On January 20, 1942, eighty-three years ago, a group of bureaucrats of the Third Reich resolved to fully support the policies announced by Reinhard Heydrich, Adolf Hitler's successor, in his speech. At the Wannsee Conference, the acceleration of the Nazi plan of extermination was arranged: the killing of eleven million European Jews. And everyone toasted. The day when the doors of horror opened
The whole thing lasted an hour and a half. During that time, fifteen people decided that eleven million human beings, the Jewish population of Europe at that time, were to be murdered. After ninety minutes, the fifteen Nazi leaders drank cognac, toasted and returned to their prominent positions in Adolf Hitler's government. Of the fifteen figures, eight had academic doctorates.
When the doors of the mansion where the Wannsee Conference was held, which sealed the fate of the Jews and He launched the so-called “final solution” devised by the Nazis, one man was put in charge of drawing up the minutes of that meeting; his task, in particular, was to translate into a neutral, ambiguous and enigmatic language the harsh proposals heard that freezing midday in a mansion in southern Berlin requisitioned from a Jewish family, who had been chosen by Reinhard Heydrich, Hitler's successor, Head of the Reich Security Office, Heinrich Himmler's right-hand man and second in command of the powerful SS.
That secretary of minutes In charge of disguising the horror was Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi who would be captured by the Israeli secret service in Argentina in May 1960. During the trial he was subjected to in Jerusalem, Eichmann tried unsuccessfully to hide his role as a mere scribe in that conference between assassins in which there were no supporting characters. And, perhaps reluctantly, he provided some key information to unravel part of the secret plot of that conference that was the starting point of the Holocaust. Through the European railway system, and with the precision of an entomologist, Eichmann would be in charge of sending millions of Jews deported from Germany and the countries occupied by the Nazis to the death camps of Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibor, Chelmno, Belzec and Majdanek.
Eighty-three years after that day, the Wannsee Conference is seen in a different light in an attempt, perhaps fatuous, to downplay the enormous importance it had in the destiny of Europe. The new eyes that look at that old episode affirm that the decision to eliminate the Jews from Europe had already been taken secretly, tacitly and hidden, by Nazism. And that more than half a million Jews had already been murdered in concentration camps scattered throughout Germany and occupied Poland since September 1939, when the Second World War broke out. The historical review of Wannsee also affirms that it was a matter of a meeting between bureaucrats, in which Heydrich wanted to ensure that Hitler's ministers who would see their functions affected when mass deportations and genocide began, approved the Nazi plan of extermination.

That's true. But a non-statistical fact puts things in perspective to a large extent. In March 1942, two months after the Wannsee Conference, seventy-five percent of the victims of the Holocaust, estimated at six million people, were alive. Eleven months later, they were all dead.
The Nazi persecution of the Jews had become state policy since Hitler took power on January 30, 1933. The National Socialist regime resorted to violence, economic pressure, social and racial persecution to encouraging German Jews to leave the country “voluntarily”. Between 1933 and 1941, XNUMX German, Austrian and Czech Jews had emigrated from their countries. This was the first of the figures Heydrich laid out on the table at Wannsee when he opened the ninety-minute session. He read a summary prepared by Eichmann, head of the RuSHA, the SS Main Race and Settlement Office.
Two months and ten days after Hitler became Chancellor on April 7, 1933, a Civil Service Restoration Act excluded German Jews from civil service and the legal profession; similar decrees prevented them from learning and practicing other professions, such as medicine. The Nazi regime banned Jewish businesses from entering the economic market and from advertising in newspapers and magazines, and cancelled all community contracts with the government. Jewish businesses were boycotted and attacked, leading to the “Night of Broken Glass” on November 9, 1938, when businesses across Germany were looted, their owners murdered, and their churches burned.
In September 1935, the so-called Nuremberg Race Laws prohibited marriages between Jews and people of German origin; penalized extramarital relations between Jews and Germans of other faiths, and made it illegal to hire German women under the age of forty-five to perform tasks in Jewish households. The Reich Citizenship Law established that Only those with German blood could be considered citizens.: Jews lost their nationality, along with other ethnic minority groups; the law also established who should be considered Jews and who should not. By the time World War II began in September 1939, two hundred and fifty thousand of the four hundred and thirty-seven thousand Jews living in Germany had emigrated to the United States, Palestine and the United Kingdom, among other countries.
