Wannsee Conference — 1942 meeting of senior officials and functionaries of National Socialist organisations and ministries in Berlin to organise and coordinate the deportation of the entire Jewish population of Europe to the East for extermination
Senior Nazi officials coordinated the systematic deportation and murder of European Jews, formalizing the administrative framework for the Holocaust.
Key Facts
- Date
- 20 January 1942
- Location
- Wannsee, Berlin suburb
- Convened by
- SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich
- Organizing body
- Reich Security Main Office (RSHA)
- Protocol copy found
- March 1947, by Robert Kempner
- Göring authorization
- 31 July 1941, for a total solution
By the Numbers
Location
Cause → Event → Consequence
Following the Nazi seizure of power in 1933 and the subsequent invasion of Poland in 1939, systematic persecution and mass killings of Jews escalated sharply. Mobile death squads operated from 1939, and after the Soviet invasion in June 1941, murders accelerated. On 31 July 1941, Hermann Göring authorized Heydrich to draft a comprehensive plan to coordinate all government agencies in implementing a 'total solution of the Jewish question.'
On 20 January 1942, Heydrich convened senior Nazi government officials and SS leaders at a villa in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee. Representatives from multiple ministries, including Foreign Affairs, Justice, and Interior, attended. Heydrich outlined the plan to round up and deport the Jews of German-occupied Europe to extermination camps in occupied Poland, and clarified that the SS would hold exclusive authority over the fate of deportees once deportation was complete.
The conference produced a formal protocol that coordinated administrative cooperation across German government departments for the genocide of European Jews. One surviving copy of the protocol was discovered in 1947 and used as evidence at the Nuremberg trials. The Wannsee House was later converted into a Holocaust memorial, and the conference remains a central document in the historical record of the Holocaust's bureaucratic organization.