The Wannsee Protocol: Object of Revisionist Falsification of History

The Wannsee Conference - which was initially scheduled for December 9, 1941 but postponed on short notice - took place on January 20, 1942 at a suburban villa on the shores of Berlin's Wannsee lake. Chaired by Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the Reich Security Main Office (Reichssicherheitshauptamt), 15 high-ranking officials of the German bureaucracy, the SS- and police-apparatus discussed the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question", while enjoying the lovely sight of the villa's gardens and the lake. It was only after the Protocol (minutes) of the conference was found in 1947 that the conference was named "Wannsee Conference" after its location.


The Holocaust History Project is proud to present a text based on a paper by Christian Mentel delivered in November 2009 at the memorial site House of the Wannsee Conference in Berlin, Germany. A longer German version is available here. An even more detailed German-language article with complete references can be downloaded here. In addition, the memorial site's multi-language webpage at www.ghwk.de offers a wealth of material, including scans of historical documents. For generous and invaluable assistance in translating the text and beyond, the author wishes to thank Gord McFee.

An Introduction to the Einsatzgruppen

Like every historical event, the Holocaust evokes certain specific images. When the Holocaust is mentioned most people immediately think of the concentration camps. They immediately envision emaciated victims in dirty striped uniforms staring incomprehensibly at their liberators or piles of corpses, too numerous to bury individually, being bulldozed into mass graves.

Those are accurate images. Those horrific scenes are real. They happened. But they are not all of the Holocaust. They are merely the end product of the systematization of the genocide committed by the Third Reich. The reality of that genocide began not in the camps or in the gas chambers but with four small groups of murderers known as the Einsatzgruppen formed by Himmler and Heydrich immediately before the invasion of the Soviet Union. They operated in the territories captured by the German armies during the invasion of the Soviet Union and, with the cooperation of German army units and local militias, murdered over a million men, women, and children. It was a story that did not end until 1952 when Otto Ohlendorf, the last surviving commander of an Einsatzgruppe (Einsatzgruppe D), climbed the steps of the gallows to pay for the more than 90,000 murders his command committed.

An article at the Holocaust History Project by Yale F. Edeiken introduces the Einsatzgruppen.

Before the Wannsee Conference Expansion of the Combat Zone

Seventy years ago, in December 1941, Japan began a war with the attack on Pearl Harbor that was joined a few days later by the Nazi Reich with its declaration of war on the USA. Thereby the European and Pacific wars became a world war.

On January 20, 1942, fifteen high-ranking bureaucrats of the Nazi regime came together for a conference, which later would become known as the "Wannsee Conference". It was no longer necessary at that time to come to a decision about the murder of the European Jews because it had already been underway for some time. The hitherto disenfranchisement, persecution and expulsion of the Jews had been replaced in the previous months by the extermination of the Jews.

In the following article, which appeared on December 11, 2011 in the Berlin daily "Tagesspiegel", the Berlin historian Ernst Piper describes the beginning of the Holocaust. Piper is known for his biography of Alfred Rosenberg, whom he characterized as "Hitler's principal ideologue". We thank Ernst Piper for his friendly permission to publish his article on our site, as well as the English translation by Gord McFee.

The German version is available here:

http://www.holocaust-history.org/piper/piper-deutsch.shtml

The English translation here:

http://www.holocaust-history.org/piper/piper-english.shtml

December 12, 1941: Hitler Orders the Final Solution

The historian Christian Gerlach proves that on this day Hitler made the fundamental decision to annihilate all European Jews.

Historians have long searched for the order to annihilate the Jews or - insofar as they excluded a Fuehrer-order - for other central documents. The Wannsee Protocol was rejected. Here second-level men were to be found, here they spoke not of an order, but rather an authorization of Hitler. Characteristically, a pre-arranged agreement applied to this meeting, ordered from above. At the least, documentary criteria had to be found that permitted plausible inferences as to place, point in time and personal construction of such a conversation. The research led nowhere.

Now however a 34-year old Berlin historian [translator's note: Geschichtswissenschaft is science of history] has precisely answered the old question. And to say it right up front: the proof is ingenious. He didn't publish it in one of the eternally boring academic tomes and in so doing made the right choice. The work appeared in Volume 18 (6th year, November 1997) of the unorthodox, independent magazine "Werkstatt Geschichte." Written with practically mathematical precision, the essay covers 37 pages, including 223 source notes. The title is: "The Wannsee Conference, the fate of German Jews and Hitler's fundamental political decision to murder all European Jews." The author's name is Christian Gerlach. He has found proof of an internal speech of Hitler's from 1941 that no other researcher had even mentioned before.

The original German edition of this article  appeared December 13, 1997 in theBerliner Zeitung. This article, and an English translation by Gord McFee appears with the friendly permission of the Berlin Verlag and the author at the Holocaust History Project.

http://www.holocaust-history.org/december-12-1941/