January 20: Planning the Holocaust in 90 Minutes

Nazi Germany committed itself to “the Final Solution of the Jewish Question” — mass murder — on this date in 1942 at the Wannsee conference, a meeting of some fifteen Nazi bureaucrats convened and chaired by Reinhard Heydrich, Heinrich Himmler’s second-in-command. The meeting, held in a Berlin suburban villa, determined that deportation and slave labor in the East would be the fate of Jews in German-occupied lands. “Able-bodied Jews, separated according to sex,” said Heydrich, “will be taken in large work columns to these areas for work on roads, in the course of which action doubtless a large portion will be eliminated by natural causes. The possible final remnant will, since it will undoubtedly consist of the most resistant portion, have to be treated accordingly, because it is the product of natural selection and would, if released, act as the seed of a new Jewish revival.” The Nazis already had in place the Nuremberg racial laws, a “euthanasia” program for the “genetically unfit,” the killing squads of the Einsatzgruppen, and a concentration camp system; at Wannsee, all of the logistics for the mass extermination of Jews were mobilized into a single design during a one-hour presentation by Heydrich and half an hour of questions-and-answers.

“It is good when terror precedes us that we are exterminating the Jews. We are writing history anew, from the racial standpoint.” —Adolf Hitler