Wannsee Conference
(Facsimiles of the minutes of the
Wannsee Conference and Eichmann's list, presented under glass at the Wannsee
Conference House Memorial)
Heydrich commented, "In
occupied and unoccupied France, the registration of Jews for evacuation will in
all probability proceed without great difficulty", but in the end, the
great majority of French-born Jews survived. More difficulty was anticipated
with Germany's allies Romania and Hungary. "In Romania the government has
[now] appointed a commissioner for Jewish affairs", Heydrich said. In fact
the deportation of Romanian Jews was slow and inefficient despite a high degree
of popular antisemitism. "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". 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. 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. Heydrich spoke for nearly an hour. Then followed about thirty
minutes of questions and comments, followed by some less formal conversation. 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. Erich Neumann from the Four Year Plan argued for the
exemption of Jews who were working in industries vital to the war effort and
for whom no replacements were available. Heydrich assured him that this was
already the policy; such Jews would not be killed. 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. Towards the end of
the meeting cognac was served, and after that the conversation became less
restrained. "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. During the conversation they minced no words
about it at all ... they spoke about methods of killing, about liquidation,
about extermination". Eichmann recorded that Heydrich was pleased with the
course of the meeting. 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".
Eichmann's list
A (Areas under direct Reich
control or occupation)
Location Number
Altreich 131,800
Ostmark 43,700
Ostgebiete 420,000
General Government 2,284,000
Białystok 400,000
Protectorate of Bohemia and
Moravia 74,200
Estonia free of Jews
Latvia 3,500
Lithuania 34,000
Belgium 43,000
Denmark 5,600
Occupied France 165,000
Unoccupied France 700,000
Hellenic State 69,600
Netherlands 160,800
Norway 1,300
B (Allied or client states,
neutral, or at war with Germany)
Location Number
Bulgaria 48,000
England 330,000
Finland 2,300
Irish Free State 4,000
Kingdom of Italy (including
Sardinia) 58,000
Albania 200
Croatia 40,000
Portugal 3,000
Romania (including Bessarabia) 342,000
Sweden 8,000
Switzerland 18,000
Serbia 10,000
Slovakia 88,000
Spain 6,000
Turkey (European part) 55,500
Hungary 742,800
Soviet Union 5,000,000 (total)
- Ukraine 2,994,684
- Byelorussia (excluding
Białystok) 446,484
Total 11,000,000
Wannsee Protocol At the
conclusion of the meeting Heydrich gave Eichmann firm instructions about what
was to appear in the minutes. They were not to be verbatim: Eichmann ensured
that nothing too explicit appeared in them. He said at his trial: "How
shall I put it – certain over-plain talk and jargon expressions had to be
rendered into office language by me". Eichmann condensed his records into
a document outlining the purpose of the meeting and the intentions of the
regime moving forward. 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. Copies of the
minutes (known from the German word for "minutes" as the
"Wannsee Protocol"[e]) were sent by Eichmann to all the participants
after the meeting. Most of these copies
were destroyed at the end of the war as participants and other officials sought
to cover their tracks. 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.
Interpretation The Wannsee
Conference lasted only about ninety minutes. 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. Heydrich did not call the meeting to make
fundamental new decisions on the Jewish question. 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. The decision to exterminate the Jews had
already been made, and Heydrich, as Himmler's emissary, held the meeting to
ensure the cooperation of the various departments in conducting the
deportations. 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. According to Longerich, a primary goal of the
meeting was to emphasise that once the deportations had been completed, the
fate of the deportees became an internal matter of the SS, totally outside the
purview of any other agency. A secondary
goal was to determine the scope of the deportations and arrive at definitions
of who was Jewish and who was Mischling. "The representatives of the ministerial
bureaucracy had made it plain that they had no concerns about the principle of
deportation per se. This was indeed the crucial result of the meeting and the
main reason why Heydrich had detailed minutes prepared and widely
circulated", said Longerich. Their presence at the meeting also ensured
that all those present were accomplices and accessories to the murders that
were about to be undertaken.
House of the Wannsee
Conference In 1965, historian Joseph Wulf proposed that the Wannsee House
should be made into a Holocaust memorial and document centre, but the West
German government was not interested at that time. The building was in use as a
school, and funding was not available. Despondent at the failure of the
project, and the West German government's failure to pursue and convict Nazi
war criminals, Wulf committed suicide in 1974. On 20 January 1992, on
the fiftieth anniversary of the conference, the site was finally opened as a
Holocaust memorial and museum known as the Haus der Wannsee-Konferenz (House of
the Wannsee Conference).The museum also hosts permanent exhibits of texts and
photographs that document events of the Holocaust and its planning. 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.
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