The people to be eliminated were divided into two groups of countries: A and B. Group A included territories occupied or under Reich control. Group B included allies, client states, neutral countries or those already at war with Germany.
The extermination of European Jews began as soon as the Nazis invaded Poland in September 1939. With the war underway, the first extermination camps were also built and the killings continued in every country occupied by the Nazis and intensified in the summer of 1941, when the Reich invaded the Soviet Union. A detailed list of the number of Jews to be murdered in Europe, which Heydrich brandished at the Wannsee Conference, established that in the USSR alone the murders would reach five million human beings.
On 31 July 1941, Hermann Göring authorized Heydrich to prepare a plan that would result in “a final solution to the Jewish question” in the European territories under German control, and to coordinate the participation of all the ministries that would be involved in this plan of extermination. Heydrich proposed sending the Jewish population of Eastern Europe and the USSR to Siberia, to be used as slave labor or to be murdered. This plan would be carried out immediately after the German victory over Stalin, a victory that Hitler calculated would take months. It was not to be. But the killing in the Soviet Union intensified; it was carried out by the Einzatsgrupen, the “operations groups” that followed the army in the conquered areas only to round up and murder the Jews: Heydrich had decreed that Every Jewish male between fifteen and forty-five years old was to be shot..
The Wannsee Conference was to have been held on December 9, 1941. But two events delayed it. First, a fierce Russian counteroffensive launched on December 5 near Moscow, which was about to be besieged, thwarted German plans for a quick victory in the East. More than that, Hitler quickly understood that the war would be a long one. Two days later, on the 7th, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor marked the entry of the United States into a world war that had changed forever. Heydrich cancelled the invitations he had sent for Hitler's ministers to meet on December 9 at the offices of Interpol, set up by Göring, at 16 Am Kleinen Wannsee. Hitler decided that European Jews had to be exterminated immediately, and not at the end of the war as he had planned.On December 18, the Führer discussed with Himmler the fate of the deportees from his famous “Wolf’s Lair” in Prussia, Himmler noted in his diary, avoiding mention of any explicit orders from Hitler, only noting: “Jews must be destroyed like partisans.”

Finally, on 8 January 1942, Heydrich again sent out invitations for the meeting of Nazi leaders on Tuesday 20 January, no longer at Interpol headquarters, but at the Villa Wannsee, at 56-58 Am Grossen Wannsee, overlooking Lake Wannsee. In addition to Heydrich and Eichmann, the following were invited: Gruppenführer Otto Hoffman, head of the SS Race and Settlement Office; Gruppenführer Heinrich Müller, one of the operational chiefs of the Gestapo; Dr. Karl Eberhard Schöngarth, Oberführer and commander of the Gestapo intelligence service; Dr. Oberführer Gerhard Klopfer, permanent secretary of the Reich Chancellery; Dr. SS Sturmbannführer Rudof Lange, commander of the Nazi intelligence service in Latvia; Dr. Georg Leibbrandt, Reich Undersecretary for the Occupied Eastern Territories; Dr. Alfred Meyer, State Secretary and Deputy Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories; Dr. Josef Bühler, State Secretary and authority over occupied Poland; Dr. Roland Freisler, Secretary of the Reich Ministry of Justice; Dr. Wilhelm Stuckart, Brigadeführer and Secretary of the Ministry of the Interior; Erich Neumann, Oberführer and Head of the Planning Office for the Four-Year Plan, the economic measures programme headed by Göring; Friedrich Kritzinger, Permanent Secretary of the Reich Chancellery; and Martin Luther, Reich Undersecretary for Foreign Affairs.
