1942 The Wannsee Conference

The National Socialist government of Adolf Hitler had always followed an anti-Jewish policy consistent with the Nazi belief that the world was engaged in a racial war for purity of  blood. On first taking office, Hitler encouraged German Jews to flee the country by barring them from a number of professions, stripping them of their citizenship, and passing a series of discriminatory laws. The possibility of moving the Jewish population to Madagascar or Palestine was discussed. Later, Jews were banned from emigrating and, when World War II broke out in September 1939, their fate became even more precarious. The occupation of Poland brought millions more Jews under Nazi control and even more fell under their sway with the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. By then a policy of extermination was clearly in place, with German forces murdering tens of thousands of Jews as their armies advanced.

But all of this killing was ad hoc, locally organized, and brutally personal. In January 1942, a meeting of high-ranking SS and government officials took place in a mansion in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee. It met to agree on a Final Solution to the Jewish Problem with a definition of who qualified as racially unfit, the mass deportation of Jews to eastern camps, their extermination (either through immediate execution or being worked to death) and which areas would be given priority in racial cleansing. Within 90 minutes these men had decided on policies that would bring death to millions.

Of those attending, few escaped punishment. The conference leader Reinhard Heydrich was assassinated by Czech partisans; Judge Roland Freisler was killed in an Allied bombing raid; Josef Bühler was executed by the Polish government; Alfred Meyer committed suicide; Rudolf Lange died in battle; Karl Schöngarth was executed by the British; Heinrich Müller disappeared in the last days of the war; Otto Hofmann was sentenced to 25 years in jail; while Georg Leibbrandt and several of the smaller fry were arrested and released. Adolf Eichmann escaped to Argentina, where he was kidnapped by Israeli agents, put on trial in Jerusalem and executed.