20th January 1942: Senior Nazis meet at the Wannsee Conference to discuss the "Final Solution" скачать в хорошем качестве

20th January 1942: Senior Nazis meet at the Wannsee Conference to discuss the "Final Solution"

SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich called the meeting, in which he outlined the deportation of European Jews to extermination camps in Poland where they would be systematically murdered. Six months earlier, on 31 July 1941, Hermann Göring had ordered Heydrich to submit plans ‘for the implementation of the projected final solution of the Jewish question’. Heydrich was a trusted member of the Nazi elite, and had been referred to by Hitler as ‘the man with the iron heart’. He had helped to organise Kristallnacht, establish Jewish ghettos in Nazi-controlled territories, and commanded the Einsatzgruppen prior to his planning of the Final Solution. Heydrich intended the Wannsee Conference to take place on 9 December 1941, but it was postponed due to the USSR’s counter-offensive in the Battle of Moscow and the entry of the USA into the war. Fifteen representatives from a variety of government ministries attended the delayed meeting on 20 January. By this time hundreds of thousands of Jews had been killed in the east, and the planning and construction of extermination camps had already begun. The meeting therefore focused on coordination between the various government agencies who were to implement the deportations. Minutes from the meeting survive as what is known as the Wannsee Protocol, although the language was edited so that mass extermination was never explicitly recorded.