Stage 7: Preparation

On Jan. 20, 1942, fifteen high-ranking Nazi officials met in a villa on Lake Wannsee on the western edge of Berlin to plan and prepare the steps for a final solution of the Jewish question in Europe.  The “Jewish question,” an antisemitic idea that the Jewish minority was a problem that needed a solution.

Planning the "Final Solution" took all of 90 minutes. The Nazi officials wrote a 15-page plan to murder all of the Jews in Europe. The written plans do not explicitly refer to murder. They use phrases like “evacuation” and “reduction” and “treatment” — and divide up the task among different government departments and their “pertinent specialists.” The protocol summarized the scope of the task in a detailed statistical table of Jewish populations across Europe, including not just the Soviet Union, but England, Ireland and Switzerland.

“The evacuated Jews will first be taken, group by group, to so-called transit ghettos, from where they will be transported onward to the East,” it continued. “With regards to the manner in which the final solution will be carried out in those European territories which we now either control or influence, it has been suggested that the pertinent specialists in the Foreign Ministry should confer with the responsible official of the Security Police and the SD.”

It was the language of bureaucrats. But there was never any doubt what the document was laying out: “The complete elimination of the European Jews,” as Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s chief propagandist, wrote in his diary after reading the minutes.