South of Berlin, on a beautiful lake, stands the town where fifteen leaders of the Nazi order met to decide what would be the final solution to the Jewish question. Today the meeting is referred to as the “Wannsee Conference”. The purpose of the conference was the plan to deport and kill the entire Jewish population of Europe.
The efficiency of the Germans and their meticulous record keeping has left us documents that explain in detail the plan to kill all the Jews of Europe. The site of the meeting has been transformed into a permanent exhibition and library/media center, where visitors and researchers can find information on various topics related to the Holocaust. A large part of the library’s collection is in languages other than German.
The exhibition, entitled “The Wannsee Conference and the Genocide of European Jews”, documents the Nazi persecution of Jews, the process of excluding them from German society, the events of 1933-1939 when Jews were expelled and deprived of their rights. the deportations, the villages, and finally the death camps (Wannsee Conference Memorial).
The meeting to resolve the final solution to the Jewish question was held on January 20, 1942, and was chaired by Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Reich Security Main Office. Adolf Eichmann is mentioned in the meeting check. The minutes or “protocol” were found in 1947 in the files of the foreign ministry and were transferred for use as evidence in the courts in Nuremberg Participants in the protocol talk about the necessary steps to rid Europe of all Jews. He put estimates of the Jewish population of Europe at about 11 million.
The meeting began with an outline of what had been done so far to rid Germany of its Jews. First, the Jews were deported or allowed to immigrate to other countries. The party had been rounded up and shot. These methods were ineffective in handling the problem, so a special task force was established in 1939 to speed up the process. “The goal of all this was to legally clear the space of the Jews living in Germany.” (The Wannsee Protocol) The problem was that those countries that were receiving immigrants could act harder. Therefore, it was necessary to devise a permanent solution to the Jewish problem.
The first step will be to transport all able-bodied Jews to Eastern Europe to work on the roads “… in the course of which no doubt a large portion will be taken by natural causes.” Then the solution should be increased to deal with those who are left to work. The last remaining possible, with undoubtedly the most constant portion, is to be taken care of, because it is the selection of World War II, Germans tried to avoid the atrocities of Adolf Hitler. In recent years, there has been a move to educate, discuss and memorialize as a way to ensure that it never happens again. The Germans hesitated to create a German “memory” of the history of the past, fearing that these terms would become a fan of criminal activity. crimes against humanity.
In a short space of time, just ninety minutes, the course of Jewish history is changed forever. At the end of World War II, the Germans systematically killed half of the European Jewish population. Looking across the back lawn of the village towards the lake dotted with boats, the area for such a gathering seems unlikely. The setting may be symbolic of the casual attitude that the Nazis had towards genocide. For most of its participants it was just one meeting among many others in a busy week.
Sources
Wannsee Memorial Conference House and Educational Site
John Mendelsohn, ed., The Holocaust: Selected Documents in Eighteen Volumes. Vol. 11: The Wannsee Protocol and the 1944 Report on Auschwitz by the Office of Strategic Management (New York: Garland, 1982), 18-32.
