In This Grand Mansion, Powerful People Have Made the Darkest Decision Europe Has Ever Suffered
On January 20th, 1942, the high ranking SS-officer Reinhard Heydrich had called a conference in the house at Wannsee in the south of Berlin. Here, some of the top leaders of the Nazi regime in Germany met and agreed on the final solution to the Jewish question – what we know today as the Holocaust.
The conference lasted only about 90 minutes and was chaired by Heydrich, the head of the Security Service (Sicherheitsdienst). He had been tasked by Air Minister Hermann Göring to find a solution to the “Jewish question”.
Heydrich’s idea was to clear Europe of Jews from west to east. First from Germany and later from the occupied territories. Few lives would be spared, most would be murdered.
In fact, the murder of Europe’s Jews had already begun on orders from Hitler himself. It especially took off when Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941. The so-called Einsatzgruppen carried out mass shootings of Soviet Jews, but the executions themselves demoralized the soldiers and became increasingly difficult to carry out.
So the conference at the Wannsee House had to end with a more effective plan, and the decision was an outline for a more effective extermination of Europe’s Jews called The Final Solution to the Jewish Question.
It wasn’t until later in 1942 that the plan to establish extermination camps such as Auschwitz, Sobibor, Belzec and Treblinka in German-occupied Poland and the train transportation of Jews to the camps was laid and executed.
Travel Back into the Dark History
Today, the house at Wannsee is a museum – a documentation center that you can visit and relive where the decision for the blackest chapter in European history was made.
You get to stand inside the magnificent rooms where Heydrich and the other top brass made the grim decision to mass murder Europe’s Jews.
In here you can read about the history leading up to the decision. You can read about and see pictures of the conference participants. And you can follow a series of photographs around the building of the consequences of the decision – what we know today as the Holocaust.
The evil in the images is in stark contrast to the beautiful surroundings you find yourself in. But it was here that the plan to exterminate the Jews of Europe was finally laid.
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