Video: 'The House of the Wannsee Conference'

(Tuesday, January 20, 1942, approximately noon-1:30 p.m. Central European Summer Time; during The Holocaust, part of World War II) — 15 high-ranking Nazi Party and German government officials gathered today at a villa in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee to discuss and coordinate the implementation of what they called the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question,” an attempt to exterminate the entire Jewish population of Europe, an estimated 11 million persons.

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The Wannsee Conference was called by the director of the Reich Security Main Office SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich to ensure the co-operation of administrative leaders of various government departments in the implementation of the Final Solution to the Jewish question, whereby most of the Jews of German-occupied Europe would be deported to occupied Poland and murdered.

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Conference participants included representatives from several government ministries, including state secretaries from the Foreign Office, the justice, interior, and state ministries, and representatives from the SS.

In the course of the meeting, Heydrich outlined how European Jews would be rounded up and sent to extermination camps in the General Government (the occupied part of Poland), where they would be killed.