The Wannsee Conference
On January 20, 1942 one of the most macabre conferences in history took place at an idyllic lakeside house Am Großen Wannsee 56/58 in Wannsee near Berlin. The conference was initially scheduled for December 9th 1941, however, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the German reactionary declaration of war provoked a delay until January the following month.
The subject was the organisation of the 'Final Solution', the destruction of all 11 million European Jews. In the relaxed and distinctively upper middle-class atmosphere of that SS guest-house fifteen highly placed Nazis met and discussed the best strategy for genocide, over a glass of good cognac. Without comment, high-ranking functionaries of the Party and the SS, as well as leading ministerial officials, were taking note of the lecture being delivered by Reinhard Heydrich, the chief of the security police and the SD, on the fate of the European Jews.
The Wannsee Conference, did not mark the beginning of the "Final Solution." The mobile killing squads were already slaughtering Jews in the occupied Soviet Union. Rather, the Wannsee Conference was the place where the "final solution" was formally revealed to non-Nazi leaders who would help arrange for Jews to be transported from all over German-occupied Europe to SS-operated "extermination" camps in Poland. Not one of the men present at Wannsee objected to the announced policy. Never before had a modern state committed itself to the murder of an entire people.
Firstly they had forced the Jews out of the various sectors of German life, then they had physically removed Jews from German territory. To complete these tasks, the Reich Central Office for Jewish Emigration was established in 1939. Their primary responsibilities were to make the appropriate arrangements for a heightened emigration of Jews, to point the flow of travel for emigrants, and to make the process of emigration a more practical one. Theoretically, it was merely a legal way of eliminating Jews from German territory. Prior to the conference, more than 500,000 Jews emigrated from Germany. They overcame difficulties like financial constraints, insufficient space, and problems in emigration to send more than half a million Jews out of Germany.
However, the onset of war led Heinrich Himmler, who was in charge of RSHA, to end the Jewish emigration. This provoked Adolf Hitler to commission the evacuation of Jews, which could include deportations, ghettoisations and mass killing actions that brought about the formation of extermination camps. Heydrich believed that the evacuation was the first step of the "Final Solution". After comprising a list of the breakdown of Jews in each European country, over 11 million Jews in total, it became apparent to all that Himmler and Heydrich intended on obtaining control of the Jews who were within the grasp of German power. Unlike Heindrich's initial plan, his final version of the Final Solution encompassed all Jews in Europe. All captured Jews were shipped to the East to labour camps. Europe would be checked for Jews from the west to the east, with Germany proper and Bohemia-Moravia being evacuated first, due to housing problems and for general social-political dilemmas, and being sent to transit ghettos.
Wannsee was efficient because it allowed the SS officials to finalize more of their plans emigration of Jews. Adequate transportation came in the form of rail lines and railcars. Concentration camps required more employers. The actual murder process needed greater precision and more resources. Thus, Himmler and Heydrich found that it would have been impossible to run a program dedicated to the genocide of a mass of people without the cooperation of their government officials.
There was also much debate between Himmler and Heydrich over the use of deported Jews. Himmler initially supported the immediate killing of all Jews, which Heydrich came to support as a theory. Furthermore, due to the huge losses on the Russian border, many Jews were forced to work in war-related production. However, Hitler did not support this use of Jews as slave laborers in German industries.
The Jewish population in the Reich and the Government General reduced by 3.1 million from the beginning of the emigration in 1933 to its conclusion in 1942. Whether they were 'transported from the Eastern provinces to the Russian East' or 'sifted through the camps', the gruesome realities of the time period were masked under the title of The Final Solution. Alarming the population was something that they hoped to avoid at all costs. As Himmler commented, "We had the moral right, we had the duty with regard to our people, to kill this race that wanted to kill us.” In the minds of the Germans, this belief justified all their actions and provided them with the validation they needed to continue doing it until they were victorious.
The fate of the Jews in Europe
Austria and Czechoslovakia conformed to German policy almost as soon as they were invaded and initiated anti-Jewish legislation and controls over Jewish activates and life. Belgium and Holland also gave up their Jews. Romania probably had the worst record of murder, enacting its own anti-Jewish legislation long before German troops reached it, carrying out pogroms and deportations. In Yugoslavia and Greece most of the Jewish population perished. Hungary took in many refugees from Germany. Czechoslovakia and Poland and although there were deportations and pogroms most Jews remained relatively safe until Hungary was invaded in 1943. Deportations began then on a massive scale
However apart from this tragic record many countries tried to help the Jews. Luxemburg enabled many Jews to escape as far as France and Portugal. To their credit, Italy, a fascist state was reluctant to give up its Jews. No Italian Jews were deported until 1943 when Germany invaded Italy. By that time many Jews had been helped to leave or had gone into hiding. In Bulgaria, one of Germany’s allies. Jews were at first subject to anti-Semitic laws and 11,000 were deported to Poland, but after public protests no more deportations were made. In Norway the Norwegian resistance helped about half the Jewish population to escape into Sweden. In Denmark almost all of demarks 8,000 Jews were ferried to Sweden. Finland also refused to give up its 2,000 Jews
Was there a clear change in policy?
Few historians now think that Hitler envisaged and planned the final solution from 1933 onwards. Only in retrospect of being part of a systematic escalation of persecution which was intended to end in extermination.
Hitler’s actions down to 1941 do not indicate that he was set on murdering all of Europe’s Jews. Until 1941 all the leading Nazi officials concerned with the Jewish issue – Himmler, Heydrich, Frank and Goering – declared that a policy of compulsory emigration offered that only real solution to the Jewish question and they acted accordingly. The ideas of Jewish reservations in the east were taken seriously. There is no basis for the claim that such plans were simply designed to conceal the regimes genocidal intention.
However given Hitler’s hatred of Jews the potential for a war of racial destruction was always there. Operation Barbarossa provided Hitler with both the opportunity and justification to solve the Jewish problem once and for all. Given the apocalyptic nature of the struggle, it made sense by Hitler’s standards to exterminate Russian Jews and then to go a stage further and order the killing of all European Jews.
While Hitler probably did not always harbour the intention of literally exterminating the Jews, extermination was always a possibility, especially in the event of war. And Hitler wanted war. It was the “father of all things” – the “unalterable law of the whole of life – the prerequisite for the natural selection of the strong and the precedent for the elimination of the weak” he probably did not want the war he got in 1939 but he certainly got the war he wanted in 1941. Operation Barbarossa was the key to the Holocaust; the war against the USSR gave him the opportunity of winning lebensraum and at the same time of destroying Jedeo-Bolshevism. From June 1941 onwards his ideology motivated anti-Semitism could be declared a military necessity.
Biography
search criteria: concentration of the Jews in Europe
Alan Farmer: Access to history - Anti-Semitism and the holocaust
Geoff Layton: Access to history – Germany: the third Reich 1933-45
Pat Levy – The holocaust: survival and resistance
