Figure 1.-- |
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NAZI officials saw the mass killing of Jews in the Soviet Union in the summer and fall of 1941 as being conducted in a disjointed and uncoordinate fashion. Himmler became concerned about the psychological impact on SS members of personally killing Jews, especially women and children. Now that the NAZIs contolled virtually all of western Europe and millions of Jews, it was felt that a coordinated plan was needed to efficently execute the "Final Sollution". The SS was the principal tool, but the killing of millions necesitated the cooperation of many different Government agencies. The was originally scheduled for December 9, 1941, but had to be postponed because of the stuningly successful Russian offensive in front of Moscow and after Pearl Harbor, Hitler's declaration of war on America. The meeting was finally held on January 20, 1942 in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee. The meeting was a secret sesion attended by 15 senior NAZI officials. The purpose was to coordinate the "Final Sollution"-the murder of 11 million Europen Jews. that had already began in Poland and the Soviet Europe. The decission to murder the Jew had already been taken. The Conference was to coordinate and immplement that decission.
No one knows when Hitle made the decision to kill 11 million European Jews. Nor do we know precisely when those orders were given to Himmler. As late as 1940, NAZI officials were toying with various schemes. One scheme was deporting all European Jews to Madagascar. It was, however, discarded as being completely impractical.
Obly one man in NAZI Germany could issue such a monentous order as the muder of millions of European Jews. While the process by which that ordered wound up in Reinhard Heydrich's hands is unclear, it is clear that Heydrich was the architect and coordinator of the Holocaust.
SS Einsatzgruppen had killed substantial numbers of Jews in Poland in 1939-40. Most Polish Jews, however, had been confined in Ghettos. The Einsatzgruppen wer expanded and used even more barbarically in the Soviet Unin in the summer andfall of 1941. They reported killed about 0.7 million Jews in the territories seized by the Wehrmact. Their methods were effectve, but NAZI officials concluded that a different more coordinated plan was needed in the more developed occupied countries in Western Europe.
SS staff formulated a draft plan to deport Jews from all over Europe to concentration camps in Poland which were being prepared as Death Camps. Jews strong enough would be put to hard labor. Children, the elderly, and those not it for labor were to be immediatly killed in industrial scale gas chambers being built in the Polish camps.
The SS estimated that the Polish camps would be fully opperational by July 1, 1942. The Jews in Poland had already been gathered into ghettos. The job of isolating, robbing, arresting, and transporting millions of Jews to the Polish Death Camps was a logigistical problem of enormous dimensions. To efficently implement th plan the close cooperation of several often competing Government agencies would be needed.
The Wannsee Conference was chaired by Reinhard Heydrich, head of the SD and the deputy for SS Reich Führer-SS. Himmler had put Heydrich in charge of coordinating SS operations against the Jews. Two other SS officils attended: Heinrich Müller (Gestapo Chief) and Adolf Eichmann (SS). [After Heydrich's assasination, Eichmann coordinated the Final Sollution for the SS.] The other paticipants show the range of involvement througout the German Government necessary to organize and administer the "Final Sollution: Dr. Wilhelm Stuckart (Reich Interior Ministry), Erich Neuman (Four-Year Plan), Dr. Roland Freisler (Reich Justice Ministry) [Freisler was the NAZI judge who brated the defendents in the trials following the attempted assasination of Hitler in 1944, he was later killed in an Allied bombing raid on Berlin], Dr. Josef Bühler (Office Government General) [the Government General was occupied Poland], Dr. Martin Luther (Foreign Office) [what a name for a man involved in mass murder.], Friedrich Kritzinger (Reich Chancellery)
Meyer, Liebbrandt (the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories, and officials from the Race and Settlement Main Office,
the Reich Security Main Office, and the Security Police and SD
The Conference was uthorized by Hermann Göring's letter to Heydrich, dated July 31, 1941. "I hereby commission you to carry out all necessary preparations . . . for a total solution of the Jewish question in the German sphere of influence in Europe." Heydrich assignmnt was to submit to Göring an "Overall Plan" for "the intended final solution of the Jewish question." There are many curious aspects to this memo. It suggests that Hitler verbally gave the order to Goering. This seems strange because Himmler as commander of the SS was more in a position to implement such an order. Many historians believe that it was Heydrich that wrote the memo and convinced Goering to sign the memo. The memo itself is currious. Heydrich was not in Goering's chain of command. Why did the order not come from Himmler to Heydrich? And why did Goering transfer the assignment to Heydrich. What appears clear is hat Heydrich wanted the assignment. No one knows for sure why this was, but it was presumably because it would increase his esteem in Hitler's eyes.
The plan prepared by the SS was discussed in detail. Heydrich explained that there were 11 million Jews in Europe. The plan was to collect and hold these Jews in transit ghettos. [HBC note: By this time this had already been accomplished in Poland and was well underway in other occupied countries, except the Soviet Union where the killing began frim the day of the invasion.] The Jews were to be sent east to create work gangs to build roads. Heydrich anticipated that "doubtless …fall away through natural reduction" and those who survived would "be dealt with appropriately." [Gilbert, p. 282.] Unmentioned was the fact that many of those 11 million Jews were children and elderly individuls who were mot suited for hard labor. Adolf Eichmann later explained to his Isreali interogators that those present clealy understood that those not suitable for work would be killed. There were some differences as to strategy, but not on the objective.
The official transcript of the Wannsee Convention is perhaps the most chilling document in all of modern history. We plan to assess it in detail. Heydrich carefully edited it to insure that innocuous terms were used to describe what it was effect the program to murder millions of people. Terms such as "evacuations to the East" were used to describe transports to death camps.
The result was the approval of the SS plan. Killings had already begun in Poland and the Soviet Union. Large-scale transport of Jews to be murdered were to be begun as oon as the Polish Death Camps were operational, estimated for July 1, 1942. The participants decided to begin with Jews in Western and Northern Europe. In practice the Jews in the Soviet Union and Poland were killed first.
Operations against Jews in the Soviet Union began almost immediately with Operation Barbarrosa, the invason of the Soviet Union. The actual schedule after the Confrnce was followed was: first Poland: Lublin (March 1942);
ghettos of Eastern and Western Poland (Spring 1942); and the Warsaw Ghetto (July-September 1942). The schedule was the Slovakian Jews (March-September 1942).
The killing of Dutch, Belgian and French Jews began in July 1942. The Hungarian Jews were the last to be killed at Auschwitz. Eichmann personally supervised the transport, rushing to accomplish his mission before the Germans were expelled by the Red Army.
The Conference shos how the entire German Government ws complicit in the mass murder. It also shows how the SS which had begun the killings with the Einsatzgruppen in Poland and the Soviet Union was now fully in charge of coordinated the entire process.
The discussions at the Confrence were not about whether or not to kill the Jews, but the most efficient process of murder. The Conference shifted the killing process from mass hootings in open pits by the Einsatzgruppen to the more efficient gassing opeations at the Polish Death Camps.
Berenbaum, Michael. The World Must Know (Ed. Arnold Kramer. Boston: Little, Brown, & Company, 1993).
Gilbert, Martin. The Holocaust: A History of the Jews of Europe During the Second World War (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1985).
Hitler, Adolf. Mein Kampf.
Padfield, Peter. Himmler: Reichsführer-SS (Henry Holt: New York, 1991), 656p.
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