[32] He changed the venue on 4 December to the eventual location of the meeting. [72], Eichmann's biographer David Cesarani agrees with Longerich's interpretation; he notes that Heydrich's main purpose was to impose his own authority on the various ministries and agencies involved in Jewish policy matters, and to avoid any repetition of the disputes that had arisen earlier in the annihilation campaign. If such a marriage had produced children who were being raised as Germans, the Jewish partner would not be killed. The purpose of the conference, called by the director of the Reich Main Security Office SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, was to ensure the co-operation of administrative leaders of various government departments in the implementation of the Final solution to the Jewish question (German: Endlösung der Judenfrage), whereby most of the Jews of German-occupied Europe would be deported to occupied Poland and murdered. "[49], The situation of people who were half or quarter Jews, and of Jews who were married to non-Jews, was more complex. The ideology of Nazism brought together elements of antisemitism, racial hygiene, and eugenics and combined them with pan-Germanism and territorial expansionism with the goal of obtaining more Lebensraum (living space) for the Germanic people. At the Wannsee Conference, Heydrich emphasised that once the deportation process was complete, the fate of the deportees would become an internal matter under the purview of the SS. Januar 1942. None of the officials present at the meeting objected to the "Final Solution" policy that Heydrich announced. [38] The venue for the rescheduled conference was a villa at Am Großen Wannsee 56–58, overlooking the Großer Wannsee. Under the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, their status had been left deliberately ambiguous. [8] A supplementary decree issued in November defined as Jewish anyone with three Jewish grandparents, or two grandparents if the Jewish faith was followed. [14] Approximately 65,000 civilians were killed by the end of 1939. [39], Heydrich invited representatives from several government ministries, including state secretaries from the Foreign Office, the Justice, Interior, and State Ministries, and representatives from the SS. Violence and economic pressure were used by the Nazi regime to encourage Jews to voluntarily leave the country. Januar 2017 ebenfalls an die Wannsee-Konferenz. The SS envisioned that some 11 million Jews, some of them not living on German-controlled territory, would be eradicated as part of the Nazi program. [59], Heydrich spoke for nearly an hour. In most of the occupied countries, Jews were rounded up and killed en masse, and anyone who lived in or identified with the Jewish community in any given place was regarded as a Jew. Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts.A copy of the license is included in the section entitled GNU Free Documentation License. [43][b] He explained that since further Jewish emigration had been prohibited by Himmler, a new solution would take its place: "evacuating" Jews to the east. In large labor columns, separated by gender, able-bodied Jews will be brought to those regions to build roads, whereby a large number will doubtlessly be lost through natural reduction. At the time of the Wannsee Conference, most participants were already aware that the Nazi regime had engaged in mass murder of Jews and other civilians in the German-occupied areas of the Soviet Union and in Serbia. [30] The initial plan was to implement Generalplan Ost after the conquest of the Soviet Union. He outlined categories of people who would not be killed. [46] This information was taken from a briefing paper prepared for him the previous week by Eichmann. At some still undetermined time in 1941, Adolf Hitler authorized this European-wide scheme for mass murder. Metropol, Berlin 1998, ISBN 3-926893-12-5. This was indeed the crucial result of the meeting and the main reason why Heydrich had detailed minutes prepared and widely circulated", said Longerich. [52] A "Mischling of the second degree" (a person with one Jewish grandparent) would be treated as German, unless he or she was married to a Jew or a Mischling of the first degree, had a "racially especially undesirable appearance that marks him outwardly as a Jew",[53] or had a "political record that shows that he feels and behaves like a Jew". [30], On 29 November 1941, Heydrich sent invitations for a ministerial conference to be held on 9 December at the offices of Interpol at Am Kleinen Wannsee 16. In this figure, he included not only Jews residing in Axis-controlled Europe, but also the Jewish populations of the United Kingdom, and the neutral nations (Switzerland, Ireland, Sweden, Spain, Portugal, and European Turkey). Despite the euphemisms which appeared in the protocols of the meeting, the aim of the Wannsee Conference was clear to its participants: to further the coordination of a policy aimed at the physical annihilation of the European Jews. Die Wannsee-Konferenz am 20. Similar legislation soon deprived other Jews of the right to practise their professions. The Wannsee House, site of the conference, is now a Holocaust memorial. On 5 December 1941, the Soviet Army began a counter-offensive in front of Moscow, ending the prospect of a rapid conquest of the Soviet Union. [56] In fact the deportation of Romanian Jews was slow and inefficient despite a high degree of popular antisemitism. Main telephone: 202.488.0400 "With this expedient solution", he said, "in one fell swoop, many interventions will be prevented. A secondary goal was to arrive at a definition of who was Jewish. [10][11], After the invasion of Poland in September 1939, Hitler ordered that the Polish leadership and intelligentsia should be destroyed. [7] The Reich Citizenship Law stated that only those of German or related blood were defined as citizens; thus, Jews and other minority groups were stripped of their German citizenship. The mass murder of the Jews by Nazi Germany and its collaborators required the coordination and cooperation of governmental agencies throughout Axis-controlled Europe. [20] Food supplies would be diverted to the German army and German civilians. Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories Dr. Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories Dr. Alfred Rosenberg, Office of the Plenipotentiary for the Four Year Plan, Reich Minister and head of the Reich Chancellery SS-, This page was last edited on 29 March 2021, at 23:15. [33], Between the date the invitations to the conference went out (29 November) and the date of the cancelled first meeting (9 December), the situation changed. [55], At the conclusion of the meeting Heydrich gave Eichmann firm instructions about what was to appear in the minutes. [48], Under proper guidance, in the course of the final solution the Jews are to be allocated for appropriate labor in the East. “during the course of the Final Solution, the Jews will be deployed under appropriate supervision at a suitable form of labor deployment in the East. Discrimination against Jews began immediately after the Nazi seizure of power on 30 January 1933. Countries were listed in two groups, "A" and "B". In late September 1941, Hitler had authorized the Reich Railroads to transport German, Austrian, and Czech Jews to locations in German-occupied Poland and the German-occupied Soviet Union, where German authorities would kill the overwhelming majority of them. This information was contained in the briefing paper Eichmann prepared for Heydrich before the meeting. 100 Raoul Wallenberg Place, SW "The simplest, most decisive way that Heydrich could ensure the smooth flow of deportations", he writes, "was by asserting his total control over the fate of the Jews in the Reich and the east, and [by] cow[ing] other interested parties into toeing the line of the RSHA". Able-bodied Jews, separated according to sex, will be taken in large work columns to these areas for work on roads, in the course of which action doubtless a large portion will be eliminated by natural causes. "A" countries were those under direct Reich control or occupation (or partially occupied and quiescent, in the case of Vichy France); "B" countries were allied or client states, neutral, or at war with Germany. [27] On 8 July, he announced that all Jews were to be regarded as partisans, and gave the order for all male Jews between the ages of 15 and 45 to be shot. The purpose of the conference, called by the director of the Reich Main Security Office SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, was to ensure the co-operation of administrative leaders of … [9] By the start of World War II in 1939, around 250,000 of Germany's 437,000 Jews emigrated to the United States, Palestine, Great Britain, and other countries. [76] The Joseph Wulf Bibliothek / Mediothek on the second floor houses a large collection of books on the Nazi era, plus other materials such as microfilms and original Nazi documents. [63] Towards the end of the meeting cognac was served, and after that the conversation became less restrained. [17] The resulting Generalplan Ost (General Plan for the East) called for deporting the population of occupied Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union to Siberia, for use as slave labour or to be murdered. [43][b] The numbers reflect the estimated Jewish population within each country; for example, Estonia is listed as Judenfrei (free of Jews), since the 4,500 Jews who remained in Estonia after the German occupation had been exterminated by the end of 1941. The "Final Solution" was the code name for the systematic, deliberate, physical annihilation of the European Jews. [23][24], Harvests were poor in Germany in 1940 and 1941 and food supplies were short, as large numbers of forced labourers had been brought into the country to work in the armaments industry. For Jews residing in the Greater German Reich and holding the status of subjects of the German Reich, the Nuremberg Laws would serve as a basis for determining who was a Jew. Reich government declared war on the U.S. Reich Chancellery meeting of 12 December 1941, territories of Poland annexed by the Soviet Union, International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, "The Wannsee Conference, the Fate of German Jews, and Hitler's Decision in Principle to Exterminate All European Jews", List of major perpetrators of the Holocaust, Nazis and Nazi Collaborators (Punishment) Law, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wannsee_Conference&oldid=1014959241, Wikipedia articles with WorldCat-VIAF identifiers, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, Head of the SS Race and Settlement Main Office (, Commander of the SiPo and the SD in the General Government. [19], In addition to eliminating Jews, the Nazis also planned to reduce the population of the conquered territories by 30 million people through starvation in an action called the Hunger Plan devised by Herbert Backe. Very soon, 600,000 Jews of Hungary (and parts of Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Yugoslavia occupied by Hungary) were sent to their deaths by Eichmann, with the collaboration of Hungarian authorities. [45], Heydrich opened the conference with an account of the anti-Jewish measures taken in Germany since the Nazi seizure of power in 1933. [56] The Hungarian regime of Miklós Horthy continued to resist German interference in its Jewish policy until the spring of 1944, when the Wehrmacht invaded Hungary. Juni 1942 wurde nach dem Prager Attentat auf Heydrich der tschechische Ort Lidice (deutsch Liditz) von der SS dem Erdboden gleichgemacht. [49] This was a reference to increasing pressure from the Gauleiters (regional Nazi Party leaders) in Germany for the Jews to be removed from their areas to allow accommodation for Germans made homeless by Allied bombing, as well as to make space for laborers being imported from occupied countries. [54] These exemptions applied only to German and Austrian Jews, and were not always observed even for them. Adolf Eichmann testifies about the Wannsee Conference, Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, Polish leadership and intelligentsia should be destroyed, Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories. On 31 July 1941, Hermann Göring gave written authorization to Heydrich to prepare and submit a plan for a "total solution of the Jewish question" in territories under German control and to coordinate the participation of all involved government organisations. [26], At the time of the Wannsee Conference, the killing of Jews in the Soviet Union had already been underway for some months. [29] By the time planning was underway for the Wannsee Conference, hundreds of thousands of Polish, Serbian, and Russian Jews had already been killed. Violence and economic pressure were used by the Nazi regime to encourage Jews to voluntarily leave the country. It was not until 1947 that Luther's copy (number 16 out of 30 copies prepared) was found by Robert Kempner, a U.S. prosecutor in the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, in files that had been seized from the German Foreign Office. One copy of the Protocol with circulated minutes of the meeting survived the war. [60] Otto Hofmann (head of the SS Race and Settlement Main Office; RuSHA) and Wilhelm Stuckart (State Secretary of the Reich Interior Ministry) pointed out the legalistic and administrative difficulties over mixed marriages, and suggested compulsory dissolution of mixed marriages or the wider use of sterilisation as a simpler alternative. [27] Open-ended instructions were given to execute "other radical elements (saboteurs, propagandists, snipers, assassins, agitators, etc.)". [61] "The gentlemen were standing together, or sitting together", Eichmann said, "and were discussing the subject quite bluntly, quite differently from the language which I had to use later in the record. [71] Their presence at the meeting also ensured that all those present were accomplices and accessories to the murders that were about to be undertaken. Some had learned of the actions of the Einsatzgruppen and other police and military units, which were already slaughtering tens of thousands of Jews in the German-occupied Soviet Union. Mark Roseman: Die Wannsee-Konferenz. [57] More difficulty was anticipated with Germany's allies Romania and Hungary. [12] The Sonderfahndungsbuch Polen (Special Prosecution Book Poland)—lists of people to be killed—had been drawn up by the SS as early as May 1939. Wählen Sie aus den über 30 Bootstouren und erkunden Sie ganz Berlin mit dem Schiff vom Wasser aus! Representing the SS at the Wannsee Conference were: Representing the agencies of the State were: Not present at the meeting were representatives of the German Armed Forces (Wehrmacht) and the Reich Railroads (Reichsbahn) in the German Ministry of Transportation. He had expected a lot of resistance, Eichmann recalled, but instead, he had found "an atmosphere not only of agreement on the part of the participants, but more than that, one could feel an agreement which had assumed a form which had not been expected". After the invasion of Poland in September 1939, the extermination of European Jewry began, and the killings continued and accelerated after the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. The building was in use as a school, and funding was not available. The possible final remnant will, since it will undoubtedly consist of the most resistant portion, have to be treated accordingly, because it is the product of natural selection and would, if released, act as the seed of a new Jewish revival. [13] Members of the SS, the Wehrmacht (German Armed Forces), and the Ordnungspolizei (Order Police; Orpo) also shot civilians during the Polish campaign. Others were aware that units of the German Army and the SS and police were killing Jews in Serbia. Legalized discrimination against Jews in Germany began immediately after the Nazi seizure of power in January 1933. Cities would be razed and the land allowed to return to forest or resettled by German colonists. [70] "The representatives of the ministerial bureaucracy had made it plain that they had no concerns about the principle of deportation per se. Paris fiel am 14. Heydrich indicated that approximately 11,000,000 Jews in Europe would fall under the provisions of the "Final Solution." Das Online-Portal zur deutschen Geschichte vom 19. Am 10. Heydrich did not call the meeting to make fundamental new decisions on the Jewish question. Epochendarstellung mit