The anniversary of that fateful meeting has a special resonance at a time when survivors of the Holocaust are dwindling and antisemitism and the ideology of white supremacy are resurgent in Europe and the United States, along with attacks targeting Jewish people and ethnic minorities
The former concentration camp of Auschwitz, now the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, on the outskirts of Oświęcim in Poland on April 10, 2015. By the time the Wannsee Conference convened, the genocide was already underway.
Image: James Hill/The New York Times
BERLIN — On Jan. 20, 1942, 15 high-ranking officials of the Nazi bureaucracy met in a villa on Lake Wannsee on the western edge of Berlin. Nibbles were served and washed down with cognac. There was only one point on the agenda: “the organizational, logistical and material steps for a final solution of the Jewish question in Europe.”
Planning the Holocaust took all of 90 minutes.
Eighty years after the infamous Wannsee Conference that meticulously mapped it out, the bureaucratic efficiency of it remains as unnerving as ever.
The minutes taken that day and typed up on 15 pages do not explicitly refer to murder. They use phrases such as “evacuation” and “reduction” and “treatment” — and divide up the task among different government departments and their “pertinent specialists.”
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