Located to the south-west of Berlin, the seaside resort of Wannsee sinisterly entered history on January 20, 1942. It was in a villa transformed into a holiday center for the SS security service that beginning of the year, 14 representatives of various Nazi administrations and organisations. They were summoned by Reinhard Heydrich, then head of the Reich Central Security Office (RSHA) under SS Chief Heinrich Himmler. The agenda is on the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question". The meeting lasted less than two hours, but it remains today associated with the beginning of the enterprise of destruction of the Jews of Europe. 

"In people's minds, there are a lot of problems with regard to Wannsee. For a very long time, it was identified as the place of decision-making, which is absurd", underlines the French historian Holocaust scholar Tal Bruttmann.

"When you look at the composition of those who sit on that day, we are dealing with second or third rank personalities. It is a meeting of technocrats, not decision makers. The one who makes the decisions is Adolf Hitler , with its inner circle of which Himmler is a part". 

The Villa Marlier in Wannsee where the meeting took place, January 20, 1942. AFP - PAUL ZINKEN

On January 20, 1942, the decision to exterminate the Jews had indeed already been recorded. It would have been taken by the German Chancellor in December 1941 following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. "It is the subject of discussion among historians, but for Hitler, this attack would be proof of the Jewish conspiracy and of a world war waged by the Jews against Germany. It is then time for him to exterminate them", explains Tal Bruttmann.  

In his diary, the head of Nazi propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, makes reference to it, on December 12, 1941. "As far as the Jewish question is concerned, the Führer has decided to wipe the slate clean. annihilation if they provoked a new world war. It was not an empty word. The world war is here, the annihilation of the Jews is the necessary consequence".  

A document listing the participants of the Wannsee conference.

AFP - PAUL ZINKEN

“A coordinated plan at European level”

However, when the Wannsee conference takes place, a million Jews have already been murdered. Ghettos have already been created, deportations have begun to conquered territories in the East, mass killings have been perpetrated after the invasion of the Soviet Union by the German army and a first killing center has been created in Chelmno as early as December 1941, where Jews were killed in gas trucks. "We have an explosion of murderous violence against the Jews from the summer of 1941 throughout Europe. But these are local assassination policies. We are not yet in the Final Solution understood in the sense of January 1942, that is to say a plan coordinated on the scale of Europe, and even beyond, to assassinate all the Jews”, describes the historian. For this Holocaust specialist,the Wannsee conference therefore marks the transition from a regional or national dimension to a continental scale.  

From the Wannsee conference, only one copy of the protocol was found in 1947 out of the thirty existing ones. This document, written by SS Lieutenant-Colonel Adolf Eichmann, then set an objective: the eradication of eleven million Jews. "It is above all a question of combing Europe from West to East and of organizing the deportation of the Jews. It is really a technical meeting in the sense that we are going to involve the whole state apparatus to coordinate the mass murder taking into account a whole set of parameters", describes Tal Bruttmann. "You cannot kill the Jews of France like those of Poland, where they can be killed on the spot. In France, there is Vichy and the French. You have to go through the diplomatic channel and set up a whole program of deportation".A roadmap is thus drawn up country by country. The objective even goes beyond the European framework. In the protocol, the Jews of North Africa and the Levant are counted among the Jews of France.  

Heydrich becomes the architect of the Final Solution 

Beyond this transition to a centralized strategy, this meeting also marks the takeover of Reinhard Heydrich.

The one who is also at the head of the protectorate of Bohemia-Moravia then becomes the prime contractor for the Final Solution by making the RSHA, which he directs, the instrument at the heart of its realization.

"Wannsee allows him to position himself above the other services. He becomes one of the central figures of the Third Reich and the most visible figure of Nazi violence embodied on the ground. He is really the architect".  

SS General Reinhard Heydrich (center), shortly before his death on May 14, 1942 during a visit to Paris.

He finds himself alongside Carl Oberg, the brand new supreme leader of the SS and the police in France and Dr. Knochen, head of the Sûreté and SD services in France.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

But the SS general did not survive this meeting for long.

Reinhard Heydrich died a few months later, on June 4, 1942, following an attack organized by Czech resistance fighters.

In tribute, the SS decided to give his name to the German plan for the extermination of the two million Jews who resided in the General Government of Poland (districts of Warsaw, Krakow, Lublin, Radom and Lvov, in present-day Ukraine), the Operation Reinhard.  

After his death, it was his superior Heinrich Himmler who closely followed the realization of the Final Solution.

From the summer of 1942, the deportation from Belgium, the Netherlands and France began.

It will then be the turn of the Jews of Italy and Greece in 1943, before those of Hungary in 1944. Of the eleven million Jews targeted by the Final Solution at the Wannsee conference, approximately six million were murdered throughout Europe during the Holocaust.

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