Wannsee Conference - Background

Background

In 1935, the German Reichstag was controlled by the Nazi Party. It codified longstanding antisemitic practices, both official and unofficial, in the Nuremberg Laws which made them official policies of the Third Reich. These laws provided legal definitions of who was a Jew and who was a German citizen (definitively severing Jewish identity from German citizenry), prohibited sexual intercourse between Jews and state citizens, and provided punishment in forced labor camps for those who fell afoul of the law.

In 1939, Adolf Hitler signed a "euthanasia decree" (later known as Action T4), which instituted a forced eugenics program extending the existing laws enabling sterilisation for those deemed genetically or socially unfit. Under this new policy doctors were allowed, and in some cases required, to take the lives of those deemed unfit rather than to sterilize them, as had been the law before. The term euthanasia in this context is a euphemism, since its aim was not to relieve pain and suffering but rather, for the sake of societal purity, to prevent further 'pollution' of the race by 'inferior' genetics.

The notion of wholesale deportation of Jews, as part of the plan to "purify" all of Europe, reached its peak in the forced deportation of Jews to labor camps in Poland and in the Madagascar Plan of 1940, but was shelved due to logistical challenges during the war.

With the policies of legal racism delineated by the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 and their consequences, the continued deportation of Jews, the prospect of 'ethnic cleansing' of Europe and the existing sterilization laws extending to actual murder in 1939, the Wannsee Conference in 1942 can be seen to be simply as a means to codify murder in order to expedite existing policy.

The rapid German advances in the opening weeks of the invasion of the Soviet Union, Operation Barbarossa, created a mood of euphoria among the Nazi leadership, which began to take a view of the "solution" of the "Jewish question" increasingly freed from moral or ethical restraints. The so-called "Jewish question" seemed even more urgent with the growing likelihood that the four million Jews of the western Soviet Union would fall under German control. On 16 July 1941 Hitler addressed a meeting of ministers, including Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, at which administration of the occupied Soviet territories was discussed. He said that Soviet territories west of the Urals were to become a "German Garden of Eden", and that "naturally this vast area must be pacified as quickly as possible; this will happen best by shooting anyone who even looks sideways at us."

Hitler's chief lieutenants, Göring and the SS chief Heinrich Himmler, took this and other comments by Hitler at this time (most of which were not recorded, but were attested to at postwar trials) as authority to proceed with a definitive "final solution of the Jewish question" (Die Endlösung der Judenfrage) involving the complete removal of the Jews from the German-occupied territories. On 31 July 1941 Göring gave written authorisation to SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, Chief of the Reich Main Security Office (RSHA), to "make all necessary preparations" for a "total solution of the Jewish question" in all the territories under German influence, to coordinate the participation of all government organizations whose cooperation was required, and to submit a "comprehensive draft" of a plan for the "final solution of the Jewish question".

Göring was at this time the second most powerful figure in the Nazi regime, having been given the special rank of Reichsmarschall and designated as Hitler's successor. Heydrich would thus have understood that any instruction coming from Göring carried Hitler's authority. He also knew that his immediate superior, Himmler, favored exterminating the Jews, and Heydrich was at that moment directing the Einsatzgruppen to do just that in the newly conquered Soviet territories. Rudolf Lange, commander of Einsatzkommando 2 in Latvia, wrote that his orders were "a radical solution of the Jewish problem through the execution of all Jews". In October, deportation of the Jews of Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia to the east began. When a train carrying about 1,000 German Jews arrived at Riga in Latvia on November 29, 1941, Lange simply had them shot. But this was clearly not a feasible method of dealing with millions of people: the cost of the ammunition alone was unacceptable, and it was observed that even SS troops were uncomfortable about shooting assimilated German Jews as opposed to Ostjuden ("Eastern Jews"). The head of the German civil administration in Belarus, Generalkomissar Wilhelm Kube, who among other crimes personally murdered Jewish children, objected to the deportation of German Jews to the Minsk ghetto "who come from our own cultural circle" where they were being casually killed by German soldiers.

Accordingly, during the second half of 1941 Heydrich and his staff worked on proposals to "evacuate" all Jews from Germany and the occupied countries to labour camps, either in occupied Poland or further east in the Soviet Union, which it was assumed would soon be completely conquered. Those who were unable to work would be killed, while the remainder would soon be worked to death. But the German defeat in front of Moscow in November–December led to a sharp change of emphasis. Euphoria was replaced by the prospect of a long war, and also by a realisation that food stocks were not sufficient to feed the entire population of German-occupied Europe. It was at this time that the decision to proceed from "evacuation" to extermination was made. Speaking with Himmler and Heydrich on 25 October, Hitler said, "Let no one say to me we cannot send them into the swamp. Who then cares about our own people? It is good when terror precedes us that we are exterminating the Jews. We are writing history anew, from the racial standpoint."