Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews Peter Longerich (grave mercy .TXT) 📖

it was the centre that began to combine the various

approaches into an extension of the murders and draw up a unified programme

for the destruction of all European Jews which was to assume form in the spring

and summer of 1942.

chapter 16

THE WANNSEE CONFERENCE

On 29 November, when Heydrich invited a number of state secretaries, senior

officials, and SS officers to a meeting on 9 December, 1 at which he wished to discuss the planned ‘overall solution of the Jewish question in Europe’, the original

intention of the Nazi leadership to undertake the ‘Final Solution’ of the ‘Jewish

question’ after the end of the war had already been superseded: the Nazi regime

had by then killed several hundred thousand people, although in official parlance

Judenpolitik had not reached the stage of the ‘Final Solution’.

With the conference Heydrich plainly intended to outline the mass murders in

the various occupied territories to a number of senior officials of the Party and the

SS as well as leading civil servants as part of a ‘solution to the European Jewish

question’ ordered by Hitler and directed by the RSHA, and to ensure that they,

and especially the ministerial bureaucracy, would share both knowledge of and

responsibility for this policy.

The fact that on 8 December Heydrich was forced by the events of the war to

postpone the conference at short notice to 20 January 1942 gave him six weeks to

rethink his strategy for this major meeting. The change in the entire war situation

that followed the declaration of war on the USA may also have contributed to the

further radicalization of his attitude in the meantime.

A day after the declaration of war on the United States, on 12 December 1942,

Hitler made a speech to the Gauleiters and Reich leaders of the Party, in which he

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Final Solution on a European Scale, 1941

once again returned to his ‘prophecy’ of 30 January 1939, as Goebbels’s diaries

reveal:2

As regards the Jewish question, the Führer is resolved to make a clean sweep. He prophesied to the Jews that if they were to bring about another world war, they would bring about their own destruction as a result. This was not empty talk. The world war is here, the destruction of the Jews must be the necessary consequence. The question must be seen without

sentimentality. We are not here to show sympathy with the Jews, we must sympathize

with our own German people. If the German people has once again sacrificed around

160,000 fallen in the Eastern campaign, the authors of this bloody conflict will have to pay with their lives.

The fact that the world war was now ‘here’ gave particular emphasis to Hitler’s

prophecy, delivered repeatedly since early 1939, that the Jews of Europe would be

destroyed in the event of a world war. But it seems excessive to see Hitler’s speech

on 12 December as the announcement of a fundamental decision on Hitler’s part to

murder the European Jews. 3 It was more like a further appeal to accelerate and radicalize the extermination policy that had already been set in motion with the

mass executions in the Soviet Union, in Poland, and Serbia and the deportations

from Central Europe. In its radical rhetoric, this appeal corresponds (sometimes

literally) to Hitler’s statements of 25 October, but also to Goebbels’s article on 16

November and Rosenberg’s press conference on 18 November. From the period

around mid-December there are further indications that Hitler wanted to radical-

ize the persecution of the Jews still further after the USA joined the war, although

one could not conclusively deduce a ‘fundamental decision’ on Hitler’s part to

murder the European Jews from all of these documents. 4 Neither can Himmler’s brief note in his office diary about a conversation with Hitler on 18 December be

seen as additional evidence for Hitler’s ‘fundamental decision’ made a few days

previously. 5 The words: ‘Jewish question/to be extirpated as partisans’ represent a renewed confirmation on Hitler’s part that the mass murders of the Soviet Jews

were to be continued and intensified, albeit with the reservations already given. 6

The minutes of the Wannsee Conference provide very little information about

what Heydrich actually said in the SS villa on the Wannsee. 7 Its author, Eichmann, noted only the results, not the exact course of the conference. According to his

own recollections, the participants used far more drastic language; on Heydrich’s

instructions, he had used euphemistic language in the minutes. 8

As we do not know the exact words used in the conference, and since

Eichmann’s statements incriminating third parties can only be trusted with

certain reservations, the minutes should not be used as a basis for speculations

about what was ‘actually’ said at the conference. Instead it should be read as a

guideline authorized by Heydrich and revealed to representatives of a number of

authorities by the RSHA, which had been commissioned to deal with the final

solution of the Jewish question. The starting point for an interpretation of the

The Wannsee Conference

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RSHA’s Judenpolitik at the beginning of 1942 should not be the conference as

such, but rather Heydrich’s subsequent distillation of it, which he then used for

external purposes.

The central passage of Heydrich’s address concerning the general aims of the

future ‘Jewish policy’ is as follows:9 ‘After appropriate prior approval by the Führer, emigration as a possible solution has been superseded by a policy of

evacuating the Jews to the East.’ These ‘actions’ (the deportations that had

already been begun) were to be regarded merely as ‘temporary solutions’

(Ausweichmöglichkeiten), nonetheless ‘practical experience would be accumu-

lated’ which would be ‘of great importance for the impending final solution of

the Jewish Question’. The impending ‘final solution’ was envisaged as involving

11 million Jews, a figure which was broken down by country in a statistical

addendum to the minutes. This list not only includes Jews living in areas under

German control, but also those of Great Britain, Ireland, Portugal, Sweden,

Switzerland, Spain, and Turkey. Included in the 700,000 Jews for unoccupied

France are those of the North African colonies. Heydrich thus clearly distin-

guished the programme of deportations that had already been set in motion

from a far more comprehensive plan, whose execution he said was ‘dependent

on military developments’, and could therefore only be fully realized after a

German victory. According to the minutes, Heydrich made the following

remarks about the ‘Final Solution’ that he