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title: Inside the Meeting that Engineered the Holocaust
description: "Imagine holding a boardroom meeting to dispassionately discuss the systematic murder of 6.6 million men, women, and children. Each seat at the table has an elegantly written name-card for one of the most notorious war criminals and mass-killers of all time. State briefings and Jewish population statistics are neatly organised in file folders for the convenience of the attendees. Chilled water, vintage wines, and expensive cognac are served in fine crystal glasses. High quality hors d'oeuvres and a sumptuous buffet lunch are provided while much of occupied Europe starves. And notes of the proceedings are dutifully typed up by an alert and impassive secretary.\n\nThirty copies of the meeting notes were circulated to the offices of all the Nazi officials in attendance. The documents were ordered not to be distributed to subordinates and to be burned shortly after the attendees and their superiors had reviewed them. Even the Nazis did not want it to be a matter of historical record that they had discussed mass-murder in such depth and breadth. One copy failed to be destroyed and survived the war. As such, we know what was discussed, by whom, and the eerily bureaucratic way in which these 15 men discussed the total annihilation of a people.\n\nIn the space of just 90 minutes, the attendees settled their plans for an industrialized slaughter that reduced all the massacres of pre-modern history to pygmy proportions. In fact, 6.6 million people is just the estimated number of Jews who died in the Holocaust. The Nazis intended to kill closer to 11 million. For perspective, that is equivalent to roughly the entire population of North Carolina, or every soul in the city of Paris, or every last man, woman, and child living in the Czech Republic.\n\nChairing the meeting was SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, nicknamed \"the Hangman\" and \"The Butcher of Prague\", and at his side was SS-Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann, the cold and calculating logistician who oversaw the deportation of millions of people to the Nazi death camps. This was the Wannsee Conference of January 20th 1942 — the meeting that set the Final Solution to the so-called \"Jewish Question\" in motion.\n\n## Forcing Them to Flee\n\nWhen Hitler ascended to power in January 1933, there were approximately 435,000 Jewish people living in Germany, or 0.6% of the population. Many of them had lived there since the Middle Ages. During peacetime, it was impossible to forcibly deport or murder the Jews without a huge international outcry. Therefore, from 1933 to the German invasion of Poland in 1939, Nazi policy was to make life for German Jews so unbearable that they would flee the country.\n\nThe pressure began almost immediately. In 1933, the Nazis banned Jewish people from working as civil servants, judges, lawyers, schoolteachers, university professors, tax consultants, public notaries, and, oddly enough, musicians, due to what the Nazis believed was the deliberate Jewish promotion of degeneracy to sabotage German morals and culture. The banning of Jewish university professors caused Albert Einstein to move to America. The Nazis also banned Jewish students from attending German universities and severely limited the number of Jewish children allowed in state-run schools.\n\nIn September 1933, the Jews were banned from owning or working on farms, or participating in the German film, theatre, and radio industries. In October this ban was extended to Jewish newspaper journalists. Jewish doctors meanwhile were banned from participating in the state-run health service. These bans also applied to people who identified as German and Christian but had recent Jewish ancestry.\n\nMeanwhile, the Nazi Party had adopted sweeping centralized powers to regulate the economy, and these powers were used as an economic weapon against the Jews. The Nazis could already dictate to all German-owned businesses what their prices should be, what things they were allowed to sell, what production quotas they had to meet, and how many people they hired. The Nazis even restricted how much profit German business owners were allowed to take home. The Nazis could also confiscate a German business with little or no compensation. Most of this was done in accordance with the Nazis' centralized economic planning models, like the Four-Year Plan of 1936 to 1940, but these same regulatory powers were used to put Jewish people out of business. They were not allowed to take government contracts, advertise publicly, sell certain products or in certain markets, and, at the drop of a hat, they could have their businesses confiscated and sold to a so-called \"Aryan.\" These measures threw thousands of formerly prosperous Jews into menial work, unemployment, and poverty.\n\nIn September and November of 1935, the Nazis introduced the Nuremberg Laws, the most sweeping body of antisemitic legislation of the prewar period. Firstly, the Nuremberg Laws stripped Jewish people of their German citizenship, relegating them to second-class status. This also meant that those Jews who were not born in Germany could be forcibly deported back to their countries of origin. The Jews who could not be deported were declared resident aliens, non-German state subjects, and \"enemies of the race-based state.\"\n\nSecondly, the Nuremberg Laws also banned marriages between Jewish and Aryan Germans, along with unmarried sexual contact between them, eventually growing to include hugging and kissing, punishable by a prison term with hard labour. Thirdly, to combat what the Nazis perceived as the sexually predatory nature of Jewish men, the Nuremberg Laws made it specifically illegal for German women under 45 to be employed in a Jewish household. Off the books, Jews who transgressed these laws were often packed off to the earliest German concentration camps.\n\nFinally, the Nuremberg Laws defined who counted as Jewish — based on heredity, and irrespective of whether they self-identified as Jewish or practiced Judaism. A German with one Jewish great-grandparent was still considered German. A German with one Jewish grandparent or two great-grandparents was considered \"mixed race\" but was eligible for German citizenship. A German with 2 Jewish grandparents was also considered \"mixed race\" and was still allowed to have citizenship unless they practiced Judaism or married a Jew. A German with 3 or 4 Jewish grandparents was a Jew, regardless of whether they or their parents had converted to Christianity.\n\nIn January 1938, Jewish people were banned from changing their surnames to hide their ethnic origins. Four months later, a similar rule was applied to changing the name of Jewish businesses in order to hide the ethnicity of their owners. Jewish doctors were stripped of their licenses and banned from calling themselves medical doctors. Instead, they had to refer to themselves as \"sick-treaters\" and most of them were banned from treating anyone who wasn't themselves Jewish.\n\nOn March 13th 1938, Germany annexed Austria, which was home to roughly 230,000 Jews. All previous laws were now extended to them. The same happened to the 3,000 Jews who lived in the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia, when the Germans annexed the territory on September 30th. Meanwhile, in April 1938, Jewish people had to register with the government all property they owned that was worth more than $6,000 dollars in modern US currency. Meanwhile, there were public boycotts of Jewish businesses, along with a campaign of violence, harassment, and vandalism.\n\nThings culminated on the night of November 9th and 10th 1938, known as Kristallnacht, or \"The Night of the Broken Glass.\" Anti-Jewish riots, encouraged by the state press, erupted across Germany in reaction to a Jewish teenager shooting a German diplomat in Paris. The rioters vandalised and burned 267 synagogues, 7,500 Jewish businesses, and committed violent assaults on Jewish individuals. 100 Jews were killed during the night and 30,000 Jews were arrested by the Nazi government as \"instigators\" and \"aggressors\" in the mayhem.\n\nBlaming the Jews for the violence, the Nazis imposed what they called an \"atonement levy\" of 1-billion Reichsmarks on the entire Jewish community, in a form of collective guilt based on race. The atonement levy was to be extracted in four payments of extra taxation and property confiscations. In 1939, the Nazis demanded a fifth one. They also banned Jews from receiving insurance payouts for any properties that had been damaged during the riots.\n\nKristallnacht was followed up a few days later by new laws that closed down the remaining Jewish owned businesses and gave them to Aryans, and prohibited Jewish people from attending movie theatres, stage-plays, and music concerts, and also banned Jews from driving or owning a car. Jews were also not permitted to travel outside their local area without government permission and they had to obey strict curfews. In February 1939, Jews were legally required to surrender all the gold, silver, diamonds, and other gems and precious metals which they owned to the Nazi government. This law included wedding and engagement rings.\n\nThe campaign of persecution compelled over 200,000 Jews to flee Germany between 1933 and 1939, along with roughly 45,000 Austrian Jews and 700 Sudeten Jews after the German annexations of 1938. This left 230,000 Jews trapped in Germany, 185,000 left in Austria, and 2,300 in the Sudetenland. Most of the refugees fled to the United States, Great Britain, or the British Mandate of Palestine (later becoming Israel in 1948). A minority of the Jewish diaspora headed to other countries in Western Europe and South America, and the Dominions of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.\n\nAll the aforementioned countries placed restrictions on the number of Jewish refugees that could migrate there, or else the number of Jews who fled the Third Reich during this time would have been higher. For example, in May 1939, 935 Jewish refugees boarded the M.S. St. Louis, sailing from Hamburg in Germany to Havana, Cuba. All but 28 of them were turned away. The remaining 907 refugees sailed for the United States, where they were intercepted by the Coast Guard, with the White House and even President Franklin D. Roosevelt personally refusing to intervene. The St. Louis then sailed on to Canada, where again they were turned away by the Liberal government of William Lyon Mackenzie-King. The St. Louis then sailed back to Europe and sat in the port of Antwerp, Belgium, while the Western European democratic nations bartered over who should take them. In the end, the UK took 288 Jewish refugees, France took 224, Belgium took 214, and 181 were taken in by the Netherlands. However, when Germany invaded and occupied France, Belgium, and the Netherlands in 1940, 254 of the refugees from the St. Louis who had settled in Western Europe were captured by the Germans and later murdered in the Holocaust.\n\nMeanwhile, if you had managed to flee Nazi Germany prior to the outbreak of war, you had to surrender 90% of your wealth in taxes before you were allowed to leave the country. This meant that you'd arrive in your host country on the verge of poverty, essentially having to rebuild your life from scratch.\n\n## Attempts at Mass Expulsion\n\nAn exception to the 90% taxation rule was applied to the 52,000 Jews who had fled to Palestine. Those people only had an average of 50% of their wealth stolen. The reason for the lower rate was that the Nazi government was laying the ground to forcibly expel the rest of the 420,000 Jews under their control in early 1939 to Palestine. With the 3,000-year-old kingdom of Israel being historically sacred in Judaism, this theoretically provided an extra incentive for Jews to comply with the expulsion order. The German objective, above all else, was not to leave a single Jewish person in the Third Reich.\n\nThe Nazi philosophy of race-based collectivism considered Jews not only inferior but genetically predisposed toward corrupting the nations in which they lived. As such, the Nazis feared that if any Jews were allowed to remain in the Third Reich, they would try to hatch a Jewish-Internationalist plot similar to the mythical \"stab in the back\" that the Nazis claimed had forced Germany to lose the First World War.\n\nHowever, the Palestine plan required the approval of the British government who administered the region at the time. And the British did not wish to enrage the local Arab population, and other Muslims in the Middle East, by bringing in such a massive influx of Jewish refugees to lands that the Muslims had also declared sacred ever since the Arab conquest of Palestine from the Byzantine Empire in the 630s. And, of course, when the Germans invaded Poland in September 1939, the British declared war and blockaded Germany, making any sort of overseas expulsion of German Jews impossible.