What Happened to the 15 Men Who Planned the Wannsee Conference? JJ
20 January 1942, Berlin. Nazi Germany The winter of 1941–1942 settles over Europe. Just weeks ago, German forces are thrown back from the gates of Moscow, and in December 1941 the United States enters the war, turning the Second World War finally global. Yet inside the Nazi leadership, these setbacks change nothing. While the front collapses into frost and chaos, the 15 elite men of the regime focus relentlessly on their murderous campaign against the Jews of Europe. Among them is Reinhard Heydrich who serves as the director of the Reich Security Main Office which
is the Nazi intelligence agency and main force in suppressing any opposition in occupied Europe. On the morning of 20 January 1942, cars arrive quietly at a villa by the frozen lake at Wannsee at the Berlin suburbs. The men who step out – officials, lawyers, SS officers – come not to discuss military strategy, but to refine a system of extermination already underway across Eastern Europe. They gather under Heydrich’s command to coordinate the Final Solution to the Jewish question, which was the code name for the physical annihilation of
the European Jews. During this secret meeting, Heydrich envisions that some 11 million Jews, some of them not living on German-controlled territory, will be eradicated as part of the Nazi program. In the end, 6 million Jews will be murdered by the end of the Second World War. The aforementioned secret meeting during which genocide is organized at a conference table will become known as the Wannsee Conference and its participants will eventually face justice for their crimes. The killing of Jews had been under way already
before the Wannsee Conference. Across the conquered territories of Eastern Europe, Einsatzgruppen, mobile SS killing units, followed the German army, rounding up and shooting Jewish men, women, and children. In the city Kamianets-Podilskyi, 23 600 Jews were murdered on 27 and 28 August 1941 and mass murder went on, when in the ravine of Babyn Yar near Kyiv, 33,771 Jews were murdered in two days at the end of September 1941. In Odessa, Riga, Minsk and other cities the same horror unfolded – villages were emptied,
innocent civilians were forced to dig their own graves before being cut down by machine gun fire. In hundreds of towns and forests of Eastern Europe, the sound of gunfire echoed for hours. Mothers clutched their children and families fell together into the mass graves. These were not chaotic acts of war but organized, documented operations – mass murder carried out as policy. By the winter of 1941–1942, the slaughter had reached a scale that could not be hidden. Entire Jewish communities had vanished, their possessions catalogued, their names erased. Yet for the Nazi
regime, the shootings were not efficient enough. The killing by bullet was slow, wasteful of ammunition, and left psychological scars on the men who carried it out. The Einsatzgruppen had murdered hundreds of thousands of people by the end of 1941, but their work was proving unsustainable. The Nazi leadership sought a new method – a cleaner and quieter system of death. Heydrich’s mission was to bring order to the chaos. The ghettos in Warsaw, Łódź, and Vilnius were bursting and diseases and starvation claimed thousands every week. On
the territory of occupied Poland, the first Nazi extermination sites were already taking form. At Chełmno, victims were loaded into sealed trucks whose exhaust pipes had been redirected inward and the drivers would start the engines and wait for the screams from the back of the car to stop. The future extermination camps – Bełżec, Sobibor, and Treblinka, were under construction or planned, designed to kill not hundreds but thousands every day. Gas chambers would soon replace bullets and efficiency would replace chaos. At the end of 1941, Heydrich sent invitations
to the Wannsee conference, shielding himself also with a letter from Hermann Göring that granted him total authority to coordinate the Final Solution. The men who came that morning to the villa were the important parts of a bureaucratic machine: lawyers, officers, and officials who could make the trains run, the orders pass, and the documents disappear if necessary. They arrived not to question the purpose of the mass murder, but to perfect its execution. Heydrich began the meeting with a report. For years, he said, Germany had sought to remove
Jews from its territory through forced emigration. In his new policy, emigration had been replaced by a new policy – evacuation to the East. The phrase was deliberately mild but was a cover name for an extermination. Deportations from ancient European cities like Vienna, Prague, and Berlin were already under way and Jews were being sent to ghettos in occupied Poland, where they were dying slowly from hunger, diseases and exhaustion. The men around the table knew this, but none said the word kill or murder – the language of genocide was cloaked in euphemism.
Heydrich outlined the plan in measured tones. Jews fit to work were to be sent to the labour camps in the East, where most would die of exhaustion, hunger, or disease. Heydrich said: “In large work units, separated by gender, Jews who are fit for work will be led to these areas to build roads, whereby a large proportion will undoubtedly die of natural causes. The remaining population, which will undoubtedly be the most resilient, will have to be treated accordingly, as it represents a natural selection and, if released, could become the nucleus of a new Jewish community.”
