Wannsee Conference

On 20 January 1942 Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Reich Security Main Office, met fifteen senior officials of Nazi ministries, the party and the SS in a villa on the Wannsee lake in Berlin. Over about ninety minutes they coordinated the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question": the deportation of the Jews of all Europe to the east, where they would be worked to death or killed. The minutes, written by Adolf Eichmann, listed some 11 million Jews country by country, including those of Britain, Ireland, Switzerland and other lands not under German control, and used euphemisms such as "evacuation" and "appropriate treatment".

Mass murder had already begun in the east, and the conference did not decide on it, but it organized the bureaucracy for genocide across the continent. The only surviving copy of the minutes, number 16 of 30, was found in the German Foreign Office files in 1947 and used at the Nuremberg trials. The villa has been a memorial and education centre since 1992.