\n\nDuring the war, the Nazis reversed their policy and began negotiations with the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem to extend the Holocaust to the Jews in Palestine, if the Axis Powers managed to conquer the region from the British. Meanwhile, Hitler's ally, Benito Mussolini, proposed that the Jews be resettled in Italian East Africa, among the historical Ethiopian Jewish population. This plan was never implemented due to the war. If it had, it is likely that a large number of the expelled Jewish refugees would have starved to death — an outcome that the Nazis would have been perfectly fine with. Low-level Japanese officials also speculated about using Jewish settlers to economically develop their holdings in Manchuria, but this idea never made it to the level of a policy proposal.\n\nBack in 1938, the Nazis had considered whether they could relocate German Jews to the French colony of Madagascar. This was an old idea for a Jewish State that had been entertained by various European officials in the 19th century, when Palestine was still controlled by the Ottoman Empire and thus was not an option. Not that the Germans wanted a free Jewish state in the world — even in Madagascar. When Germany conquered France in June 1940, the Madagascar Expulsion Plan was revived in earnest, with the Nazis imposing the idea on the French collaborationist government at Vichy. Assuming that the British would soon surrender, the Nazis planned to deport hundreds of thousands of Jews to Madagascar, where they would be governed by German SS Officers in a tightly-controlled police state. It did not matter to the Nazis that the food supply in Madagascar could not support even a few thousand more people, and that sending European Jews to Madagascar would most likely have resulted in mass starvation and death. The plan was abandoned when the British Empire did not sue for peace in 1940, declared their intention to fight on alone, and won a decisive victory in the Battle of Britain.\n\nMeanwhile, the German occupation of the rest of Czech territory in March 1939, and their wartime invasions of Poland, Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, and France in 1939 and 1940 had resulted in 4.2 million more Jewish people being brought under the control of the Third Reich. 3.3 million of them were from Poland alone. In the summer of 1940, the Germans set about building walled off ghettos in Poland to house the Jews in crowded, starving, and disease-riddled conditions. Thousands died of dysentery and tuberculosis. Some of the Jews in occupied Western Europe were deported to Poland, but many remained where they were, falling under the same oppressive restrictions applied to Jews in Germany. Meanwhile, numerous Nazi-led massacres of Jews in the thousands were taking place all over Europe, most frequently by shooting them into mass graves that the victims had been forced to dig themselves.\n\nBut the oppressive restrictions, massacres, and the ghettos in Poland were just temporary for the Nazis. Hitler's policy of Lebensraum, or \"living space\", demanded that Poland and the rest of Eastern Europe not only be fully depopulated of Jews but, eventually, hundreds of millions of Slavs, so that the land could be settled by German farming families. The idea was, within the space of a few generations, the German and Austrian Aryan population would triple from 80 million to 240 million, making the Third Reich the largest industrialised power in the world — even rivalling the United States.\n\nAfter the Germans were defeated in the Battle of Britain in September 1940, Hitler put his British invasion plans on indefinite hiatus and immediately ordered his general staff to begin formulating plans for the invasion of the Soviet Union. The idea was to crush the Soviets in a quick campaign in 1941. Thereafter, the Jews of Europe would be forcibly deported beyond the Urals into Siberia, where they would most likely freeze and starve to death.\n\nHowever, from the perspective of the Nazis, this plan came with two major problems. First, by invading the Soviet Union, Germany would bring a further 3 to 5 million Jews under German occupation — depending on how far east they conquered — in addition to the 154,000 Jews that had been brought under German rule when they invaded Yugoslavia and Greece earlier in 1941. Furthermore, there were 2.1 million more Jews residing in the Axis allied countries of Italy, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria. From the Nazi point of view, all of these people had to be purged from Europe.\n\nTherefore, on July 31st 1941, Reichsmarshall Hermann Göring ordered SS Deputy Leader Reinhard Heydrich, the ruthless Head of the Reich Security Office, which included the Gestapo, to come up with a \"total solution to the Jewish question.\"\n\nThe second problem was that the Germans failed to conquer the Soviet Union in the summer and autumn of 1941. It quickly became apparent that the struggle between the Nazis and the Communists was going to stretch into 1942, if not longer. Meanwhile, the Germans had upwards of 11 million Jews in the territories which they occupied, and, with the Wehrmacht stalled at the gates of Moscow, they could not be forcibly deported anywhere. And the British blockade and the poor harvests of 1940 and 1941 left Nazi-occupied Europe with a severe shortage of food. And, ideologically, the Nazis could not bear the idea of keeping 11 million Jews alive on their territory for the duration of the war. It was thus in the autumn and winter of 1941 that the Nazis definitively shifted their ideas from the expulsion of the Jews to certain death in Siberia to the mechanized and industrialized slaughter of the Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe. All that remained was to put this hideous plan into action.\n\n## The Guest List\n\nActing under the authority of Hermann Göring, on November 29th 1941, Reinhard Heydrich, assisted by SS-Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann, sent invitations to 13 Nazi officials whose departments would be indispensable to the execution of the Holocaust. The date of the meeting was set for December 9th. Initially, they were to meet in a Berlin office building, but on December 4th Heydrich changed the meeting location to a lavish villa in Wannsee, a suburb of Berlin.\n\nThe Wannsee villa was nothing less than a mansion, with multiple bedrooms, drawing rooms, servant's quarters, an industrial-sized kitchen, private gardens, and a substantial endowment of land overlooking a lake in Berlin. It had previously been owned by Friedrich Minoux, a German industrialist and long-time financier of the Nazi Party. Minoux was forced to sell the villa to Heydrich after his imprisonment for fraud in 1941. Thereafter, Heydrich used the Wannsee villa as a base for many SS operations. Heydrich also planned to make the villa his personal residence after the war.\n\nOn December 5th 1941 there was a Soviet counter-offensive at Moscow, and on the 7th the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbour, and on the 11th Hitler declared war on the United States. Amid the bureaucratic chaos these events created, many of the Nazi officials invited to the meeting were required at their posts, and so the Wannsee conference was postponed until January 1942. Meanwhile, on December 12th Hitler spoke to government officials in Berlin about how the Jewish people were to blame for the war and how that would, as a consequence, bring about their own annihilation. On December 18th Hitler met with Heinrich Himmler, Reichsführer of the SS, at the Wolf's Lair in East Prussia, where they discussed how the Jewish people were to be exterminated prior to the end of the war.\n\nOn January 8th 1942, Heydrich sent new invitations to his Wannsee villa on January 20th. On that day, the men who gathered around the table were:\n\n- **SS-Brigadeführer Josef Bühler**, State Secretary of the Government of Occupied Poland and representative of Hans Frank, the Nazi Governor-General of that region. Bühler assisted in the deportation of Jews to ghettos, where he presided over their administration, including starvation rations and the lack of attention to the spread of deadly diseases.\n- **SS-Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann**, logistician and specialist in Jewish affairs for the SS, who spoke both a little Hebrew and Yiddish, and before the war had investigated the possibility of the mass expulsion of Germany's Jews to Palestine. After the German invasion of Poland, Eichmann had presided over the deportation of millions of Jews to ghettos and formulated plans for their further deportation to Siberia, once the Soviet Union had been conquered. Eichmann also became an expert at various methods of extermination, investigating mass-murder technologies and evaluating them for their feasibility and efficiency. Eichmann acted as conference organiser and Heydrich's right-hand man at the Wannsee meeting.\n- **Judge Roland Freisler**, State Secretary at the Ministry of Justice, a key figure in shaping discriminatory laws that persecuted the Jews, including the Nuremberg Laws. In particular, he was the lead advocate for prohibiting marriages between Jews and Aryans and banning any sexual activity between them. Freisler also championed legal changes that allowed juveniles under the age of 18 to be sent to prison or even be sentenced to death. 72 such child-executions took place as a result of Freisler's efforts. At Wannsee, he was there as an expert to advise on the legality of the deportation and mass-murder of the Jews.\n- **SS-Gruppenführer Otto Hofmann**, Head of the SS Race and Settlement Office, which regulated the marriages of SS men to maintain the racial purity of their offspring, selected Eastern Europeans for slave labour with the aim of working them to death, abducted Polish and Soviet children who were of German descent, and handled the German re-settlement of the Eastern territories that had recently been purged of Slavic inhabitants.\n- **Dr. Friedrich Kritzinger**, Permanent Secretary at the Reich Chancellery, representing Hans Lammers, who served directly under Adolf Hitler. Kritzinger was a career bureaucrat who served as policymaker for the Nazis from 1938 onward. He helped to enact many anti-Jewish policies, from discrimination to forcible deportation. In 1941, he briefly advocated Jewish sterilization and/or mass-extermination. His suggestions were refused, so that the Chancellery and Hitler himself would not be directly implicated, on record, in the decision to commit genocide.\n- **SS-Sturmbannführer Rudolf Lange**, Deputy Commander of \"SiPo\" and the \"SD\" in the Baltic States and Belarus — a mixture of Gestapo, spies, and criminal police, charged with suppressing resistance and rounding up the Jews. At Wannsee, he was representing his commander, Franz Stahlecker. Lange was also leader of \"Einsatzkommando 2,\" a group charged with the depopulation of Latvia. Lange was direct commander of the branch of SiPo and the SD in Latvia, where in December 1941 he presided over the murder of 25,000 Jews from the ghetto in the capital, Riga. The victims were marched out to the woods, 1,000 people at a time, forced to stand in pits that already contained dead bodies, before they were gunned down by machine gun fire. Then another thousand were brought in. The slaughter lasted 9 days.\n- **SS-Brigadeführer Martin Luther**, a Nazi diplomat, undersecretary at the Foreign Office, and close associate of both Joachim von Ribbentrop and Heinrich Himmler. As such, Luther had been one of the first to become aware that Nazi policy had shifted in late 1941 from the deportation of Jews to their outright extermination. One of Luther's primary functions as a diplomat was to convince the Axis allies of Italy, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia, and Vichy France to hand over their Jews to German authorities.\n- **SS-Oberführer Gerhard Klopfer**, secretary and representative of Martin Bormann, Head of the Nazi Party Chancellery, who was growing increasingly influential with Hitler. Klopfer had overseen the confiscation of Jewish businesses, persecuted mixed marriages between Jews and Aryans, and now handled a raft of appointments in the Nazi Party. Beyond that, Klopfer was Bormann's creature and carried out his will across the Reich.