Heydrich opened the meeting and spoke for an hour. There would be no debate on any of his proposals: the powerful SS chief was reporting the decisions taken by Hitler (his name was never mentioned in the minutes), Göring, Himmler and Heydrich himself. Using the meticulous notes prepared by the Eichmann, Heydrich had divided into two groups of countries: A and B. A included the territories occupied or under Reich control. B included allies, client states, neutral countries or those already at war with Germany. Both lists showed the number of people to be eliminated in each. Heydrich outlined the different measures that Nazism had carried out since its rise to power and reported the decision to “evacuate them to the East” as a “temporary solution prior to the final solution.” He explained: “Under proper direction, the Jews will be sent to the East to be used for work in an appropriate manner. In large work columns, under separation of the sexes, the Jews capable of labor will be brought to these areas to build roads; during which, undoubtedly, a large part will be eliminated by natural causes. Those of the possible final remnant, being undoubtedly part of the most resistant portion, will have to be treated according to this condition, as the natural selection they represent, since if released they would act as the seed of the Jewish renaissance.” Thus said the minutes written by Eichmann: The crimes were simulated under the euphemisms “in an appropriate manner”, “they will be eliminated by natural causes” or “treated according to this condition”, “the corresponding treatment” would be applied to them.
Hitler's heir apparent then also reported what had already been decided. To avoid legal and political difficulties, he said, it was essential to specify who should be "evacuated." He then defined a category of Jews who would not be killed, including veterans of the First World War who had been wounded or who had received the Iron Cross. He then spoke of those who had only part Jewish blood or who were married to non-Jews, a no-man's land that the Nuremberg Laws had deliberately left in a nebula. He also spoke of "Mischlinge," a derogatory word that the Nazis used to define mixed-race people. He said that there would be first-degree Jews, with two Jewish grandparents who would be treated as such, which was equivalent to murder. This rule would not apply to those who were married to a non-Jew and had a child in common.
Second-degree Mischlinge, with only one Jewish grandparent, were to be treated as Germans unless they were married to a first-degree Mischling or a “pure Jew,” or “had a special and undesirable racial appearance by which they were distinguished as Jews,” or were burdened with a “political record showing that they felt or acted like Jews.” Finally, Heydrich spoke of gaining “practical experience in the process of the forthcoming final solution of the Jewish question,” which, it was estimated at Wannsee, would include eleven million people and entailed a manhunt that would reach England and Ireland, Switzerland, Spain, Turkey, and the French colonies in North Africa.
Heydrich was punctual, precise and meticulous because he sensed that there would be resistance to his proposal, which was not a proposal at all, but a decision already taken by the highest authorities of the Reich. He was wrong. Those summoned to the conference were enthusiastic and supported the extermination plan.. Otto Hoffmann, head of the Central Office for Race and Settlement, raised the legal and administrative difficulties of mixed marriages and proposed their compulsory dissolution or annulment and the wider use of sterilisation as an alternative. Erich Neumann, who was implementing the economic programme laid down by the Four-Year Plan, asked for leniency for Jewish workers in vital war industries: Heydrich promised him that they would not be executed. Josef Bühler, State Secretary in the Central Government, fully supported the plan and called for executions to begin as soon as possible.
At the close of the conference, The Nazi leaders served cognac, toasted and drank. When he was tried in Jerusalem for his war crimes, Eichmann recalled: “The gentlemen stood or sat together and talked about the subject in a language quite different from that which I had to use later for the reports. They did not mince their words. They talked about methods of killing, of liquidation, of extermination.” Eichmann had received precise instructions from Heydrich that the minutes should not be verbatim and that nothing explicit should appear in them. At his trial in Jerusalem in 1961 he recalled: “How should I say it? Some exaggerated language and jargon had to be translated by me into office language. I could not stand there and just listen. But the words did reach me.” Finally, he admitted that at Wannsee “it was agreed upon what the different methods of murder would be,” and that some expressions intended for Jews such as “appropriate treatment,” as transcribed in his minutes, meant murder. Ian Kershaw, the great Hitler biographer, explains in his work: “Although, as Eichmann later testified, there was explicit talk of killing, eliminating and exterminating, Heydrich was not organizing an existing, definite program of killing in extermination camps. But the Wannsee Conference was a key step on the road to the terrible genocidal outcome".
