European Jewry altogether crystallised after he launched Operation Barbarossa. In the euphoric first few weeks after June 22, 1941, when the Wehrmacht overran large parts of Western USSR, it probably occurred to Hitler that nothing – not even something that had looked like a wild dream till the other day – might be impossible any more. His musings on those lines may have communicated themselves to Goering, who then proceeded to ask Heydrich to prepare for the “final solution.”

Another slightly different and probable interpretation is that as Germany’s march on Moscow began to stall and the Soviets mounted their counteroffensive in early December, it dawned on Hitler that Barbarossa would be a protracted campaign and early victory was unlikely. The US having been drawn in, the prospects of a swift end to the war also seemed remote. Why then, he may have wondered, should he wait for the war to end before he could go about resolving the “Jewish question,” the question that really lay at the very heart of his worldview?

Also read: How The Nazis Worked With Indian Organisations Like Arya Samaj to Spread Propaganda

Legacy of evil: A museum that speaks volumes

The world would likely not have known about the Wannsee Conference but for a lucky accident. Originally, 30 copies of the protocol had been circulated to the concerned agencies, ministries and secretaries. But as the war’s end neared and the Nazis knew their game was up, their frenzied destruction of incriminating documents consumed, among hundreds of thousands of other records, all existing copies of the Wannsee protocol save one. The surviving minutes, belonging to Martin Luther at the Foreign Office, was discovered by American staff microfilming Nazi documents for the Nuremberg Trials, who then made the file over to the US prosecutors.

The prosecutors interrogated several surviving attendees of the Wannsee Conference, confirmed the protocol’s contents and cited the protocol at several subsequent Nuremberg Trials. Today, a full set of facsimile copies of the protocol’s pages is available for viewing by visitors to the permanent exhibition at the museum and educational site of the House of the Wannsee Conference hosted at the Wannsee villa.

The exhibition features many photos and pictures that powerfully evoke the culture saturating the Nazi years. One photo I found particularly disquieting shows five moon-faced teenage boys, fitted out in Hitler Youth gear, smiling as they stand beneath a road sign that declares in bold letters, “Jews not welcome in Behringerdorf.” Such images, alas, are found in plenty as you walk around. And then it will begin to sink in how fifteen men sitting around an exquisite conference table in a cosy room in an elegant villa could sign off on a death warrant for 11 million people without so much as blinking an eye.

Anjan Basu can be reached at basuanjan52@gmail.com.