\n- **Dr. Georg Leibbrandt**, undersecretary and representative for Alfred Rosenberg, Minister for the Eastern Occupied Territories, which consisted of all the territory the Nazis had thus far conquered in the Soviet Union. Leibbrandt was an ethnic German from Ukraine who had become a German citizen and was an expert on Soviet affairs. He was in charge of anti-Communist propaganda and director of the ministry's political department, with the task of convincing Soviet citizens that the Nazis were there to liberate them from Stalin, while at the same time the Einsatzgruppen razed cities to the ground and depopulated the countryside.\n- **Dr. Alfred Meyer**, Deputy Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories, in charge of the civil administration, economic planning, infrastructure development, and the rounding up and exploitation of Jewish slave labour in the Soviet Union. It is unknown how many thousands of Jews were worked and starved to death under his tenure. He was also a fanatical Regional Party Leader for the Nazis in Westphalia.\n- **SS-Gruppenführer Heinrich Müller**, Chief of the Gestapo, the man who had ordered the arrest of 30,000 Jews during Kristallnacht, and who oversaw the suppression of dissent and resistance movements in the Third Reich. He also handled the capture of European Jews and their deportation. Müller was a pure thug through and through — a sadistic henchman for his superiors, Himmler and Heydrich. Thus far in his career, Müller had presided over hundreds of thousands of midnight arrests, the torture of prisoners, and summary executions.\n- **SS-Oberführer Erich Neumann**, State Secretary for the Office of the Four-Year Plan, representing the Ministry of Finance, Ministry of Labour, and Ministry of Supply. Neumann oversaw the logistics of slave labour in Nazi Germany and was eager to avoid Jewish slaves who were contributing to wartime production from being prematurely deported and murdered.\n- **SS-Oberführer Karl Eberhard Schöngarth**, Heydrich's creature, who had been sent out to Poland to command the SiPo and SD. His task was the suppression of Polish resistance and the capture and deportation of the Jews. Between July and September 1941, Schöngarth had ordered the execution of 10,000 Polish Jews and their burial in mass graves.\n- **SS-Brigadeführer Wilhelm Stuckart**, State Secretary of the Interior Ministry and representative of Wilhelm Frick. Stuckart was a legal theorist who pioneered the theory of race-based collectivism. He was co-creator of the Nuremberg Laws and was chiefly responsible for codifying who got classified as genetically Jewish. In 1939, Stuckart was instrumental in shaping the Nazi policy of euthanizing children with disabilities, to which his own infant son, born with Down's Syndrome, fell victim in 1941.\n\nAs for Reinhard Heydrich himself, he was described by Hitler as \"a man with an iron heart.\" Heydrich was second in the SS only to Himmler. Heydrich was the architect of the SD intelligence service, he was one of the engineers of Kristallnacht, and was chief designer of the Einsatzgruppen, the military reserve units that operated behind the lines and ruthlessly depopulated Eastern Europe, killing millions of Slavs. He was also appointed Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia, where he unleashed a terror campaign that claimed the lives of tens of thousands of Czechs, and delivered hundreds of thousands more into slavery. Finally, Heydrich was the principal architect of the industrialised methods by which the Holocaust itself was to be carried out.\n\nBefore Wannsee, over 500,000 Jews in Eastern Europe had already been killed in ad hoc massacres or via disease or overwork. Now the pace was about to accelerate. At the time of the Wannsee Conference in January 1942, Heydrich was only 37 years old.\n\n## Euphemisms for Genocide\n\nThe conference kicked off with an announcement by Heydrich that Reichsmarshall Hermann Göring had charged him with the task of enacting the Final Solution, and to bring all the other government departments, represented by those around the table, up to speed and into line. The 15 men there that day were mostly the \"number-two's\" of even more notorious Nazis, partially because their superiors had many demands on their time, and partially to give their bosses plausible deniability should the details of the Final Solution ever get leaked to enemy countries. But, rest assured, there is enough documentary and substantiating evidence to prove that the entire Nazi executive, from Hitler downward, were aware of the Holocaust and ordered its perpetration. Genocide was not just some initiative randomly taken by some Nazi lapdogs without the knowledge of their masters.\n\nHeydrich then announced that the Final Solution would be carried out under the absolute authority of Heinrich Himmler and himself. This may have ruffled a few feathers, since the men around the table could be jealous of their authority and departmental purview. But if it angered them, they did not show it. At this point in the history of the Nazi regime, one thing had become clear — you did not want to mess with the SS. To do so would likely result in your imprisonment, torture, and death.\n\nThen Heydrich summarised the progress the Nazis had made in forcing the Jews to emigrate, either by intimidation or by coerced deportation. Heydrich pointed out that these methods had been undertaken to maintain a thin veneer of legality during peacetime, but said that, \"The disadvantages engendered by such is clear to all authorities. But in the absence of other possible solutions, they had to be accepted for the time being.\" The biggest problem, from the Nazi point of view, was that emigration had not gotten rid of the Jews fast enough. And the war had shut down that scheme. Also, with every new territory the Nazis conquered, the number of Jews under their control had increased exponentially. They didn't just have 420,000 German-speaking Jews like they did at the beginning of 1939. They had millions. As such, Heydrich announced, \"Emigration has now been replaced by evacuation of the Jews to the East, as a further possible solution, with the appropriate prior authorization by the Führer.\"\n\nAt the meeting, and in hundreds of subsequent Nazi documents and communications thereafter, it was clear that \"evacuation to the East\" was a euphemism for murdering the Jews somewhere in Eastern Europe. And Heydrich did not mean some sort of forced deportation and resettlement in Siberia once the Soviet Union had surrendered. Well before the Wannsee Conference, Himmler and Heydrich had already decided the place for most of the exterminations would be in Poland. To that end, the first death camp at Chełmno had already become operational on December 8th 1941. Between 152,000 and 350,000 people were murdered there. Auschwitz-Birkenau had been operational since May 1940 to house Polish political prisoners. It was expanded in 1941. In February 1942, only a few weeks after the Wannsee conference, the showers became operational to mass-murder Jews. In total, 960,000 Jews would die at Auschwitz, with 865,000 of them — or 90% — being gassed upon arrival. Bełżec became operational the following month, in March 1942, and 500,000 Jews would die there. Sobibór started up two months later, in May, killing a further 250,000 people. Two months after that, in July, Treblinka started up, and 900,000 Jews would be killed there. And, finally, in October 1942, Majdanek was opened as an auxiliary to the other death camps. Nevertheless, 78,000 people would be murdered there.\n\nWe list the operational dates of these extermination camps and their death tolls so that the reader is under no illusion what \"evacuation to the East\" actually meant. In addition to this, a further 150,000 Jews died in other concentration camps. And approximately 220,000 Jews were shot and buried in mass graves in Poland, 500,000 were shot in the Soviet Union, and 150,000 were shot elsewhere in German-occupied Europe. At least 800,000 Jews died of starvation and diseases like typhus in the ghettos, and at least 500,000 died while working as slave labour or being sent on forced death marches. Finally, there were the so-called \"gas wagons,\" an inexpensive method of mass-murder, whereby the victims were coerced into the back of a vehicle with the exhaust redirected into the chamber so they died of carbon monoxide poisoning. One vehicle could murder 60 people an hour, or up to 1,440 people per 24 hours of operation for a single truck or van. 20 gas wagons were commissioned by the SS for use at Chełmno in 1941. Hundreds became operational at ad hoc sites across the Soviet Union from 1942 to 1944, killing approximately 800,000 Jews.\n\nThe 15 Nazis around the table then reviewed the population estimates for Jews remaining in Europe. The estimates were not just for countries the Germans had already occupied, but included countries they had yet to conquer, like Britain, and also neutral countries like Ireland, Sweden, Switzerland, and Turkey. Heydrich pointed out that some of these countries only counted Jews by religious observance, so they would need to dig a little deeper to find the so-called \"genetic Jew.\"\n\nDiscussion then turned to how some of the Jews would be worked to death by building roads in the vast and underdeveloped Soviet Union. Heydrich observed that \"a large proportion will no doubt drop out via natural reduction.\" Heydrich then pointed out the slave labour that survived the ordeal would have to be killed outright because those Jews, \"will without doubt represent the most resilient group, consisting of a natural selection that could become the germ-cell of a new Jewish revival.\"\n\nHeydrich then declared that the Jews remaining in Germany and Austria would be killed first, along with those in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia — which had become Heydrich's personal fiefdom. The remaining regions would then be emptied according to logistical priority and urgency.\n\nThe conversation then turned to German Jews over 65 years old, and those Jews who had been severely wounded fighting for Germany in the First World War, or won the Iron Cross, First Class. It was decided they would be sent to an old-age ghetto, possibly Theresienstadt in Czechoslovakia, where they would be allowed to die of natural causes. Perhaps from old age, but not exclusive of eventual starvation or disease. Those Jews over 65 years old who were not from Germany would be exterminated in the same way as their younger counterparts.\n\nHeydrich then opined that exterminating Jews should not be difficult in Slovakia and Croatia, where the local authorities had already started these actions with great fervour. Indeed, 83% of Jews in Slovakia and 77% in Croatia would be murdered during the war. Heydrich then spoke about applying pressure to Hungary, Romania, Italy, and Vichy France to turn over their Jews. The problem was ideological. These Fascist governments did not share National Socialist ideas concerning racial collectivism, with its bizarre corruption of Darwinist theory, and tended to focus more on cultural nationalism. Indeed, for example, 10,000 Jews had been members of the Italian Fascist Party. And so, Heydrich knew these Axis allies would require German coercion. In the event, 68% of Hungarian Jews, 34% of Romanian Jews, 22% of French Jews, and 13% of Italian Jews died during the Holocaust.\n\nAt this point, Martin Luther from the Foreign Office said that the Scandinavian countries would resist deportation of the Jews, so it should be postponed. Conversely, Luther said, he foresaw no such resistance in Western and Southeastern Europe. Otto Hofmann from the Race and Settlement Office said he'd like some representation when the SS approached the government of Hungary. Heydrich agreed to this, provided Hofmann's representative served under Heydrich's total authority while the representative was there.\n\nThen the discussion turned to who exactly would qualify as a genetic Jew and thus be sent East for extermination. Under the Nuremberg Laws, German-Jewish mixed-race individuals could still qualify for German citizenship. At Wannsee, much of this was thrown out. It was decided that mixed-race individuals who had previously qualified for citizenship, only having one Jewish parent, two grandparents, or over 3 Jewish great-grandparents, would be considered as Jews and killed. The exception to this new rule would be if they were married to a full-blooded German and there were children. Or in the rare circumstances where the person was given an exemption from deportation by the Nazi government. In both of these exceptions, the mixed-race individual would be chemically castrated with an injection of acid into their genitals or by exposure to high doses of radiation, preventing them from having any more children. If they refused to be sterilized, they would be evacuated East to die in a concentration camp.\n\nThose German-Jewish individuals with only 1 Jewish grandparent would not be killed. The exceptions to this rule were if they were born out of wedlock, if they looked Jewish, or if they acted Jewish. Then they would be killed. This rather subjective evaluation would be made by SS authorities on the spot.