Nazi Officials Seal Fate: The Final Solution Begins
Reinhard Heydrich convened fifteen senior Nazi bureaucrats at a villa on the shores of Berlin's Wannsee Lake on January 20, 1942, to coordinate the logistics of murdering Europe's eleven million Jews. The meeting lasted only ninety minutes. Cognac was served. Adolf Eichmann took the minutes, which survived the war and became a crucial document at the Nuremberg Trials. What made Wannsee distinctive was not its intent, since the killings were already underway, but its bureaucratic character. Transportation officials discussed railroad schedules. Legal experts debated the status of half-Jewish individuals. No one present objected to the fundamental purpose. The conference transformed the Holocaust from a series of ad hoc massacres into a coordinated industrial operation with clear chains of responsibility across multiple government ministries. Heydrich was assassinated by Czech resistance fighters five months later.
January 20, 1942
84 years ago
Key Figures & Places
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