The Final Solution: What Happened at Wannsee?

The villa where the Wannsee Conference took place.

(Arnd Wiegmann/Reuters/Corbis)

Sixty-five years ago today, on January 20, 1942, a group of midlevel Nazi officials met at 56-58 Am Grossen Wannsee, a stately three-story gray stone building set back on a quiet, residential street in suburban Berlin. There, under the direction of SS-Gruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the Reich Main Security Office, they formalized plans to murder Europe’s Jewish population. The “Wannsee Conference” has long been the subject of intense debate among Holocaust historians and also the subject of much fiction and film, most recently the acclaimed HBO/BBC production Conspiracy, starring Kenneth Branagh in the role of Reinhard Heydrich.

What happened at 56-58 Am Grossen Wannsee plays a central role in the ongoing debate between two schools of Holocaust history. “Intentionalists” argue that Nazi officials intended to destroy European Jewry as early as the 1920s, even before they achieved their first electoral successes in the short-lived Weimar Republic. According to this line of thinking, best laid out in Lucy Dawidowiez’s’s popular book The War Against the Jews, all one need do is carefully parse the writings and rants of leading Nazis to see that every subsequent twist and turn in Adolf Hitler’s policy was designed with a single purpose in mind, to cleanse the continent of Jews. According to this rendering, the Wannsee Conference did not represent a critical policy departure. Rather it allowed for better coordination between officials who were already involved in the complex machinery of state-sponsored genocide. This interpretation presupposes the existence of what is called the “Fuhrer Order,” Hitler’s explicit authorization of the death camps. To date, no evidence has emerged that clearly proves or disproves that there was such a dictate.

Conversely the “functionalist” camp argues that Hitler played only an indirect role in the formation of his country’s Jewish policy, and that the Final Solution was born in fits and starts, the product of a fractured and bureaucratically chaotic state in which no one person exercised complete control over policymaking. According to this interpretation, first laid out in full by the historian Martin Broszat in 1977, Hitler was a remote and inspirational leader who gave voice to a general ideology but left it to party and state subordinates, whose authority often overlapped, to enact his general wishes. Funcionalists argue among themselves about the timing of the Final Solution, but most would agree that the Wannsee Conference formalized a genocidal policy that had slowly emerged after Germany’s invasion of Poland in 1939.

After decades of close historical inquiry, we know a few things definitively.

First, the Wannsee Conference had originally been scheduled for December 9, 1941, but was postponed in the aftermath of several military developments, most notably Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor two days earlier. This suggests that midlevel officials involved in designing the state’s Jewish policy were already at least vaguely informed of a genocidal project by late 1941.

Second, until early 1941 the Nazi government actively encouraged Jewish emigration from Germany. This policy was central to the notion of a “Jew free” nation and complemented, rather than contradicted, the regime’s larger preoccupation with population transfers and ethnic cleansing. In other words, the critical period in the formation of the Final Solution lay somewhere between mid-1941 and the Wannsee Conference of January 1942. Indeed, as late as 1940 Nazi officials were still discussing a plan to forcibly relocate all of Europe’s Jews to Madagascar. That scheme would surely have resulted in the deaths of a great number of Jews, but, as Hitler’s second in command, Heinrich Himmler, noted, “however cruel and tragic each individual case may be, this method is still the mildest and best, if one rejects the Bolshevik method of physical extermination of a people out of inner conviction as un-German and impossible.”

Third, as early as June 1941, when Germany invaded Russia, special auxiliary policemen and “task forces,” known as Einsatzgruppen, were involved in the mass murders of civilian Jews—mostly men and boys, but increasingly, by mid-July 1941, women and children as well.

Fourth, by September 1941, less than three months after its invasion of Russia, Germany was already engaged in the limited, “experimental” gassing of Eastern European Jews at Auschwitz and had begun constructing death camps at Chelmno and Belzec. By October 23 an editor of a weekly Nazi newspaper, was boasting that “in the near future many of the Jewish vermin will be exterminated through special measures.” In other words, the key decision to move from mass population shifts and the tactical killing of Jewish men to genocide was taken sometime in the summer of 1941. Christopher Browning, a leading expert on the timing and origins of the Final Solution, points to July as the decisive moment in the formulation of the new policy and believes it is distinctly possible that Hitler authorized it in private conversations with Himmler and Heydrich.

If the bureaucrats who gathered at Wannsee ratified rather than developed a policy that had been developing over the course of half a year, still the conference was extremely important. It was there that the Nazi state’s Jewish “experts” coordinated and organized their policy of ghettoization and mass extermination, and it was there that they definitively rejected other strategies of ethnic cleansing, like mass population transfers.

Sixty-five years later, the debate over Wannsee is still illuminating. It raises questions that are consequential today, about what constitutes genocide and about the moral culpability of leaders, bureaucrats, and ordinary citizens of a state. One need only look to Darfur to appreciate its urgent relevance two generations later.

—Joshua Zeitz is a contributing editor of American Heritage magazine and the author of Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity, and the Women Who Made America Modern (Crown).