Sammlungsobjekten, Foto-, Audio- und Filmdokumenten, Biografien, Chroniken, Zeitzeugen. [3], Discrimination against Jews, long-standing, but extra-legal, throughout much of Europe at the time, was codified in Germany immediately after the Nazi seizure of power on 30 January 1933. The "evacuated" Jews, he said, would first be sent to "transit ghettos" in the General Government, from which they would be transported eastward. TTY: 202.488.0406, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC, Holocaust Survivors and Victims Resource Center, SS Major General Heinrich Müller, chief of RSHA Department IV (, SS Colonel Eberhard Schöngarth, commander of the RSHA field office for the Government General in Krakow, Poland, SS Major Rudolf Lange, commander of RSHA Einsatzkommando 2, deployed in Latvia in the autumn of 1941. [21] The objective of the Hunger Plan was to inflict deliberate mass starvation on the Slavic civilian populations under German occupation by directing all food supplies to the German home population and the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front. The SS and police had already negotiated agreements with the German Army High Command on the murder of civilians, including Soviet Jews, in the spring of 1941, prior to the invasion of the Soviet Union. [34] Somewhere around this time, Hitler resolved that the Jews of Europe were to be exterminated immediately, rather than after the war, which now had no end in sight. [32] He enclosed a copy of a letter from Göring dated 31 July that authorised him to plan a so-called Final solution to the Jewish question. [50] The wording of the Wannsee Protocol—the distributed minutes of the meeting—made it clear to participants that evacuation east was a euphemism for death. Some invitees were involved in these preparations, so Heydrich postponed his meeting. [63] Eichmann condensed his records into a document outlining the purpose of the meeting and the intentions of the regime moving forward. Im besetzten Polen begann nach der Wannsee-Konferenz 1942 die systematische Deportation, Versklavung und Ermordung von Juden aus ganz Europa. It would also not apply if they had been granted written exemption by "the highest offices of the Party and State". Right from the start of Operation Barbarossa—the invasion of the Soviet Union—Einsatzgruppen were assigned to follow the army into the conquered areas and round up and kill Jews. Washington, DC 20024-2126 Grüne starten in dreitägige Konferenz: „Wir sind die neue Berlin-Partei“. [70] A secondary goal was to determine the scope of the deportations and arrive at definitions of who was Jewish and who was Mischling. He said that between 1933 and October 1941, 537,000 German, Austrian, and Czech Jews had emigrated. It was found by Robert Kempner in March 1947 among files that had been seized from the German Foreign Office. Hiroshima, (film TV), regia di Koreyoshi Kurahara e Roger Spottiswoode (1995) Paradise Road, regia di Bruce Beresford (1997) ... La Conferenza di Wannsee (Die Wannsee Konferenz), regia di Heinz Schrik (1984) La diciassettesima sposa (The 17th Bride), regia di Nadav Levitan (1985) It was used as evidence in the Subsequent Nuremberg Trials. Der Sohn des NS-Kriegsverbrechers Reinhard Heydrich sorgt in Tschechien für Aufsehen. Heydrich announced that Mischlinge (mixed-race persons) of the first degree (persons with two Jewish grandparents) would be treated as Jews. [53] In the case of mixed marriages, Heydrich recommended that each case should be evaluated individually, and the impact on any German relatives assessed. In the course of the meeting, Heydrich outlined how European Jews would be rounded up and sent to extermination camps in the General Government (the occupied part of Poland), where they would be killed.[1]. [37], The war was still ongoing, and since transporting masses of people into a combat zone was impossible, Heydrich decided that the Jews currently living in the General Government (the German-occupied area of Poland) would be killed in extermination camps set up in occupied areas of Poland, as would Jews from the rest of Europe. [62][d] Josef Bühler, State Secretary of the General Government, stated his support for the plan and his hope that the killings would commence as soon as possible. [54] Persons in these latter categories would be killed even if married to non-Jews. Jews over 65 years old, and Jewish World War I veterans who had been severely wounded or who had won the Iron Cross, might be sent to Theresienstadt concentration camp instead of being killed. Film und Serie Kabarett und Comedy Show und Talk ... (17.45 Uhr) erinnert am 20. [4] Violence and economic pressure were used by the regime to force Jews to leave the country. [40] Of the 15 who attended, 8 held academic doctorates. [12] The Einsatzgruppen (special task forces) performed these murders with the support of the Volksdeutscher Selbstschutz (Germanic Self-Protection Group), a paramilitary group consisting of ethnic Germans living in Poland. But by 1943, Himmler was a much more powerful figure in the regime than Göring, and all categories of skilled Jews eventually lost their exemptions. We would like to thank Crown Family Philanthropies and the Abe and Ida Cooper Foundation for supporting the ongoing work to create content and resources for the Holocaust Encyclopedia. The ministries to be represented were Interior, Justice, the Four-year plan, Propaganda, and the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories. Citizens were harassed and subjected to violent attacks