\n\nHeydrich then proposed Jews married to full-blooded Germans prior to 1935 should have their marriages dissolved and the Jewish spouse killed in the East. Unless the deportation would cause a public uproar, in which case the Jew would be sent to die discretely in an old-age ghetto. Any children from the marriage, if they were deemed Jewish, would also be killed or else sent to an old-age ghetto.\n\nOtto Hofmann then piped up and said it was vital that any mixed-race person who was allowed to live must be sterilized, and, given the choice between sterilization and \"evacuation\", mixed-race people would invariably choose to be sterilized. Dr. Wilhelm Stuckart, co-author of the Nuremberg Laws, then complained that all of these subtle distinctions and the dissolution of marriages would require endless red-tape. He advocated for compulsory sterilization of all mixed-race people, and he wanted mixed-race marriages dissolved on the spot, without unnecessary paperwork.\n\nErich Neumann, Office of the Four-Year Plan, expressed his concerns that killing Jews currently performing slave labour in industries vital to the war effort could not be replaced by Germans now fighting at the front. And so, those Jews should be spared death, \"for the present.\" Heydrich assured Neumann that these Jewish slaves would be exempted under the current plan.\n\nDr. Bühler, representing the General-Government of Occupied Poland, then issued a warning that diseases among Jews in Polish ghettos were reaching epidemic levels, that Jews were causing disorder to Poland's economy, and that the majority of Jews in Poland were unfit for work. Therefore, Bühler urged that the Polish Jews be killed first. In the event, 90% of Polish Jews were murdered in the Holocaust. Both Bühler and his colleague, Dr. Meyer, Deputy Minister of Occupied Poland, advised that preparations for the Final Solution be made discretely to avoid alarming the Polish population.\n\nHeydrich then closed the meeting by asking for the assent and support of everyone present for what had been discussed. It was duly given. And thus, after 90 minutes, 15 men signed the death warrant of over 6 million people, including children. Heydrich later told Eichmann that he was pleased these men not only supported the proposed solution, but seemed to agree with enthusiasm.\n\nCognac brandy was then served as a digestif to the lavish business lunch of sweet meats and freshly hunted game, paired with exquisite German and French wine, which they had enjoyed. As the men became intoxicated, their speech became less guarded and euphemistic. As Eichmann later testified, the men were \"discussing the subject quite bluntly, quite differently from the language which I had to use later in the record. During the conversation they minced no words at all. They spoke of methods of killing, of liquidation, of extermination.\"\n\n## Justice Delivered, Delayed, and Denied\n\nOn May 27th 1942, Reinhard Heydrich was attacked by two British-trained Czech resistance fighters and mortally wounded by a shrapnel bomb. A few days later, on June 4th, he died of sepsis in hospital.\n\nJudge Roland Freisler was killed in a US air raid on February 3rd 1945, when a bomb collapsed his entire courtroom, crushing him under the rubble.\n\nSS-Major Rudolf Lange, mass-murderer of Latvian Jews, disappeared on February 23rd 1945.\n\nAlfred Meyer, Deputy Minister for the Eastern Occupied Territories, committed suicide in Germany on April 11th 1945.\n\nHeinrich Müller, Chief of the Gestapo, disappeared in Berlin on May 1st 1945.\n\nGerman diplomat Martin Luther was sent to a German concentration camp in 1944 after a failed coup to replace von Ribbentrop as Foreign Minister. Luther was freed as an assumed prisoner of war by Soviet troops in spring 1945, but he died of a heart attack shortly thereafter on May 13th. Luther did not destroy his copy of the notes from the Wannsee Conference, and it was found in 1947 in the archives of the Foreign Ministry by Robert Kempner, the US Prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials.\n\nSS-Colonel Karl Schöngarth, murderer of tens of thousands of Polish Jews, was captured after the war and tried by a British military tribunal in February 1946 for the war crimes he committed in the Netherlands. His crimes in Poland were not mentioned. He was hanged on May 16th 1946.\n\nDr. Friedrich Kritzinger, policymaker at the Reich Chancellery under Lammers and Hitler, was arrested after the war and stood as a witness against other Nazis at the Nuremberg trials. Kritzinger claimed that he was ashamed of the Final Solution which he had helped to perpetrate. Kritzinger was released without charge in April 1946, then rearrested again in December, before being released again due to poor health. He died of natural causes on April 25th 1947.\n\nJosef Bühler, secretary of state for Occupied Poland, who had urged that Polish Jews be killed first, was a witness at the Nuremberg Trials, testifying on behalf of his boss, Hans Frank. Then Bühler was extradited to Poland where he was tried for crimes against humanity. He was convicted and hanged on August 22nd 1948.\n\nErich Neumann, Office of the Four-Year Plan, who had been concerned that his Jewish slave labour would be killed too soon, was arrested after the war, but was released due to poor health in 1948. He died of natural causes on March 23rd 1951.\n\nWilhelm Stuckart, co-author of the Nuremberg Laws, was arrested after the war in 1948 for crimes against humanity and complicity in the Holocaust. He claimed that his insistence at Wannsee on sterilizing all mixed-race Germans was to prevent their murder. Stuckart was sentenced to \"time served\" and released in April 1949. He went on to enjoy a prosperous career as a civil servant. He was tried again in civil court for complicity in the Holocaust, was convicted, and was fined 500 marks. Stuckart was killed on November 15th 1953 in a car accident, though some have speculated he was assassinated, and the accident was staged.\n\nAfter Reinhard Heydrich's death in 1942, Adolf Eichmann presided over the logistics of the Holocaust as the main point of contact between all the departments involved. Eichmann was arrested as an SS-officer after the war, but shielded his true identity from the Americans by using false identity papers. Eichmann escaped from his prison work detail and made his way to Argentina in 1950 where he eventually found work as a department head at Mercedes-Benz. Eichmann was captured by Mossad agents in 1960 and taken to Israel, where he stood trial, was convicted, and was hanged June 1st 1962.\n\nGeorg Leibbrandt, Undersecretary for the Ministry of the Eastern Occupied Territories, was arrested after the war and put on trial in 1950 for crimes against humanity. The case against him was dropped on August 10th 1950. He lived the rest of his life working as a scholar in West Germany and America, until he was banned from the United States in 1979 due to his role in the Holocaust. Leibbrandt died at 82 years old in West Germany on June 16th 1982.\n\nOtto Hofmann, Head of the SS Race and Settlement Office, who coordinated Eastern European slave labour and the settlement of depopulated Slavic regions by Germans, was arrested after the war. He was put on trial at Nuremberg in 1948 and sentenced to 25 years in prison. In 1951, this sentence was reduced to 15 years. This sentence was reduced still further, and Hofmann was released in 1954 after serving less than 6 years of his sentence. He went on to live a quiet life as a clerk in West Germany, dying at the age of 86 on December 31st 1982.\n\nSS-Colonel Gerhard Klopfer, secretary to Martin Bormann at the Nazi Party Chancellery, was captured after the war and charged with war crimes. Klopfer was later released without trial. He spent the rest of his life working as a civil servant and lawyer in West Germany, dying at the age of 81 on January 29th 1987.\n\nSuch was the justice meted out to the 15 men who signed off on the Holocaust at the Wannsee Conference. We can only end an article like this with two words. Never Forget.\n\n## Key Takeaways\n\n- The Wannsee Conference in 1942 was a meticulously planned meeting where Nazi officials discussed the systematic murder of 6.6 million Jews.\n- Nazi officials used bureaucratic language and euphemisms to discuss the 'Final Solution' to the 'Jewish Question,' planning the industrialized slaughter of Jews.\n- The conference attendees agreed to prioritize the extermination of Jews in Germany, Austria, and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia first.\n- The Nazis had previously attempted to expel Jews through various means, including forced emigration and resettlement plans, but shifted to extermination due to war constraints.\n- Post-war justice for the attendees of the Wannsee Conference varied, with some facing trials and executions, while others escaped punishment or died under mysterious circumstances.\n\n## Frequently Asked Questions\n\n### What was the Wannsee Conference?\n\nThe Wannsee Conference was a meeting held on January 20th, 1942, where Nazi officials discussed and planned the Final Solution to the so-called 'Jewish Question,' which resulted in the systematic murder of 6.6 million Jews.\n\n### Who chaired the Wannsee Conference?\n\nSS-Obergruppenfuhrer Reinhard Heydrich chaired the Wannsee Conference.\n\n### What was the purpose of the Wannsee Conference?\n\nThe purpose of the Wannsee Conference was to coordinate the efforts of various Nazi departments in the implementation of the Final Solution, which aimed to exterminate the Jewish population in Europe.\n\n### What was the estimated number of Jews the Nazis intended to kill?\n\nThe Nazis intended to kill approximately 11 million Jews, which is roughly equivalent to the entire population of North Carolina or the city of Paris.\n\n### What was the initial Nazi policy towards Jews before the Wannsee Conference?\n\nBefore the Wannsee Conference, the Nazi policy was to make life unbearable for Jews in Germany so that they would flee the country. This included banning Jews from various professions, confiscating their businesses, and imposing restrictive laws.\n\n### What was the significance of Kristallnacht?\n\nKristallnacht, or the 'Night of the Broken Glass,' was a pogrom against Jews in Germany on November 9th and 10th, 1938. It resulted in the destruction of Jewish property, violence against individuals, and the imposition of a collective fine on the Jewish community.\n\n### What was the Madagascar Plan?\n\nThe Madagascar Plan was a Nazi proposal to deport European Jews to the French colony of Madagascar. The plan was abandoned when the British Empire did not surrender in 1940.\n\n### What was the role of Adolf Eichmann at the Wannsee Conference?\n\nAdolf Eichmann served as the logistician and specialist in Jewish affairs for the SS. He acted as the conference organizer and Heydrich's right-hand man at the Wannsee meeting.\n\n### What happened to the notes from the Wannsee Conference?\n\n30 copies of the meeting notes were circulated to the offices of all the Nazi officials in attendance. The documents were ordered to be burned shortly after the attendees and their superiors had reviewed them. One copy survived the war and provides details of the proceedings.\n\n### What was the outcome of the Wannsee Conference?\n\nThe outcome of the Wannsee Conference was the formalization and coordination of the Final Solution, leading to the industrialized slaughter of Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe. The attendees agreed to support the plan and signed off on the genocide of over 6 million people.\n\n## Sources\n\n- [Original Into the Shadows video: Inside the Meeting that Engineered the Holocaust](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hyz-drMwzDA)\n- [Hero image source](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d9/Jan_Karski_and_Pola_Nirenska_section_40_-_Mt_Olivet_-_Washington_DC_-_2014.jpg) by Tim Evanson / openverse, by-sa.\n\n## Related Coverage"
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Imagine holding a boardroom meeting to dispassionately discuss the systematic murder of 6.6 million men, women, and children. Each seat at the table has an elegantly written name-card for one of the most notorious war criminals and mass-killers of all time. State briefings and Jewish population statistics are neatly organised in file folders for the convenience of the attendees. Chilled water, vintage wines, and expensive cognac are served in fine crystal glasses. High quality hors d'oeuvres and a sumptuous buffet lunch are provided while much of occupied Europe starves. And notes of the proceedings are dutifully typed up by an alert and impassive secretary.

