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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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
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307
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 envisaged: ‘As part of the develop-
ment of the final solution the Jews are now to be put to work in a suitable
manner under the appropriate leadership. Organized into large work gangs and
segregated according to sex, those Jews fit for work will be led into these areas as
road-builders, in the course of which, no doubt, a large number will be lost by
natural wastage.’ The ‘remainder who will inevitably survive’ will, ‘since they are
the ones with the greatest powers of endurance’, ‘have to be dealt with accord-
ingly’ to prevent their becoming ‘the germ cell of a new Jewish regeneration’.
Initially the Jews were to be taken to ‘transit-ghettos’, from which they were to
be ‘transported further towards the East’.
Heydrich thus developed the conception of a gigantic deportation programme
which would only be fully realizable in the post-war period. Those Jews who were
deported ‘to the East’ were to be worked to death through forced labour or, if they
should survive these tribulations, they would be murdered. The fate of those ‘unfit
for work’, children and mothers in particular, was not further elucidated by
Heydrich. In the context of the speech as a whole, however, and of the murderous
practice that had predominated for months in the occupied Soviet territories, and
since the beginning of December in Chelmno, it is clear that they too were to be
killed, because Heydrich wanted to prevent the survival of the ‘germ cell of a new
Jewish regeneration’ at all costs.
Heydrich’s statement indicates that the RSHA was at this time still proceeding
according to the plan, followed since the beginning of 1941, of implementing the
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‘Final Solution’ of the Jewish question after the end of the war in the occupied
Eastern territories. Heydrich also made it clear what was understood by the
phrase ‘Final Solution’: the Jews were to be annihilated by a
combination of
forced labour and mass murder. The fact that it was Jewish forced labour that
gained importance early in 1942 suggests that Heydrich’s remarks should be taken
literally. 10 Tellingly, only a few days before the Wannsee Conference, on 12
January 1942, the HSSPF Ukraine instructed the Commissars General in Brest-
Litovsk, Zhitomir, Nikolayev, Dnepropetrovsk, and Kiev to start immediately
preparing for the establishment of ghettos so that ‘Jews from the Old Reich
could be accommodated in the course of 1942’. 11 By contrast, there is no evidence that there was any plan at this point to deport the Jews from Central and Western
Europe directly to extermination camps on Polish soil. On the contrary, the first
deportations from countries outside Germany, those from Slovakia and France,
which began in the spring of 1942, as well as the ‘third-wave’ deportations from
the Reich, which were taking place at the same time, did not lead directly to the
gas chambers of the extermination camps. It was not immediately before or after
the Wannsee Conference, but in the spring of 1942 that the capacity of the
extermination camps was hastily extended at very short notice.
The minutes of the Wannsee Conference do, however, make it clear that, on the
one hand, the idea of a post-war solution was being firmly adhered to, while at the
same time there was a debate over the proposal to exempt the Jews in the General
Government and the occupied Soviet territories from this general plan and kill
them in the short term.
Five weeks before the Wannsee Conference, Governor General Frank had
already learned that the deportation of the Jews from the General Government
could not be counted on even in the medium-to-long term. 12 He drew the conclusions from this knowledge at a meeting on 16 December:13
In Berlin they said to us, ‘Why are people making such a fuss? We can’t do anything with
them in the Ostland or in the Reichsommissariat either; liquidate them yourselves!’
Gentlemen, I must ask you to resist any sense of compassion. We must annihilate the
Jews wherever we find them and whenever this is at all possible, in order to maintain here the whole structure of the Reich.
However, the method and time-frame for this mass murder were still undecided
in mid-December 1941, as we can see from Frank’s further remarks:
We can’t shoot these 3.5 million Jews, we can’t poison them, but we will be able to intervene in a way that will somehow lead to their successful extermination—in the context of the
greater measures that are to be discussed in relation to the Reich. The General Government must become just as free of Jews [judenfrei] as the Reich. Where and how that happens is a matter for the official bodies that we must set up and deploy here, and in due course I shall let you know how effective they are being.
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The determination of the leadership of the General Government to achieve this
‘successful extermination’ in the short term provides the context for the remarks
made by the State Secretary, Bühler,the representative of the government of the
General Government, towards the end of the Wannsee Conference. Bühler stated
that the General Government would ‘welcome it if the final solution to this
question could begin in the General Government, because, in the first place, the
problem of transportation does not play a decisive role here and because these
measures will not be obstructed by issues involving labour deployment’. More-
over, the approximately 2.5 million Jews who were to be removed from the
General Government ‘as soon as possible’ were overwhelmingly ‘unfit for work’.