Heydrich did not live to see the results of his plan of extermination. Four months and seven days after Wannsee, on 27 May 1942, two Czech partisans trained in London by the British Special Operations Directorate, who had parachuted into Czech territory from a Royal Air Force plane, dropped a bomb in front of Heydrich's car, a Mercedes 320 with the license plate "SS 3". Wounded, the Nazi leader tried to pursue his attackers with a pistol in his hand, but was shot and wounded in the diaphragm, spleen and lung. He died on 4 June in a Prague hospital.
Nothing that was said and written at Wannsee would have been known if it had not been for a twist of fate. In 1947, the American prosecutor Robert Kempner found in the archives seized by the Allies from Hitler's Foreign Office a fifteen-page document with a disturbing stamp, “Reich Confidential Document,” and an innocuous title: “Minutes of Meeting.” These were Eichmann's minutes of the Wannsee Conference. Thirty copies had been made and all had been destroyed by their owners at the end of the war, so that no traces would remain.. All but one, number sixteen, had belonged to Martin Luther, Hitler's undersecretary for foreign affairs, who had died of a heart attack in May 1945, days after Hitler's suicide, the fall of the Reich and Germany's defeat. Prosecutor Kempner used this copy as evidence at the Nuremberg trials that followed the Nazi trials in 1946.
Adolf Hitler's name never appeared in any of the Wannsee minutes, or in any other official or private document that spoke of his plan to exterminate the Jews of Europe. But on January 30, 1942, ten days after Wannsee, Hitler spoke on the ninth anniversary of his rise to power in Germany. Before a rapturous audience that filled the Berlin Sportpalast, he said: "We are very clear that the war can only end either with the extermination of the Aryan peoples or with the disappearance of the Jews from Europe (...). I already said on September 1, 1939 in the Reichstag (and I try not to make hasty prophecies) that this war will not end as the Jews imagine, with the extermination of the European Aryan peoples, but that the result of this war will be the annihilation of Jewishness. The old Jewish law will now be applied for the first time: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.
Wannsee had opened the doors of horror.
A very complete article.
It is somewhat disconcerting that Spain appears as one of the countries where the Nazis had planned to exterminate all the Jews, when the Spanish fascists pretend to be beings on the same level as their former German Nazi comrades, if not of a higher level. Franco almost cheated Hitler in the famous interview in Hendaye, in a train carriage on the border of Spain with France, when fascist Spain refused to participate in the Second World War, naturally on the side of Germany, due to the very precarious situation in which Spain was left after the Civil War, and, above all, because Hitler refused to give in to anything in return for the compensations that Franco asked of him, according to his brother-in-law and Minister of Foreign Affairs, Serrano Suñer, a pro-Nazi Falangist who acted as a bridge between fascist Spain and Nazi Germany. Hitler yawned while Franco asked him in return: French Morocco, Oranésado and territories up to Libya, he seems to have said in an interview, he did not mention Gibraltar, which is a pain in the ass. The Spanish fascists have permanent positions, although it seems that Germany was at least close to reaching Gibraltar, without the possibility of an impediment from the impoverished Spanish fascist army, only the refusal of its friend Franco prevented it. Recently, England also declassified documents from the Second World War on payments that Churchill authorized to the highest figures of the Franco government, including his older brother Nicolás, to influence the very fascist and very anti-Semitic Franco to desist from entering the Second World War alongside Nazi Germany.
This is apart from the fact that the Spanish fascists always say or have created a public image of not knowing anything about what their former criminal friends, the German Nazis, were doing. Perhaps in Spain nothing else would have happened than what happened in Northern Italy, in the Italian Republic of Salò, when Hitler rescued Mussolini from his prison in the Alps, only to force him to take over this puppet state of Germany, so that the Italians could serve as slave workers for the war needs of the Nazis, while the same Italian fascists suffered hardship and hunger, or the Nazis also imposed their own laws, including racial laws against the Jews, that was when many were deported to concentration camps when before, with Mussolini's fascist government, they could more or less live peacefully.