Thirty copies of the meeting notes were circulated to the offices of all the Nazi officials in attendance. The documents were ordered not to be distributed to subordinates and to be burned shortly after the attendees and their superiors had reviewed them. Even the Nazis did not want it to be a matter of historical record that they had discussed mass-murder in such depth and breadth. One copy failed to be destroyed and survived the war. As such, we know what was discussed, by whom, and the eerily bureaucratic way in which these 15 men discussed the total annihilation of a people.

In the space of just 90 minutes, the attendees settled their plans for an industrialized slaughter that reduced all the massacres of pre-modern history to pygmy proportions. In fact, 6.6 million people is just the estimated number of Jews who died in the Holocaust. The Nazis intended to kill closer to 11 million. For perspective, that is equivalent to roughly the entire population of North Carolina, or every soul in the city of Paris, or every last man, woman, and child living in the Czech Republic.

Chairing the meeting was SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, nicknamed "the Hangman" and "The Butcher of Prague", and at his side was SS-Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann, the cold and calculating logistician who oversaw the deportation of millions of people to the Nazi death camps. This was the Wannsee Conference of January 20th 1942 — the meeting that set the Final Solution to the so-called "Jewish Question" in motion.

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## Forcing Them to Flee

When Hitler ascended to power in January 1933, there were approximately 435,000 Jewish people living in Germany, or 0.6% of the population. Many of them had lived there since the Middle Ages. During peacetime, it was impossible to forcibly deport or murder the Jews without a huge international outcry. Therefore, from 1933 to the German invasion of Poland in 1939, Nazi policy was to make life for German Jews so unbearable that they would flee the country.

The pressure began almost immediately. In 1933, the Nazis banned Jewish people from working as civil servants, judges, lawyers, schoolteachers, university professors, tax consultants, public notaries, and, oddly enough, musicians, due to what the Nazis believed was the deliberate Jewish promotion of degeneracy to sabotage German morals and culture. The banning of Jewish university professors caused Albert Einstein to move to America. The Nazis also banned Jewish students from attending German universities and severely limited the number of Jewish children allowed in state-run schools.

In September 1933, the Jews were banned from owning or working on farms, or participating in the German film, theatre, and radio industries. In October this ban was extended to Jewish newspaper journalists. Jewish doctors meanwhile were banned from participating in the state-run health service. These bans also applied to people who identified as German and Christian but had recent Jewish ancestry.

Meanwhile, the Nazi Party had adopted sweeping centralized powers to regulate the economy, and these powers were used as an economic weapon against the Jews. The Nazis could already dictate to all German-owned businesses what their prices should be, what things they were allowed to sell, what production quotas they had to meet, and how many people they hired. The Nazis even restricted how much profit German business owners were allowed to take home. The Nazis could also confiscate a German business with little or no compensation. Most of this was done in accordance with the Nazis' centralized economic planning models, like the Four-Year Plan of 1936 to 1940, but these same regulatory powers were used to put Jewish people out of business. They were not allowed to take government contracts, advertise publicly, sell certain products or in certain markets, and, at the drop of a hat, they could have their businesses confiscated and sold to a so-called "Aryan." These measures threw thousands of formerly prosperous Jews into menial work, unemployment, and poverty.

In September and November of 1935, the Nazis introduced the Nuremberg Laws, the most sweeping body of antisemitic legislation of the prewar period. Firstly, the Nuremberg Laws stripped Jewish people of their German citizenship, relegating them to second-class status. This also meant that those Jews who were not born in Germany could be forcibly deported back to their countries of origin. The Jews who could not be deported were declared resident aliens, non-German state subjects, and "enemies of the race-based state."

Secondly, the Nuremberg Laws also banned marriages between Jewish and Aryan Germans, along with unmarried sexual contact between them, eventually growing to include hugging and kissing, punishable by a prison term with hard labour. Thirdly, to combat what the Nazis perceived as the sexually predatory nature of Jewish men, the Nuremberg Laws made it specifically illegal for German women under 45 to be employed in a Jewish household. Off the books, Jews who transgressed these laws were often packed off to the earliest German concentration camps.

Finally, the Nuremberg Laws defined who counted as Jewish — based on heredity, and irrespective of whether they self-identified as Jewish or practiced Judaism. A German with one Jewish great-grandparent was still considered German. A German with one Jewish grandparent or two great-grandparents was considered "mixed race" but was eligible for German citizenship. A German with 2 Jewish grandparents was also considered "mixed race" and was still allowed to have citizenship unless they practiced Judaism or married a Jew. A German with 3 or 4 Jewish grandparents was a Jew, regardless of whether they or their parents had converted to Christianity.

In January 1938, Jewish people were banned from changing their surnames to hide their ethnic origins. Four months later, a similar rule was applied to changing the name of Jewish businesses in order to hide the ethnicity of their owners. Jewish doctors were stripped of their licenses and banned from calling themselves medical doctors. Instead, they had to refer to themselves as "sick-treaters" and most of them were banned from treating anyone who wasn't themselves Jewish.

On March 13th 1938, Germany annexed Austria, which was home to roughly 230,000 Jews. All previous laws were now extended to them. The same happened to the 3,000 Jews who lived in the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia, when the Germans annexed the territory on September 30th. Meanwhile, in April 1938, Jewish people had to register with the government all property they owned that was worth more than $6,000 dollars in modern US currency. Meanwhile, there were public boycotts of Jewish businesses, along with a campaign of violence, harassment, and vandalism.

Things culminated on the night of November 9th and 10th 1938, known as Kristallnacht, or "The Night of the Broken Glass." Anti-Jewish riots, encouraged by the state press, erupted across Germany in reaction to a Jewish teenager shooting a German diplomat in Paris. The rioters vandalised and burned 267 synagogues, 7,500 Jewish businesses, and committed violent assaults on Jewish individuals. 100 Jews were killed during the night and 30,000 Jews were arrested by the Nazi government as "instigators" and "aggressors" in the mayhem.

Blaming the Jews for the violence, the Nazis imposed what they called an "atonement levy" of 1-billion Reichsmarks on the entire Jewish community, in a form of collective guilt based on race. The atonement levy was to be extracted in four payments of extra taxation and property confiscations. In 1939, the Nazis demanded a fifth one. They also banned Jews from receiving insurance payouts for any properties that had been damaged during the riots.

Kristallnacht was followed up a few days later by new laws that closed down the remaining Jewish owned businesses and gave them to Aryans, and prohibited Jewish people from attending movie theatres, stage-plays, and music concerts, and also banned Jews from driving or owning a car. Jews were also not permitted to travel outside their local area without government permission and they had to obey strict curfews. In February 1939, Jews were legally required to surrender all the gold, silver, diamonds, and other gems and precious metals which they owned to the Nazi government. This law included wedding and engagement rings.

The campaign of persecution compelled over 200,000 Jews to flee Germany between 1933 and 1939, along with roughly 45,000 Austrian Jews and 700 Sudeten Jews after the German annexations of 1938. This left 230,000 Jews trapped in Germany, 185,000 left in Austria, and 2,300 in the Sudetenland. Most of the refugees fled to the United States, Great Britain, or the British Mandate of Palestine (later becoming Israel in 1948). A minority of the Jewish diaspora headed to other countries in Western Europe and South America, and the Dominions of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

All the aforementioned countries placed restrictions on the number of Jewish refugees that could migrate there, or else the number of Jews who fled the Third Reich during this time would have been higher. For example, in May 1939, 935 Jewish refugees boarded the M.S. St. Louis, sailing from Hamburg in Germany to Havana, Cuba. All but 28 of them were turned away. The remaining 907 refugees sailed for the United States, where they were intercepted by the Coast Guard, with the White House and even President Franklin D. Roosevelt personally refusing to intervene. The St. Louis then sailed on to Canada, where again they were turned away by the Liberal government of William Lyon Mackenzie-King. The St. Louis then sailed back to Europe and sat in the port of Antwerp, Belgium, while the Western European democratic nations bartered over who should take them. In the end, the UK took 288 Jewish refugees, France took 224, Belgium took 214, and 181 were taken in by the Netherlands. However, when Germany invaded and occupied France, Belgium, and the Netherlands in 1940, 254 of the refugees from the St. Louis who had settled in Western Europe were captured by the Germans and later murdered in the Holocaust.

Meanwhile, if you had managed to flee Nazi Germany prior to the outbreak of war, you had to surrender 90% of your wealth in taxes before you were allowed to leave the country. This meant that you'd arrive in your host country on the verge of poverty, essentially having to rebuild your life from scratch.

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## Attempts at Mass Expulsion

An exception to the 90% taxation rule was applied to the 52,000 Jews who had fled to Palestine. Those people only had an average of 50% of their wealth stolen. The reason for the lower rate was that the Nazi government was laying the ground to forcibly expel the rest of the 420,000 Jews under their control in early 1939 to Palestine. With the 3,000-year-old kingdom of Israel being historically sacred in Judaism, this theoretically provided an extra incentive for Jews to comply with the expulsion order. The German objective, above all else, was not to leave a single Jewish person in the Third Reich.

The Nazi philosophy of race-based collectivism considered Jews not only inferior but genetically predisposed toward corrupting the nations in which they lived. As such, the Nazis feared that if any Jews were allowed to remain in the Third Reich, they would try to hatch a Jewish-Internationalist plot similar to the mythical "stab in the back" that the Nazis claimed had forced Germany to lose the First World War.

However, the Palestine plan required the approval of the British government who administered the region at the time. And the British did not wish to enrage the local Arab population, and other Muslims in the Middle East, by bringing in such a massive influx of Jewish refugees to lands that the Muslims had also declared sacred ever since the Arab conquest of Palestine from the Byzantine Empire in the 630s. And, of course, when the Germans invaded Poland in September 1939, the British declared war and blockaded Germany, making any sort of overseas expulsion of German Jews impossible.