Thus Bühler was clearly proposing that the majority of the Jews in the General
Government should be murdered within the General Government itself, and that
they should no longer be used, as Heydrich had suggested, ‘to build roads’ in the
occupied Eastern territories.
Then the conference participants went a step further, and discussed the
question of how the Jews in the General Government and the occupied Soviet
territories were actually to be ‘removed’—in other words they talked in concrete
terms about the method for murder: ‘In the concluding stages different possible
solutions were discussed. Both Gauleiter Dr Meyer [the representative of the
Eastern Ministry] and State Secretary Dr Bühler argued that certain preliminary
measures for the final solution should immediately be taken in the relevant area
itself, although in such a way as to avoid causing disquiet among the local
population.’
These ‘preliminary measures’, however, can only have meant one thing: the
construction of extermination camps in the district of Lublin: Belzec was already
under construction, while Sobibor may have been at the planning stage. However,
the minutes do not provide any evidence that any decision was taken on the
proposals of Meyer and Bühler at the conference itself.
In fact the Wannsee Conference took place at a watershed. The original plan,
for which concrete steps had already been taken, for the comprehensive deport-
ation and annihilation of the Jews in camps in the occupied Soviet territories
(‘road-building’ as a synonym for forced labour in inadequate conditions) was still
being adhered to. However, at the same time it had become clear that the
precondition for this, an impending victory, could not be expected at least in
the short term, while in the meantime hundreds of thousands of people had been
killed in the occupied Polish territories, in Serbia, and the Soviet Union, and there
were plans to extend these massacres.
Thus, the Wannsee minutes that have survived provide a snapshot of a stage
reached in a process in the course of which the SS leadership had shifted its
perspective away from the idea of a post-war ‘final solution’ to the new aim of
implementing ever more stages of the ‘Final Solution’ during the war, in other
words to ‘anticipate’ it, while at the same time this new perspective still included
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the post-war period. During this critical period, the deportation to the occupied
Soviet territories increasingly became a fiction, while mass murder in the
General Government increasingly became reality. During the greatest crisis of
the war so far, the ‘Final Solution’ of the ‘Jewish question’ that had originally
been intended, namely the mass deportations to the occupied Soviet territories,
was becoming increasingly illusory. In this context Heydrich wished to convey
the impression to those responsible for the persecution of the Jews that the
RSHA had a plan whereby the mass murders which had begun in different ways
in various occupied territories, which represented a hitherto unimaginable
realization of state terror, could lead to a ‘total solution’ that could be imple-
mented in the long term.
While Heydrich adhered to the scheme of deportations to the occupied Eastern
territories and allowed no doubts that the deportees would be violently killed
there, the minutes of the discussion make it clear that other solutions had already
been considered, namely the possibility of murdering all the Jews in the General
&nb
sp; Government in situ. This idea was plainly accepted after the Wannsee Conference,
and it also became gradually accepted that the deportations from the rest of
Europe, originally planned for the occupied Soviet territories, were to be diverted
to the extermination sites under construction in the General Government. On 20
January 1942, Heydrich had two chief concerns: the deportations had to be
accepted (everything that happened after the deportations was an internal SS
matter, and no longer had to be agreed with other institutions). Secondly, the
category of those to be deported had to be established: the status of Mischlinge and
those married to non-Jews had to be clarified.
This latter issue was dealt with in the second part of the conference. Heydrich
suggested that ‘Mischlinge of the first degree’ who were married to ‘Aryans’ were
as a rule to be deported or dispatched to a ‘ghetto for the aged’. Heydrich pointed
out that the complicated classification of Mischlinge by the Nazi racial laws would
have required numerous individual decisions. The State Secretary in the Reich
Ministry of the Interior, Wilhelm Stuckart, objected to the ‘endless administrative
work’ that this would inevitably produce, and suggested ‘a move to compulsory
sterilization’. This disagreement could not be settled at the conference, and was
thus to be addressed in several subsequent meetings, albeit without any conclusive
results. 14
However, by being included in the detailed discussion of the problems sur-
rounding Mischlinge and ‘mixed marriages’, the representatives of the ministerial
bureaucracy came to share both knowledge of and responsibility for the ‘Final
Solution’. For, with the concerns they raised against the inclusion of marginal
groups in the deportations, the representatives of the ministerial bureaucracy had
made it plain that they had no concerns about the principle of deportation per se.
This was indeed the crucial result of the meeting and the main reason why
Heydrich had detailed minutes prepared and widely circulated.
Part V
THE EXTERMINATION OF THE EUROPEAN
JEW, 1942–1945
Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews Page 55