and boycotts of their businesses. The process of disseminating information about the fate of the Jews was already well underway by the time the meeting was held. [27] He instructed that any pogroms spontaneously initiated by the occupants of the conquered territories were to be quietly encouraged. [22] According to the historian Timothy Snyder, "4.2 million Soviet citizens (largely Russians, Belarusians, and Ukrainians) were starved" by the Nazis (and the Nazi-controlled Wehrmacht) in 1941–1944 as a result of Backe's plan. The Wannsee Conference (German: Wannseekonferenz) was a meeting of senior government officials of Nazi Germany and Schutzstaffel (SS) leaders, held in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee on 20 January 1942. [18][31] European Jews would be deported to occupied parts of Russia, where they would be worked to death in road-building projects. The Wannsee Conference (German: Wannseekonferenz) was a meeting of senior government officials of Nazi Germany and Schutzstaffel (SS) leaders, held in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee on 20 January 1942. Heydrich convened the Wannsee Conference. The Wannsee Conference was a high-level meeting of German officials to discuss and implement the so-called “Final Solution of the Jewish Question” (mass killing). Ullstein, München 2002, ISBN 3-548-36403-9. The men at the table did not deliberate whether such a plan should be undertaken, but instead discussed the implementation of a policy decision that had already been made at the highest level of the Nazi regime. Johannes Tuchel: Am Großen Wannsee 56–58. During the conversation they minced no words about it at all ... they spoke about methods of killing, about liquidation, about extermination". [55][c], Heydrich commented, "In occupied and unoccupied France, the registration of Jews for evacuation will in all probability proceed without great difficulty",[56] but in the end, the great majority of French-born Jews survived. [68] Observations from historian Laurence Rees support Longerich's position that the decision over the fate of the Jews was determined before the conference; Rees notes that the Wannsee Conference was really a meeting of "second-level functionaries", and stresses that neither Himmler, Goebbels, nor Hitler were present. Find topics of interest and explore encyclopedia content related to those topics, Find articles, photos, maps, films, and more listed alphabetically, Recommended resources and topics if you have limited time to teach about the Holocaust, Explore the ID Cards to learn more about personal experiences during the Holocaust, On January 20, 1942, 15 high-ranking Nazi Party and German government officials gathered at a villa in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee to discuss and coordinate the implementation of what they called the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question.". They must be dealt with appropriately, since, representing the fruit of natural selection, they are to be regarded as the core of a new Jewish revival.”, The participants discussed a number of other issues raised by the new policy, including the establishment of the Theresienstadt camp-ghetto as a destination for elderly Jews as well Jews who were disabled or decorated in World War I, the deferment until after the war of “Final Solution” measures against Jews married to non-Jews or persons of mixed descent as defined by the Nuremberg laws, prospects for inducing Germany's Axis partners to give up their Jewish populations, and preparatory measures for the “evacuations.”. The Reich government declared war on the U.S. on 11 December. [1], On 8 January 1942, Heydrich sent new invitations to a meeting to be held on 20 January. Mark Roseman, The Wannsee Conference and the Final Solution (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2002). [6], In September 1935, the Nuremberg Laws were enacted, prohibiting marriages between Jews and people of Germanic extraction, extramarital sexual relations between Jews and Germans, and the employment of German women under the age of 45 as domestic servants in Jewish households. The enormous importance which has been attached to the conference by post-war writers was not evident to most of its participants at the time. films en VF ou VOSTFR et bien sûr en HD. Wie die NS-Bürokratie den Holocaust organisierte. Leaders were given briefings about the need to be "severe" and "firm"; all Jews were to be viewed as potential enemies that had to be dealt with ruthlessly. This would be a temporary solution, a step towards the "final solution of the Jewish question". [41], In preparation for the conference, Eichmann drafted a list of the numbers of Jews in the various European countries. [58] "In order to settle the question in Hungary", Heydrich said, "it will soon be necessary to force an adviser for Jewish questions onto the Hungarian government". He stated at his trial that it was personally edited by Heydrich, and thus reflected the message he intended the participants to take away from the meeting. Massive killings of Jews in the conquered territories in the Soviet Union and Poland were ongoing, and a new extermination camp was already under construction at Belzec at the time of the conference; other extermination camps were in the planning stages. [49], German historian Peter Longerich notes that vague orders couched in terminology that had a specific meaning for members of the regime were common, especially when people were being ordered to carry out criminal activities.