The Wannsee Conference took place at a Villa overlooking the Lake of Wannsee on the outskirts of Berlin on 20th January 1942. The conference was chaired by Reinhard Heydrich who was the Head of the Reich Security’s Main Office. Hitler wasn’t present at the conference but SS officers and high-ranking civil servants were.
The main aim of the conference was to discuss and plan what they called “The Final Solution of the Jewish Question” which was basically the organized mass murder and destruction of every Jewish man, woman and child in continental Europe or at least within their reach.
After the mass murder of Jews in the German Invasion of the Soviet Union of 1941, the SS and police units began the eradicating entire Jewish operations. At the conference Heydrich reiterated that this type of activity would extend to all of Europe rather than just Eastern Europe. They calculated the number of Jews within their reach country by country and concluded that it was approximately 11 million Jews. This included countries not yet under Germany control at the time as well including 330,000 Jews in Britain and other European countries that were neutral including Sweden, Turkey, Spain, etc. This plan clearly shows how the Nazi annihilation of Jews was different to the persecution of other groups/communities.
There is no photographical evidence of the conference, but the minutes that were taken by Adolf Eichmann were later discovered in the files of German Foreign Office. There is a sort of strangeness in the situation since the planning and discussion of an extermination of an entire group of people was discussed in a Villa overlooking Lake Wannsee. Eichmann states that once the conference concluded, the group proceeded to drink brandy and smoke after “long hours of effort”.
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