On January 20, 1942, in Berlin, the Nazis held a conference on the final solution of the Jewish question. It is known as the Wannsee Conference. It adopted a document that provided guidelines for the practice of the mass extermination of Jews.
The head of the Reich Main Security Agency, which united all the special services of the Reich, SS Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, invited 15 high-ranking officials from 6 ministries, the judiciary and party structures to a “conference with a subsequent breakfast”. Among them were Heydrich's subordinate, Gestapo chief Müller, and Heydrich's personal assistant for Jewish affairs, SS Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann.
The conference discussed one main issue in principle: the physical destruction of European Jewry.
The debates were taken down in shorthand by Eichmann, who was known for his conscientiousness and correctness. The conference minutes, which he later compiled, were sent to participants and other involved services in 30 copies with the highest degree of confidentiality.
For several years after the war, it was believed that all copies of these minutes had been destroyed. It was not until 1949 that in a forgotten archive of one of the participants (the irony of history saw to it that his name was Martin Luther…) a copy No. 16 was accidentally discovered. Thus came to light an incredible document in its bottomless cruelty, linguistically maintained in the dispassionate, complexly structured style of the traditional German administration.
The impression is wrong that the decision on the Holocaust itself was made at the Wannsee Conference. The extermination of the Jews from the conquered territories in the East was already in full swing at that time (1942). At the meeting by Lake Wannsee, the deportation of all citizens of Jewish origin in Europe to labor and death camps was decided.
What was to happen to them is stated there at the very beginning of the document. The goal is: “The final solution of the Jewish question“. The sophisticated elite administrators from the ministries discuss with the representatives of the services the numbers by country of the human beings subject to “final solution”, clarify in detail who falls within the definition of “Jew”, specify the most efficient routes for transporting the estimated 11 million Jews from all over Europe.
In neat tables are indicated the exact figures of the Jews living in each country, who must be deported to the camps in the East, one by one. The column for Bulgaria indicates 48,000. Neutral Sweden also appears in the table with 8,000 Jews.
The fate of the so-called “first degree half-breeds” - i.e., the children of a Jewish woman and a non-Jew and vice versa - is discussed in detail. These “half-breeds” in principle, they are equated “in all matters relating to the final solution of the Jewish question with the Jews“. Only exceptionally and with the approval of higher party and state authorities “mongrels of the first degree with special merit“ can be exempted from deportation and remain on the territory of the Reich. The condition for this to happen is that they undergo “voluntary sterilization“…
After the end of the National Socialist regime, some of the participants in the conference stated that they did not know exactly what was hidden behind the phrase “final solution of the Jewish question“. Which is not true - all state secretaries were explicitly informed about the deportations and exterminations, and the SS representatives were directly involved in the crimes.