During the war, the Nazis reversed their policy and began negotiations with the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem to extend the Holocaust to the Jews in Palestine, if the Axis Powers managed to conquer the region from the British. Meanwhile, Hitler's ally, Benito Mussolini, proposed that the Jews be resettled in Italian East Africa, among the historical Ethiopian Jewish population. This plan was never implemented due to the war. If it had, it is likely that a large number of the expelled Jewish refugees would have starved to death — an outcome that the Nazis would have been perfectly fine with. Low-level Japanese officials also speculated about using Jewish settlers to economically develop their holdings in Manchuria, but this idea never made it to the level of a policy proposal.

Back in 1938, the Nazis had considered whether they could relocate German Jews to the French colony of Madagascar. This was an old idea for a Jewish State that had been entertained by various European officials in the 19th century, when Palestine was still controlled by the Ottoman Empire and thus was not an option. Not that the Germans wanted a free Jewish state in the world — even in Madagascar. When Germany conquered France in June 1940, the Madagascar Expulsion Plan was revived in earnest, with the Nazis imposing the idea on the French collaborationist government at Vichy. Assuming that the British would soon surrender, the Nazis planned to deport hundreds of thousands of Jews to Madagascar, where they would be governed by German SS Officers in a tightly-controlled police state. It did not matter to the Nazis that the food supply in Madagascar could not support even a few thousand more people, and that sending European Jews to Madagascar would most likely have resulted in mass starvation and death. The plan was abandoned when the British Empire did not sue for peace in 1940, declared their intention to fight on alone, and won a decisive victory in the Battle of Britain.

Meanwhile, the German occupation of the rest of Czech territory in March 1939, and their wartime invasions of Poland, Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, and France in 1939 and 1940 had resulted in 4.2 million more Jewish people being brought under the control of the Third Reich. 3.3 million of them were from Poland alone. In the summer of 1940, the Germans set about building walled off ghettos in Poland to house the Jews in crowded, starving, and disease-riddled conditions. Thousands died of dysentery and tuberculosis. Some of the Jews in occupied Western Europe were deported to Poland, but many remained where they were, falling under the same oppressive restrictions applied to Jews in Germany. Meanwhile, numerous Nazi-led massacres of Jews in the thousands were taking place all over Europe, most frequently by shooting them into mass graves that the victims had been forced to dig themselves.

But the oppressive restrictions, massacres, and the ghettos in Poland were just temporary for the Nazis. Hitler's policy of Lebensraum, or "living space", demanded that Poland and the rest of Eastern Europe not only be fully depopulated of Jews but, eventually, hundreds of millions of Slavs, so that the land could be settled by German farming families. The idea was, within the space of a few generations, the German and Austrian Aryan population would triple from 80 million to 240 million, making the Third Reich the largest industrialised power in the world — even rivalling the United States.

After the Germans were defeated in the Battle of Britain in September 1940, Hitler put his British invasion plans on indefinite hiatus and immediately ordered his general staff to begin formulating plans for the invasion of the Soviet Union. The idea was to crush the Soviets in a quick campaign in 1941. Thereafter, the Jews of Europe would be forcibly deported beyond the Urals into Siberia, where they would most likely freeze and starve to death.

However, from the perspective of the Nazis, this plan came with two major problems. First, by invading the Soviet Union, Germany would bring a further 3 to 5 million Jews under German occupation — depending on how far east they conquered — in addition to the 154,000 Jews that had been brought under German rule when they invaded Yugoslavia and Greece earlier in 1941. Furthermore, there were 2.1 million more Jews residing in the Axis allied countries of Italy, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria. From the Nazi point of view, all of these people had to be purged from Europe.

Therefore, on July 31st 1941, Reichsmarshall Hermann Göring ordered SS Deputy Leader Reinhard Heydrich, the ruthless Head of the Reich Security Office, which included the Gestapo, to come up with a "total solution to the Jewish question."

The second problem was that the Germans failed to conquer the Soviet Union in the summer and autumn of 1941. It quickly became apparent that the struggle between the Nazis and the Communists was going to stretch into 1942, if not longer. Meanwhile, the Germans had upwards of 11 million Jews in the territories which they occupied, and, with the Wehrmacht stalled at the gates of Moscow, they could not be forcibly deported anywhere. And the British blockade and the poor harvests of 1940 and 1941 left Nazi-occupied Europe with a severe shortage of food. And, ideologically, the Nazis could not bear the idea of keeping 11 million Jews alive on their territory for the duration of the war. It was thus in the autumn and winter of 1941 that the Nazis definitively shifted their ideas from the expulsion of the Jews to certain death in Siberia to the mechanized and industrialized slaughter of the Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe. All that remained was to put this hideous plan into action.

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## The Guest List

Acting under the authority of Hermann Göring, on November 29th 1941, Reinhard Heydrich, assisted by SS-Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann, sent invitations to 13 Nazi officials whose departments would be indispensable to the execution of the Holocaust. The date of the meeting was set for December 9th. Initially, they were to meet in a Berlin office building, but on December 4th Heydrich changed the meeting location to a lavish villa in Wannsee, a suburb of Berlin.

The Wannsee villa was nothing less than a mansion, with multiple bedrooms, drawing rooms, servant's quarters, an industrial-sized kitchen, private gardens, and a substantial endowment of land overlooking a lake in Berlin. It had previously been owned by Friedrich Minoux, a German industrialist and long-time financier of the Nazi Party. Minoux was forced to sell the villa to Heydrich after his imprisonment for fraud in 1941. Thereafter, Heydrich used the Wannsee villa as a base for many SS operations. Heydrich also planned to make the villa his personal residence after the war.

On December 5th 1941 there was a Soviet counter-offensive at Moscow, and on the 7th the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbour, and on the 11th Hitler declared war on the United States. Amid the bureaucratic chaos these events created, many of the Nazi officials invited to the meeting were required at their posts, and so the Wannsee conference was postponed until January 1942. Meanwhile, on December 12th Hitler spoke to government officials in Berlin about how the Jewish people were to blame for the war and how that would, as a consequence, bring about their own annihilation. On December 18th Hitler met with Heinrich Himmler, Reichsführer of the SS, at the Wolf's Lair in East Prussia, where they discussed how the Jewish people were to be exterminated prior to the end of the war.

On January 8th 1942, Heydrich sent new invitations to his Wannsee villa on January 20th. On that day, the men who gathered around the table were:

- **SS-Brigadeführer Josef Bühler**, State Secretary of the Government of Occupied Poland and representative of Hans Frank, the Nazi Governor-General of that region. Bühler assisted in the deportation of Jews to ghettos, where he presided over their administration, including starvation rations and the lack of attention to the spread of deadly diseases.
- **SS-Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann**, logistician and specialist in Jewish affairs for the SS, who spoke both a little Hebrew and Yiddish, and before the war had investigated the possibility of the mass expulsion of Germany's Jews to Palestine. After the German invasion of Poland, Eichmann had presided over the deportation of millions of Jews to ghettos and formulated plans for their further deportation to Siberia, once the Soviet Union had been conquered. Eichmann also became an expert at various methods of extermination, investigating mass-murder technologies and evaluating them for their feasibility and efficiency. Eichmann acted as conference organiser and Heydrich's right-hand man at the Wannsee meeting.
- **Judge Roland Freisler**, State Secretary at the Ministry of Justice, a key figure in shaping discriminatory laws that persecuted the Jews, including the Nuremberg Laws. In particular, he was the lead advocate for prohibiting marriages between Jews and Aryans and banning any sexual activity between them. Freisler also championed legal changes that allowed juveniles under the age of 18 to be sent to prison or even be sentenced to death. 72 such child-executions took place as a result of Freisler's efforts. At Wannsee, he was there as an expert to advise on the legality of the deportation and mass-murder of the Jews.
- **SS-Gruppenführer Otto Hofmann**, Head of the SS Race and Settlement Office, which regulated the marriages of SS men to maintain the racial purity of their offspring, selected Eastern Europeans for slave labour with the aim of working them to death, abducted Polish and Soviet children who were of German descent, and handled the German re-settlement of the Eastern territories that had recently been purged of Slavic inhabitants.
- **Dr. Friedrich Kritzinger**, Permanent Secretary at the Reich Chancellery, representing Hans Lammers, who served directly under Adolf Hitler. Kritzinger was a career bureaucrat who served as policymaker for the Nazis from 1938 onward. He helped to enact many anti-Jewish policies, from discrimination to forcible deportation. In 1941, he briefly advocated Jewish sterilization and/or mass-extermination. His suggestions were refused, so that the Chancellery and Hitler himself would not be directly implicated, on record, in the decision to commit genocide.
- **SS-Sturmbannführer Rudolf Lange**, Deputy Commander of "SiPo" and the "SD" in the Baltic States and Belarus — a mixture of Gestapo, spies, and criminal police, charged with suppressing resistance and rounding up the Jews. At Wannsee, he was representing his commander, Franz Stahlecker. Lange was also leader of "Einsatzkommando 2," a group charged with the depopulation of Latvia. Lange was direct commander of the branch of SiPo and the SD in Latvia, where in December 1941 he presided over the murder of 25,000 Jews from the ghetto in the capital, Riga. The victims were marched out to the woods, 1,000 people at a time, forced to stand in pits that already contained dead bodies, before they were gunned down by machine gun fire. Then another thousand were brought in. The slaughter lasted 9 days.
- **SS-Brigadeführer Martin Luther**, a Nazi diplomat, undersecretary at the Foreign Office, and close associate of both Joachim von Ribbentrop and Heinrich Himmler. As such, Luther had been one of the first to become aware that Nazi policy had shifted in late 1941 from the deportation of Jews to their outright extermination. One of Luther's primary functions as a diplomat was to convince the Axis allies of Italy, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia, and Vichy France to hand over their Jews to German authorities.
- **SS-Oberführer Gerhard Klopfer**, secretary and representative of Martin Bormann, Head of the Nazi Party Chancellery, who was growing increasingly influential with Hitler. Klopfer had overseen the confiscation of Jewish businesses, persecuted mixed marriages between Jews and Aryans, and now handled a raft of appointments in the Nazi Party. Beyond that, Klopfer was Bormann's creature and carried out his will across the Reich.
- **Dr. Georg Leibbrandt**, undersecretary and representative for Alfred Rosenberg, Minister for the Eastern Occupied Territories, which consisted of all the territory the Nazis had thus far conquered in the Soviet Union. Leibbrandt was an ethnic German from Ukraine who had become a German citizen and was an expert on Soviet affairs. He was in charge of anti-Communist propaganda and director of the ministry's political department, with the task of convincing Soviet citizens that the Nazis were there to liberate them from Stalin, while at the same time the Einsatzgruppen razed cities to the ground and depopulated the countryside.
- **Dr. Alfred Meyer**, Deputy Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories, in charge of the civil administration, economic planning, infrastructure development, and the rounding up and exploitation of Jewish slave labour in the Soviet Union. It is unknown how many thousands of Jews were worked and starved to death under his tenure. He was also a fanatical Regional Party Leader for the Nazis in Westphalia.
- **SS-Gruppenführer Heinrich Müller**, Chief of the Gestapo, the man who had ordered the arrest of 30,000 Jews during Kristallnacht, and who oversaw the suppression of dissent and resistance movements in the Third Reich. He also handled the capture of European Jews and their deportation. Müller was a pure thug through and through — a sadistic henchman for his superiors, Himmler and Heydrich. Thus far in his career, Müller had presided over hundreds of thousands of midnight arrests, the torture of prisoners, and summary executions.
- **SS-Oberführer Erich Neumann**, State Secretary for the Office of the Four-Year Plan, representing the Ministry of Finance, Ministry of Labour, and Ministry of Supply. Neumann oversaw the logistics of slave labour in Nazi Germany and was eager to avoid Jewish slaves who were contributing to wartime production from being prematurely deported and murdered.
- **SS-Oberführer Karl Eberhard Schöngarth**, Heydrich's creature, who had been sent out to Poland to command the SiPo and SD. His task was the suppression of Polish resistance and the capture and deportation of the Jews. Between July and September 1941, Schöngarth had ordered the execution of 10,000 Polish Jews and their burial in mass graves.
- **SS-Brigadeführer Wilhelm Stuckart**, State Secretary of the Interior Ministry and representative of Wilhelm Frick. Stuckart was a legal theorist who pioneered the theory of race-based collectivism. He was co-creator of the Nuremberg Laws and was chiefly responsible for codifying who got classified as genetically Jewish. In 1939, Stuckart was instrumental in shaping the Nazi policy of euthanizing children with disabilities, to which his own infant son, born with Down's Syndrome, fell victim in 1941.

