“The Final Solution”
By late 1941, it was apparent in the upper echelon of the Third Reich that Hitler intended all the Jews in Europe be deported or executed. Earlier in 1941, Der Fuhrer had addressed a meeting of his senior ministers wherein he tacitly gave them permission to proceed with Die Endlosung der Judenfrage, the final solution of the Jewish question. The policy became “Citizenship is to be determined by race; no Jew to be a German.”
To carry out such a massive enterprise at a time when necessary human and material resources were being stretched presented a formidable logistical challenge.
In July 1941, Goering had written to SS Obergruppenfuhrer (Lt. General) Reinhard Heydrich to “make all necessary preparations” for a “total solution of the Jewish question” in all territories controlled by Germany and to submit a “comprehensive draft” of a plan to render these areas Judenrein (cleansed of Jews).
Heydrich and his staff worked assiduously during the second half of 1941 to develop plans to evacuate all Jews from Germany and the occupied countries to labor camps in Poland or western USSR, which was expected to be conquered soon. Those who were unable to work would be killed.
In November 1941, Heydrich sent invitations to State Secretaries, ministers of various government agencies responsible for various policies relating to Jews and the head of the Gestapo to join him on January 20th, 1942 in Wannsee, a resort town in the suburbs of Berlin.
He laid before them a document, which became the Wannsee Protocol. His right-hand man taking minutes was SS Oberstrumbannfuhrer (Lt. Colonel) Adolf Eichmann.
Heydrich opened the meeting with an accounting of Jews that had been emigrated in the last ten years, about 530000 and the estimated number of them that remained, country-by-country (which totaled over eleven million), half of which were in territories not under German control. The complex question of what constitutes a Jew had been discussed since the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 had left their status deliberately ambiguous.
Heydrich spoke for about an hour, followed by thirty minutes of Q and A during which the attendees announced the logistical difficulties of complying with the Protocol. Heydrich listened impatiently but quietly and then adjourned the meeting. He instructed Eichmann to eliminate from the minutes of the meeting all references to killing.
Some historians speculate that the main purpose of the conference was to make the top representatives of the Nazi bureaucracy accomplices and accessories to Heydrich and the plan he was pursuing.
The fate of millions of people was decided in less than ninety minutes by a handful of men.