Conspiracy

Emigration. Evacuation. Total solution. Final Solution.
Historians of the Holocaust may disagree as to exactly when this euphemistic Nazi phraseology took on its deadliest meaning. No single document has ever been found in which Hitler himself explicitly ordered the annihilation of European Jewry. Most historians agree, however, that at some point in 1941, after the launch of the Russian campaign (Operation Barbarossa), "evacuation" became more widely understood in the Nazi hierarchy as a codeword for systematic, industrial-scale murder, orchestrated by Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, and, until his assassination in the late spring of 1942, his second, Reinhard Heydrich. By that spring, the gas chambers were no longer experimental; they were operating to their full, ghastly capacity. Two crucial, surviving documents frame the period in which the ultimate meaning of the Final Solution went from theory to practice. First is a letter of July 31, 1941 (drafted by Adolf Eichmann at Heydrich's bequest) in which Reichsmarshall Hermann Göring authorizes Heydrich

"to carry out preparations as regards organizational, financial, and material matters for a total solution (Gesamtlösung) of the Jewish question in all the territories of Europe under German occupation… I charge you further to submit to me as soon as possible a general plan of the administrative material and financial measures necessary for carrying out the desired final solution (Endlösung) of the Jewish question."

The second document is what has come to be known as the Wannsee Protocol, the minutes of the infamous meeting of January 20, 1942 at Wannsee Haus, an elegant private home then being used as an SS guest house in a beautiful lakeside district of Berlin. The meeting, called by Heydrich and organized by Eichmann, brought together 15 high-ranking Nazi officials for a "discussion to be followed by a buffet lunch." Originally scheduled for December 9, 1941, the meeting was postponed due to the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7th and America's entry into the war. Two agendas were behind Heydrich's matter-of-fact invitation. Between the July order from Göring and Wannsee, the machinery for mass murder - the gas chambers - had been developed and tested. The major extermination camps were under construction. During the 90-minute meeting at Wannsee, Heydrich mobilized the administrative apparatus of the Third Reich to implement the escalation of Hitler's genocidal "Final Solution." Heydrich also made it clear that the SS - not the Nazi party or any of the government ministries represented at the meeting - would be calling the shots. What helped make this meeting extraordinary is that the minutes survived: Eichmann sent out 30 copies that were to have been destroyed after reading, but one copy was found in the files of the German Foreign Office in 1947. Even more extraordinary is how the minutes record in the most ordinary way a dispassionate discussion of the potential slaughter of what Eichmann estimated to be 11 million Jews throughout Europe - including England and other not-yet conquered territories.

The Jews Prior to Wannsee
When Hitler took power, there were perhaps only a half million Jews in Germany. Beginning with the Nuremberg Laws in 1935, German Jews had been stripped of their rights and their property. With his conquering of additional territory - first Austria, then Poland, Czechoslovakia and parts of the Soviet Union - his "Jewish problem" escalated. Suddenly, he had millions of Jews literally at his disposal. Hitler and his henchmen had experimented with lethal treatments at euthanasia centers for the mentally ill, disabled and political dissenters - including Jews. The Nazis had built internment and labor camps in which hard labor and dire conditions took their natural toll. Polish (and resettled German) Jews were crowded into ghettos of Warsaw, Cracow, Lublin and Radom, where disease was rampant due to overcrowding, unsanitary conditions and food shortages. The Nazis discussed plans to force all European Jews to resettle in a "super ghetto" in, of all places, Madagascar. They had discussed massive resettlement in part of eastern Poland. By the time of the Wansee Conference, they had encouraged the brutal slaughter of thousands and thousands of Jews in the eastern Occupied Territories (eastern Poland, the Baltics, White Russia and Ukraine) by the Einsatzgruppen, SS paramilitary forces supported by local police. Indeed, by January 1942, Estonia was "judenfrei" - free of Jews. But Himmler and Heydrich - and, presumably, their superiors - realized that you could not shoot to death the entire Jewish population of eastern Europe. (Besides, Himmler said, shooting all those victims was bad for the morale of the SS and German soldiers.) By the fall of 1941, they saw gas - Zyklon B - as the cheaper, "cleaner" and more efficient way of handling their so-called "storage problem" of the Jews. Evacuation could become elimination, relocation could - and would - become wholesale murder.

The Reconstruction of Events
What happened at Wannsee has been reconstructed primarily from three admittedly problematic sources: The Wannsee Protocol - which Eichmann described at his trial as highly expurgated to hide its true meanings and the freewheeling, sometimes vulgar discussion that took place; Eichmann's trial testimony, which is, of course, suspect; and interviews with five participants in 1947 by U.S. Prosecutor Robert M.W. Kempner. At these interviews, four of the Nazis denied having been at Wannsee until confronted with the Protocol, which listed their attendance. The fifth, Dr. Wilhelm Kritzinger of the Reichs Chancellery, expressed shame and regret for what happened at Wannsee. (Indeed, Kritzinger tried to resign from his post not long after Wannsee, but his superior asked him to remain because it would be "even worse" without him.)

The Discussion Itself
The discussion, as often grounded in legalistic language as in racist vitriol, was largely on two topics: plans for the "evacuation" of up to 11 million Jews from European life, "provided that the Führer gives the appropriate approval in advance." The Wannsee Protocol notes cryptically, "…practical experience is already being collected which is of the greatest importance in relation to the future final solution of the Jewish question." And solution to the "problem of mixed marriages and persons of mixed blood," the so-called Mischlinge. It is assumed that the "practical experience" - experiments underway with gas vans and construction of gas chambers - were indeed discussed by the participants. If any of the participants were not previously aware of these experiments or the mass executions underway in the Occupied Eastern Territories, they were made aware at the Conference. As for the Mischlinge, a complex, highly legalistic construction of racial purity had been laid out earlier in the Nuremberg Laws, co-written by Dr. Wilhelm Stuckart (the State Secretary of the Interior Ministry, and an attendee at Wannsee). Heydrich was attempting to get rid of "exemptions" for certain categories of part Jews; Stuckart surprised his colleagues by calling for cross-the-board sterilizations. The question was not resolved at Wannsee or at two subsequent conferences, and most Mischlinge in the Third Reich survived the war. The discussion at Wannsee, however, exemplifies how law, practicality and hatred butted up against each other in conversation frighteningly devoid of moral conscience.