Heydrich´s language was coded but unmistakable. Eleven million Jews across Europe fell within the scope of the plan, including those in neutral and enemy countries such as England, Spain, and Sweden. SS-Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann, seated quietly nearby, has prepared detailed charts listing the Jewish populations of every European country, down to the last thousand. The conversation soon turned to practical questions of definition. Who was to be classified as a Jew? What of people with one or two Jewish grandparents?
Wilhelm Stuckart, co-author of the Nuremberg Race Laws, spoke with the detached tone of a legal scholar. Mixed marriages, he suggested, could be dissolved by decree, and the children would be sterilized to prevent “racial pollution.” Since Heydrich had a different view on this topic, participants agreed to postpone these detailed questions to conferences dealing with this topic in the future. The others nodded in agreement. Josef Bühler, the representative of the General Government created from the part of former Polish territory,
urged that the Final Solution should begin immediately in this territory, and he pointed out that there was no transport problem there, so the Jewish question could be solved more quickly. When the discussion ended, the tone remained calm, even casual. Servants brought food and wine while the men chatted, smoked, and joked, departing satisfied that the matter had been neatly settled. The minutes of the meeting created by Adolf Eichmann recorded their decisions in clinical, bureaucratic language. There was no mention of death of thousands, only of evacuation,
resettlement and natural reduction. Of the thirty copies distributed, only one survived, found in 1947 among the files that had been seized from the German Foreign Office. This single document remained one of the most chilling records in modern history, proof that the murder of millions was not born in rage but drafted in order in the villa in the Berlin suburbs. From the morning of 20 January 1942 when the Wannsee conference took place, the machinery of death moved with terrifying efficiency. Less than 2 months later in March 1942,
killing operations at Bełżec began and continued until December 1942. Sobibor began operating in May 1942 and was functional until October 1943. The killing centre at Treblinka opened in July 1942 and closed in August 1943. They were all located in the German-occupied Poland and operated with industrial precision. The victims, who arrived in trains, were told they were being relocated for labour and their luggage was tagged, valuables confiscated, and within minutes after their arrival, they were stripped naked, herded into chambers disguised as showers, and gassed.
As the war turned against Germany, many of the men from the conference met their own ends and some paid the highest price for their crimes. Reinhard Heydrich did not live to see the system he designed reach its peak. On 27 May 1942, Czechoslovak resistance fighters attacked his car in Prague and he died a few days later. In reprisal, German forces murdered hundreds of men, women, and children in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Roland Freisler, the most fanatical and infamous judge who served the Nazis,
was killed by devastating air raid against Berlin in February 1945. The People’s Court building was hit while Freisler was presiding over a trial and a falling masonry column came crushing down on him, killing him instantly. Rudolf Lange, who had overseen mass shootings in Latvia before Wannsee, took his own life in 1945 as the Red Army advanced against the city of Poznań, which Lange was defending as a commander. Alfred Meyer, state secretary for the occupied eastern territories, also committed suicide in the final days of the war. Heinrich Müller, the Gestapo chief, vanished in
the ruins of Berlin in the last days of the Second World War. He was most likely killed or committed suicide during the chaotic fall of Berlin, but his body, if recovered, was never identified. Eberhard Schöngarth was captured by the British forces after the war and was brought before a military court. Ironically, he did not go before the court because of mass murder of thousands, but for the execution of a captured Allied airman. Despite this fact, his conviction led to his hanging in Hameln Prison on 16 May 1946. His execution was justice for the
thousands of lives he had taken during the war. Josef Bühler, who had urged that the extermination begin in Poland, was captured after the war, tried in Kraków, and executed in 1948. The irony is that this man, who so intensely demanded that the killings begin in the area where he served, begged for mercy and asked for clemency after the verdict was handed down, even through his wife. Given the crimes he participated in, it is not surprising that all his requests were denied. Adolf Eichmann carried on Heydrich’s work with tireless precision, organizing deportations
from every corner of occupied Europe. After the war, he fled to Argentina under a false name, but justice found him too. In 1960, Israeli agents captured him and two years later he was hanged in Jerusalem. Today, the house at Wannsee stands as a memorial. Yet it was here, on that winter morning in 1942, that genocide was organized not with shouts or blood, but with calm voices, deliberate words, and the turning of pages. Thanks for watching the World History Channel. Be sure to like and subscribe
and click the bell notification icon so you don’t miss our next episodes. We thank you and we’ll see you next time on the channel.