As for Reinhard Heydrich himself, he was described by Hitler as "a man with an iron heart." Heydrich was second in the SS only to Himmler. Heydrich was the architect of the SD intelligence service, he was one of the engineers of Kristallnacht, and was chief designer of the Einsatzgruppen, the military reserve units that operated behind the lines and ruthlessly depopulated Eastern Europe, killing millions of Slavs. He was also appointed Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia, where he unleashed a terror campaign that claimed the lives of tens of thousands of Czechs, and delivered hundreds of thousands more into slavery. Finally, Heydrich was the principal architect of the industrialised methods by which the Holocaust itself was to be carried out.

Before Wannsee, over 500,000 Jews in Eastern Europe had already been killed in ad hoc massacres or via disease or overwork. Now the pace was about to accelerate. At the time of the Wannsee Conference in January 1942, Heydrich was only 37 years old.

<!-- aeo:section end="the-guest-list" -->
<!-- aeo:section start="euphemisms-for-genocide" -->
## Euphemisms for Genocide

The conference kicked off with an announcement by Heydrich that Reichsmarshall Hermann Göring had charged him with the task of enacting the Final Solution, and to bring all the other government departments, represented by those around the table, up to speed and into line. The 15 men there that day were mostly the "number-two's" of even more notorious Nazis, partially because their superiors had many demands on their time, and partially to give their bosses plausible deniability should the details of the Final Solution ever get leaked to enemy countries. But, rest assured, there is enough documentary and substantiating evidence to prove that the entire Nazi executive, from Hitler downward, were aware of the Holocaust and ordered its perpetration. Genocide was not just some initiative randomly taken by some Nazi lapdogs without the knowledge of their masters.

Heydrich then announced that the Final Solution would be carried out under the absolute authority of Heinrich Himmler and himself. This may have ruffled a few feathers, since the men around the table could be jealous of their authority and departmental purview. But if it angered them, they did not show it. At this point in the history of the Nazi regime, one thing had become clear — you did not want to mess with the SS. To do so would likely result in your imprisonment, torture, and death.

Then Heydrich summarised the progress the Nazis had made in forcing the Jews to emigrate, either by intimidation or by coerced deportation. Heydrich pointed out that these methods had been undertaken to maintain a thin veneer of legality during peacetime, but said that, "The disadvantages engendered by such is clear to all authorities. But in the absence of other possible solutions, they had to be accepted for the time being." The biggest problem, from the Nazi point of view, was that emigration had not gotten rid of the Jews fast enough. And the war had shut down that scheme. Also, with every new territory the Nazis conquered, the number of Jews under their control had increased exponentially. They didn't just have 420,000 German-speaking Jews like they did at the beginning of 1939. They had millions. As such, Heydrich announced, "Emigration has now been replaced by evacuation of the Jews to the East, as a further possible solution, with the appropriate prior authorization by the Führer."

At the meeting, and in hundreds of subsequent Nazi documents and communications thereafter, it was clear that "evacuation to the East" was a euphemism for murdering the Jews somewhere in Eastern Europe. And Heydrich did not mean some sort of forced deportation and resettlement in Siberia once the Soviet Union had surrendered. Well before the Wannsee Conference, Himmler and Heydrich had already decided the place for most of the exterminations would be in Poland. To that end, the first death camp at Chełmno had already become operational on December 8th 1941. Between 152,000 and 350,000 people were murdered there. Auschwitz-Birkenau had been operational since May 1940 to house Polish political prisoners. It was expanded in 1941. In February 1942, only a few weeks after the Wannsee conference, the showers became operational to mass-murder Jews. In total, 960,000 Jews would die at Auschwitz, with 865,000 of them — or 90% — being gassed upon arrival. Bełżec became operational the following month, in March 1942, and 500,000 Jews would die there. Sobibór started up two months later, in May, killing a further 250,000 people. Two months after that, in July, Treblinka started up, and 900,000 Jews would be killed there. And, finally, in October 1942, Majdanek was opened as an auxiliary to the other death camps. Nevertheless, 78,000 people would be murdered there.

We list the operational dates of these extermination camps and their death tolls so that the reader is under no illusion what "evacuation to the East" actually meant. In addition to this, a further 150,000 Jews died in other concentration camps. And approximately 220,000 Jews were shot and buried in mass graves in Poland, 500,000 were shot in the Soviet Union, and 150,000 were shot elsewhere in German-occupied Europe. At least 800,000 Jews died of starvation and diseases like typhus in the ghettos, and at least 500,000 died while working as slave labour or being sent on forced death marches. Finally, there were the so-called "gas wagons," an inexpensive method of mass-murder, whereby the victims were coerced into the back of a vehicle with the exhaust redirected into the chamber so they died of carbon monoxide poisoning. One vehicle could murder 60 people an hour, or up to 1,440 people per 24 hours of operation for a single truck or van. 20 gas wagons were commissioned by the SS for use at Chełmno in 1941. Hundreds became operational at ad hoc sites across the Soviet Union from 1942 to 1944, killing approximately 800,000 Jews.

The 15 Nazis around the table then reviewed the population estimates for Jews remaining in Europe. The estimates were not just for countries the Germans had already occupied, but included countries they had yet to conquer, like Britain, and also neutral countries like Ireland, Sweden, Switzerland, and Turkey. Heydrich pointed out that some of these countries only counted Jews by religious observance, so they would need to dig a little deeper to find the so-called "genetic Jew."

Discussion then turned to how some of the Jews would be worked to death by building roads in the vast and underdeveloped Soviet Union. Heydrich observed that "a large proportion will no doubt drop out via natural reduction." Heydrich then pointed out the slave labour that survived the ordeal would have to be killed outright because those Jews, "will without doubt represent the most resilient group, consisting of a natural selection that could become the germ-cell of a new Jewish revival."

Heydrich then declared that the Jews remaining in Germany and Austria would be killed first, along with those in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia — which had become Heydrich's personal fiefdom. The remaining regions would then be emptied according to logistical priority and urgency.

The conversation then turned to German Jews over 65 years old, and those Jews who had been severely wounded fighting for Germany in the First World War, or won the Iron Cross, First Class. It was decided they would be sent to an old-age ghetto, possibly Theresienstadt in Czechoslovakia, where they would be allowed to die of natural causes. Perhaps from old age, but not exclusive of eventual starvation or disease. Those Jews over 65 years old who were not from Germany would be exterminated in the same way as their younger counterparts.

Heydrich then opined that exterminating Jews should not be difficult in Slovakia and Croatia, where the local authorities had already started these actions with great fervour. Indeed, 83% of Jews in Slovakia and 77% in Croatia would be murdered during the war. Heydrich then spoke about applying pressure to Hungary, Romania, Italy, and Vichy France to turn over their Jews. The problem was ideological. These Fascist governments did not share National Socialist ideas concerning racial collectivism, with its bizarre corruption of Darwinist theory, and tended to focus more on cultural nationalism. Indeed, for example, 10,000 Jews had been members of the Italian Fascist Party. And so, Heydrich knew these Axis allies would require German coercion. In the event, 68% of Hungarian Jews, 34% of Romanian Jews, 22% of French Jews, and 13% of Italian Jews died during the Holocaust.

At this point, Martin Luther from the Foreign Office said that the Scandinavian countries would resist deportation of the Jews, so it should be postponed. Conversely, Luther said, he foresaw no such resistance in Western and Southeastern Europe. Otto Hofmann from the Race and Settlement Office said he'd like some representation when the SS approached the government of Hungary. Heydrich agreed to this, provided Hofmann's representative served under Heydrich's total authority while the representative was there.

Then the discussion turned to who exactly would qualify as a genetic Jew and thus be sent East for extermination. Under the Nuremberg Laws, German-Jewish mixed-race individuals could still qualify for German citizenship. At Wannsee, much of this was thrown out. It was decided that mixed-race individuals who had previously qualified for citizenship, only having one Jewish parent, two grandparents, or over 3 Jewish great-grandparents, would be considered as Jews and killed. The exception to this new rule would be if they were married to a full-blooded German and there were children. Or in the rare circumstances where the person was given an exemption from deportation by the Nazi government. In both of these exceptions, the mixed-race individual would be chemically castrated with an injection of acid into their genitals or by exposure to high doses of radiation, preventing them from having any more children. If they refused to be sterilized, they would be evacuated East to die in a concentration camp.

Those German-Jewish individuals with only 1 Jewish grandparent would not be killed. The exceptions to this rule were if they were born out of wedlock, if they looked Jewish, or if they acted Jewish. Then they would be killed. This rather subjective evaluation would be made by SS authorities on the spot.

Heydrich then proposed Jews married to full-blooded Germans prior to 1935 should have their marriages dissolved and the Jewish spouse killed in the East. Unless the deportation would cause a public uproar, in which case the Jew would be sent to die discretely in an old-age ghetto. Any children from the marriage, if they were deemed Jewish, would also be killed or else sent to an old-age ghetto.

