Blueprint for the "Final Solution"
From Facing History and Ourselves:
Holocaust and Human Behavior, Chapter 7
In January 1942, representatives from the SS, the SS Race and Settlement Office, the SD, the Einsatzgruppen, the Party Chancellery, the Interior Ministry, the Office of the Four-Year Plan, the Justice Ministry, the Office of the Governor General of Poland, the Foreign Office, and the Reich Chancellery met in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee. They had come together to discuss the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question.” It was an official meeting. So minutes were taken and distributed to those who could not attend.
At the beginning of the meeting the Chief of Security Police and the SD, SS Obergruppenfuehrer [Reinhard] Heydrich, announced his appointment by the Reich Marshal [Hermann Goering], as Plenipotentiary for the Preparation of the Final Solution of the European Jewish Question, and pointed out that this conference had been called to clear up fundamental questions. The Reich Marshal’s request to have a draft sent to him on the organizational, functional, and material concerns on the final solution of the European Jewish question necessitates prior joint consideration by all central agencies directly concerned with these questions, with a view to keeping policy lines parallel…
In the course of the practical implementation of the final solution, Europe is to be combed from west to east. The Reich area, including the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, will have to be handled in advance, if only because of the housing problem and other sociopolitical necessities.
The evacuated Jews will be brought, group by group, into so-called transit ghettos, to be transported from there farther to the east.1
Heydrich argued that there were more than eleven million European Jews if strict racial definitions were applied. The participants then established a complicated set of rules to determine who was and who was not a Jew. The conference did not mark the start of the Holocaust. Jews were being killed long before the meeting. It was significant, mainly because it turned the “final solution” over to the bureaucrats
- Note the language used in the minutes of the Wannsee Conference. How you account for the way the task is described?
- The notes taken at the Wannsee Conference, only a small portion of which are included in this reading, are the basis for a feature-length film called The Wannsee Conference. The film, available from the Facing History Resource Center, shows how murder can be discussed without ever using the word.
- Historical events do not follow a neat timeline. For the most part, mass shootings ended after the Wannsee Conference. But ghettos were enlarged in some places, even as others were destroyed and their inhabitants shipped to death camps.
1Minutes of Wannsee Conference, 20 January, 1942. NG-2586-G. Trials of War Criminals before the Nuremberg Military Tribunals, XIII, Washington, D.C., 1952, 210-211, 218-219.
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