On January 20, 1942, 15 high-ranking officials in the Nazi hierarchy gathered in a mansion on the shore of Lake Wannsee, on the western edge of Berlin. Snacks were served, accompanied by brandy. The agenda covered only one point: “The organizational, logistical and material steps towards a final solution of the Jewish question in Europe.”
Planning the Holocaust took just 90 minutes.
Eighty years after the infamous Wannsee Conference, which painstakingly mapped the Holocaust, the bureaucratic efficiency of the process is still profoundly frightening.
The minutes written down that day and then typed into 15 pages make no explicit mention of murders. They employ terms like “evacuation”, “reduction” and “treatment” – and divide the task between different government departments and their “relevant experts”.
“When you read that protocol, it makes your blood run cold,” commented Deborah Lipstadt, a distinguished Holocaust scholar. “It’s all expressed in very camouflaged language. But then you look at the list of countries and the number of Jews they planned to kill. They wanted to eliminate 11 million people. They had very big plans.”
The anniversary of that fateful meeting holds special significance at a time when there are fewer and fewer Holocaust survivors left and anti-Semitism and white supremacist ideology are re-emerging in Europe and the United States, alongside attacks on Jews and members of ethnic minorities.
Last Saturday (15), a man took a rabbi and three members of his congregation hostage in a synagogue in Texas. In Germany, where anti-Semitism crimes are also on the rise, authorities publicly warn that terrorism and right-wing extremism pose the greatest threat to democracy.
Today the three-story lakeside mansion that was used as an SS guest house [polícia do regime nazista] and hosted the Wannsee Conference, looks pretty much the same from the outside. Set back from the street and surrounded by expansive gardens, it greets visitors with a majestic front portico and four statues of cherubs dancing on the roof.
West German officials struggled for decades with the question of what to do with the building. As survivors pressed the government to convert the mansion into a place to learn about the Holocaust and document the perpetrators’ crimes, officials delayed the decision. Some said they feared the mansion might become a place of pilgrimage for old Nazis; others suggested that the building be demolished, “so that nothing remains of this house of horrors.”
Joseph Wulf, a Jewish resistance fighter who escaped an Auschwitz death march and after the war became a respected historian, led the initial campaign to convert the mansion into a memorial and historical institute. On his desk he pinned a note to himself, written in Hebrew, about the six million Jews massacred by the Nazis: “Remember! 6 million.”
For many people, the anniversary of the Wannsee Conference is less remarkable than the date of the liberation of Auschwitz or that of the Warsaw ghetto uprising, which focus on victims of Nazi terror. But it stands out as a rare date to turn attention to the perpetrators of the Holocaust, documenting the genocidal machine of the Nazi state.
The host of the conference on that day in January 1942 was Reinhard Heydrich, the powerful head of the security service and the SS, whom Hermann Goring, Adolf Hitler’s right-hand man, had charged with devising a “final solution” and organizing it with others. government departments and ministries.
Adolf Eichmann, head of the Interior Ministry’s “Jewish affairs and expulsions” department, who would later organize deportations to the death camps, was asked to draw up the minutes of the meeting. Only one of 30 copies of his 15-page protocol, marked in red on the first page as “secret”, survives to this day. It was discovered among the Foreign Office archives by American soldiers after the war.
Eichman’s protocol summarized the scope of the proposed task by making a detailed statistical tabulation of Jewish populations in Europe, including also the Soviet Union, England, Ireland and Switzerland.
“With proper prior authorization from the Führer, emigration has now given way to the evacuation of Jews to the East as another possible solution,” the protocol highlighted. “Approximately 11 million Jews will be considered in this final settlement of the Jewish question.”
Then the document went on to explain in detail what form this final solution would take.
“Under proper supervision, Jews must be used for work in the East in an appropriate manner,” the document reads. “In large columns of work, separated by sex, Jews able to work will be dispatched to these regions to build roads. In the process, a large proportion of them will undoubtedly be eliminated by natural reduction. Those who remain will need to be given proper treatment, because they unquestionably represent the toughest parts.”
“The evacuated Jews will first be taken, group by group, to the so-called transit ghettos, from where they will be transported to the East,” the text continues. “As for the way in which the final solution will be carried out in those European territories that are currently under our control or influence, it was suggested that the relevant experts from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs consult with the official responsible for the Security Police and the SD [serviço de inteligência]”.
It was the language of bureaucrats. But there was never any doubt as to what the document was proposing: “the complete elimination of the Jews,” as Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s chief propagandist, wrote in his diary after reading the minutes.
Eighty years after the Wannsee Conference and 77 years after the end of World War II, witnesses to Nazi atrocities are dying.
When Lipstadt, 74, a professor of modern Jewish history and Holocaust studies at Emory University, began teaching about the Holocaust more than three decades ago, it was easy to find survivors who could talk to their students.
“When I wanted a survivor to come to my class, I would ask myself, ‘Do I need a survivor from a camp or one who spent the war in hiding? Do I want someone from Eastern Europe? I want a German who has lived under anti-Jewish laws for eight years until I was deported? Do I want someone from the underground resistance?'” she recalled. “Today I just hope to find someone who has health conditions to come.”
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