Otto Hofmann then piped up and said it was vital that any mixed-race person who was allowed to live must be sterilized, and, given the choice between sterilization and "evacuation", mixed-race people would invariably choose to be sterilized. Dr. Wilhelm Stuckart, co-author of the Nuremberg Laws, then complained that all of these subtle distinctions and the dissolution of marriages would require endless red-tape. He advocated for compulsory sterilization of all mixed-race people, and he wanted mixed-race marriages dissolved on the spot, without unnecessary paperwork.

Erich Neumann, Office of the Four-Year Plan, expressed his concerns that killing Jews currently performing slave labour in industries vital to the war effort could not be replaced by Germans now fighting at the front. And so, those Jews should be spared death, "for the present." Heydrich assured Neumann that these Jewish slaves would be exempted under the current plan.

Dr. Bühler, representing the General-Government of Occupied Poland, then issued a warning that diseases among Jews in Polish ghettos were reaching epidemic levels, that Jews were causing disorder to Poland's economy, and that the majority of Jews in Poland were unfit for work. Therefore, Bühler urged that the Polish Jews be killed first. In the event, 90% of Polish Jews were murdered in the Holocaust. Both Bühler and his colleague, Dr. Meyer, Deputy Minister of Occupied Poland, advised that preparations for the Final Solution be made discretely to avoid alarming the Polish population.

Heydrich then closed the meeting by asking for the assent and support of everyone present for what had been discussed. It was duly given. And thus, after 90 minutes, 15 men signed the death warrant of over 6 million people, including children. Heydrich later told Eichmann that he was pleased these men not only supported the proposed solution, but seemed to agree with enthusiasm.

Cognac brandy was then served as a digestif to the lavish business lunch of sweet meats and freshly hunted game, paired with exquisite German and French wine, which they had enjoyed. As the men became intoxicated, their speech became less guarded and euphemistic. As Eichmann later testified, the men were "discussing the subject quite bluntly, quite differently from the language which I had to use later in the record. During the conversation they minced no words at all. They spoke of methods of killing, of liquidation, of extermination."

<!-- aeo:section end="euphemisms-for-genocide" -->
<!-- aeo:section start="justice-delivered-delayed-and-denied" -->
## Justice Delivered, Delayed, and Denied

On May 27th 1942, Reinhard Heydrich was attacked by two British-trained Czech resistance fighters and mortally wounded by a shrapnel bomb. A few days later, on June 4th, he died of sepsis in hospital.

Judge Roland Freisler was killed in a US air raid on February 3rd 1945, when a bomb collapsed his entire courtroom, crushing him under the rubble.

SS-Major Rudolf Lange, mass-murderer of Latvian Jews, disappeared on February 23rd 1945.

Alfred Meyer, Deputy Minister for the Eastern Occupied Territories, committed suicide in Germany on April 11th 1945.

Heinrich Müller, Chief of the Gestapo, disappeared in Berlin on May 1st 1945.

German diplomat Martin Luther was sent to a German concentration camp in 1944 after a failed coup to replace von Ribbentrop as Foreign Minister. Luther was freed as an assumed prisoner of war by Soviet troops in spring 1945, but he died of a heart attack shortly thereafter on May 13th. Luther did not destroy his copy of the notes from the Wannsee Conference, and it was found in 1947 in the archives of the Foreign Ministry by Robert Kempner, the US Prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials.

SS-Colonel Karl Schöngarth, murderer of tens of thousands of Polish Jews, was captured after the war and tried by a British military tribunal in February 1946 for the war crimes he committed in the Netherlands. His crimes in Poland were not mentioned. He was hanged on May 16th 1946.

Dr. Friedrich Kritzinger, policymaker at the Reich Chancellery under Lammers and Hitler, was arrested after the war and stood as a witness against other Nazis at the Nuremberg trials. Kritzinger claimed that he was ashamed of the Final Solution which he had helped to perpetrate. Kritzinger was released without charge in April 1946, then rearrested again in December, before being released again due to poor health. He died of natural causes on April 25th 1947.

Josef Bühler, secretary of state for Occupied Poland, who had urged that Polish Jews be killed first, was a witness at the Nuremberg Trials, testifying on behalf of his boss, Hans Frank. Then Bühler was extradited to Poland where he was tried for crimes against humanity. He was convicted and hanged on August 22nd 1948.

Erich Neumann, Office of the Four-Year Plan, who had been concerned that his Jewish slave labour would be killed too soon, was arrested after the war, but was released due to poor health in 1948. He died of natural causes on March 23rd 1951.

Wilhelm Stuckart, co-author of the Nuremberg Laws, was arrested after the war in 1948 for crimes against humanity and complicity in the Holocaust. He claimed that his insistence at Wannsee on sterilizing all mixed-race Germans was to prevent their murder. Stuckart was sentenced to "time served" and released in April 1949. He went on to enjoy a prosperous career as a civil servant. He was tried again in civil court for complicity in the Holocaust, was convicted, and was fined 500 marks. Stuckart was killed on November 15th 1953 in a car accident, though some have speculated he was assassinated, and the accident was staged.

After Reinhard Heydrich's death in 1942, Adolf Eichmann presided over the logistics of the Holocaust as the main point of contact between all the departments involved. Eichmann was arrested as an SS-officer after the war, but shielded his true identity from the Americans by using false identity papers. Eichmann escaped from his prison work detail and made his way to Argentina in 1950 where he eventually found work as a department head at Mercedes-Benz. Eichmann was captured by Mossad agents in 1960 and taken to Israel, where he stood trial, was convicted, and was hanged June 1st 1962.

Georg Leibbrandt, Undersecretary for the Ministry of the Eastern Occupied Territories, was arrested after the war and put on trial in 1950 for crimes against humanity. The case against him was dropped on August 10th 1950. He lived the rest of his life working as a scholar in West Germany and America, until he was banned from the United States in 1979 due to his role in the Holocaust. Leibbrandt died at 82 years old in West Germany on June 16th 1982.

Otto Hofmann, Head of the SS Race and Settlement Office, who coordinated Eastern European slave labour and the settlement of depopulated Slavic regions by Germans, was arrested after the war. He was put on trial at Nuremberg in 1948 and sentenced to 25 years in prison. In 1951, this sentence was reduced to 15 years. This sentence was reduced still further, and Hofmann was released in 1954 after serving less than 6 years of his sentence. He went on to live a quiet life as a clerk in West Germany, dying at the age of 86 on December 31st 1982.

SS-Colonel Gerhard Klopfer, secretary to Martin Bormann at the Nazi Party Chancellery, was captured after the war and charged with war crimes. Klopfer was later released without trial. He spent the rest of his life working as a civil servant and lawyer in West Germany, dying at the age of 81 on January 29th 1987.

Such was the justice meted out to the 15 men who signed off on the Holocaust at the Wannsee Conference. We can only end an article like this with two words. Never Forget.

<!-- aeo:section end="justice-delivered-delayed-and-denied" -->
<!-- aeo:section start="key-takeaways" -->
## Key Takeaways

- The Wannsee Conference in 1942 was a meticulously planned meeting where Nazi officials discussed the systematic murder of 6.6 million Jews.
- Nazi officials used bureaucratic language and euphemisms to discuss the 'Final Solution' to the 'Jewish Question,' planning the industrialized slaughter of Jews.
- The conference attendees agreed to prioritize the extermination of Jews in Germany, Austria, and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia first.
- The Nazis had previously attempted to expel Jews through various means, including forced emigration and resettlement plans, but shifted to extermination due to war constraints.
- Post-war justice for the attendees of the Wannsee Conference varied, with some facing trials and executions, while others escaped punishment or died under mysterious circumstances.

<!-- aeo:section end="key-takeaways" -->
<!-- aeo:section start="frequently-asked-questions" -->
## Frequently Asked Questions

### What was the Wannsee Conference?

The Wannsee Conference was a meeting held on January 20th, 1942, where Nazi officials discussed and planned the Final Solution to the so-called 'Jewish Question,' which resulted in the systematic murder of 6.6 million Jews.

### Who chaired the Wannsee Conference?

SS-Obergruppenfuhrer Reinhard Heydrich chaired the Wannsee Conference.

### What was the purpose of the Wannsee Conference?

The purpose of the Wannsee Conference was to coordinate the efforts of various Nazi departments in the implementation of the Final Solution, which aimed to exterminate the Jewish population in Europe.

### What was the estimated number of Jews the Nazis intended to kill?

The Nazis intended to kill approximately 11 million Jews, which is roughly equivalent to the entire population of North Carolina or the city of Paris.

### What was the initial Nazi policy towards Jews before the Wannsee Conference?

Before the Wannsee Conference, the Nazi policy was to make life unbearable for Jews in Germany so that they would flee the country. This included banning Jews from various professions, confiscating their businesses, and imposing restrictive laws.

### What was the significance of Kristallnacht?

Kristallnacht, or the 'Night of the Broken Glass,' was a pogrom against Jews in Germany on November 9th and 10th, 1938. It resulted in the destruction of Jewish property, violence against individuals, and the imposition of a collective fine on the Jewish community.

### What was the Madagascar Plan?

The Madagascar Plan was a Nazi proposal to deport European Jews to the French colony of Madagascar. The plan was abandoned when the British Empire did not surrender in 1940.

### What was the role of Adolf Eichmann at the Wannsee Conference?

Adolf Eichmann served as the logistician and specialist in Jewish affairs for the SS. He acted as the conference organizer and Heydrich's right-hand man at the Wannsee meeting.

### What happened to the notes from the Wannsee Conference?

30 copies of the meeting notes were circulated to the offices of all the Nazi officials in attendance. The documents were ordered to be burned shortly after the attendees and their superiors had reviewed them. One copy survived the war and provides details of the proceedings.

### What was the outcome of the Wannsee Conference?

The outcome of the Wannsee Conference was the formalization and coordination of the Final Solution, leading to the industrialized slaughter of Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe. The attendees agreed to support the plan and signed off on the genocide of over 6 million people.

<!-- aeo:section end="frequently-asked-questions" -->
<!-- aeo:section start="sources" -->
## Sources

- [Original Into the Shadows video: Inside the Meeting that Engineered the Holocaust](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hyz-drMwzDA)
- [Hero image source](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d9/Jan_Karski_and_Pola_Nirenska_section_40_-_Mt_Olivet_-_Washington_DC_-_2014.jpg) by Tim Evanson / openverse, by-sa.

<!-- aeo:section end="sources" -->
<!-- aeo:section start="related-coverage" -->
## Related Coverage
<!-- aeo:section end="related-coverage" -->