Wannsee Conference - Planning The Conference

Planning The Conference

By November 1941, it was becoming known in the upper reaches of the Nazi leadership and government offices that Hitler intended all the Jews of Europe to be deported to the eastern territories and executed by whatever means. To carry out such a massive enterprise involving the registration, assembly and transportation of millions of people at a time when the necessary material and human resources were already severely stretched, would be a formidable logistical challenge. It was also one that at least some elements of the German state apparatus might be expected to obstruct or fail to cooperate with. It thus seemed advisable to bring together representatives of all affected departments to explain what was intended and how it was to be carried out, and to make it clear that the project had been undertaken on the highest authority of the Reich.

On 29 November, Heydrich sent invitations for a meeting to be held on 9 December at the headquarters of the International Criminal Police Commission (the forerunner of Interpol, of which Heydrich at the time served as President) at 16 Am Kleinen Wannsee (in the comfortable lakeside suburb of Wannsee on the western edge of Berlin). He enclosed a copy of Göring's letter of 31 July to indicate his authority in the matter. As this was to be a meeting of administrators to discuss implementation of a policy already decided at the executive level, those invited were mostly state secretaries, i.e., chief administrative (subministerial) officers of government ministries. The ministries to be represented were Interior, Justice, the Four Year Plan and Occupied Eastern Territories. The Foreign Office was to be represented by an undersecretary, since Heydrich suspected that State Secretary Weizsäcker was not fully aligned with the objectives of the regime. Also invited were representatives of the Reich Chancellery, the Nazi Party Chancellery, the Race and Resettlement Main Office of the RSHA and Gestapo chief Müller. When Hans Frank, head of the General Government in occupied Poland, heard of the meeting, he demanded to be represented and Heydrich agreed. SS-Sturmbannführer Lange was invited for his experience in executing German Jews in Latvia. Heydrich's right-hand man Eichmann was to take the minutes.

Developments in early December 1941 disrupted the original meeting plans. On 5 December, the Soviet Army began a counter-offensive in front of Moscow, ending the prospect of a rapid conquest of the Soviet Union. On 7 December, the Japanese attacked the United States at Pearl Harbor, causing the U.S. to declare war on Japan the next day. To fulfill its obligations under its Tripartite Pact with Italy and Japan, the Reich government immediately began preparing to issue a declaration of war on the U.S. on 11 December. Some meeting invitees were involved in these preparations, so Heydrich postponed the meeting without rescheduling it on 8 December. In early January 1942, Heydrich sent new invitations to a meeting to be held on 20 January. German historian Christian Gerlach sees in Heydrich's postponement the exploitation of an opportunity to broaden the original objective. Götz Aly wrote, "The postponement followed, one could assert, the political confusion that the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor had caused. But Gerlach substantiates with convincing details that the originally planned Wannsee Conference had an entirely different theme from that which actually took place six weeks later. It had been anticipated only to discuss problems that occurred with the deportations of the (Greater) German Jews... Only after Hitler's speech of 12 December was Heydrich able, as Gerlach shows, to broaden the theme and fix a conference on the 'Final Solution of the European Jewish question'."

The venue for the rescheduled conference was changed to a villa at 56–58 Am Großen Wannsee, a quiet residential street across the Großer Wannsee from the popular Wannsee beach. The villa, built in 1914, had been purchased from Friedrich Minoux in 1940 by the SS for use as a conference centre.