The conference that would determine the tragic fate of a few million people lasted only ninety minutes, as if even those involved were not aware of the historicity of their decisions.
Perhaps it was his fault that the meeting of the high-ranking Nazis was not to change the guidelines on the so-called Jewish Question, which was also being promoted according to the general plan, and a series of new concentration camps were on their way to even more mass extermination of the Jews. territories of Poland and USSR.
The decision on the genocide of its Jewish population Ευρώπης had been taken. Heinrich simply wanted, as Himmler's envoy, to ensure the greatest possible cooperation and the best coordination of the services that would manage the Final Solution of the Jewish Question. The extermination of a few million people was not an easy task, after all, and the full support of all was crucial.
What was arranged at that conference in the Berlin suburb in January 1942 would turn into what would become known as the Holocaust, a well-coordinated and systematic genocide of some 6 million Jews, two-thirds of Europe's Jewish population.
The extermination of the Jews was only part of his larger Nazi plan World War II, in which Germany and its allies chased and massacred many more population groups, such as the Roma, those suffering from incurable diseases, the political and religious enemies of the paranoid regime, the communists, the Jehovah's Witnesses, the Jehovah's Witnesses.
But also parts of the Slavic population and the conquered Poles, as well as the Soviet prisoners of war, practically those who did not fit into the racist ideals of Nazi rhetoric.
Today, the term "architect of the Holocaust" is often applied to Adolf Eichmann, but this is not accurate. Such an extensive and systematic operation needs many crutches to complete, an entire state mechanism.
The Final Solution evolved and materialized in the first 25 months of World War II. It was more of a process than an instantaneous event, an illegal plan to "kill the last Jew in German territory," as one of the graduates of the Final Solution that the assassins failed to destroy.
Most historians today agree that the Holocaust could not be attributed to a single decision or to a single person. It was a prolonged and progressively evolving process that began as early as 1940 and its fall France, when Eichmann conceived the comedic-tragic plan to send the Jews of Europe to the French colony of Madagascar. If we have to say, it was canceled because of the huge numbers to move and manage all these people.
The same happened with the subsequent Nazi plans to deport Jews to Palestine and Siberia, and even Africa or Latin America. In 1941, however, the Nazis conceived another plan: the death squads that massacred Jews in the conquered lands of Eastern Europe. But again it became clear that one genocide such specifications could not be performed by such meager means. Not even on the go.
Central planning and mobilization of every available medium was needed. Hitler authorized his three forefathers, Reinhard Heinrich, Heinrich Himmler and Adolf Eichmann, to account for the death of their poisonous ideology.
The Nuremberg trials of 1945 would bring to justice those who orchestrated and facilitated in every way one of the greatest crimes against humanity.
The toxic anti-Semitism that emerged in Germany after World War I quickly found the culprits of the national catastrophe: Jews and communists stabbed the state in the back and organized the capitulation of Germany. Jewish Bolshevism was nothing but butter in the bread of Nazi propaganda.
By the time the National Socialist German Workers' Party took over the country in 1933, the population had already been divided into "racially undesirable" and "racially valuable".
Theorists of Nazi ideology, such as Dietrich Eckart and Alfred Rosenberg, played a key role in Hitler's reasoning about what Germany's big problem was. As early as the early 1920s, its medicated anti-Semitism Hitler he likened the Jews to germs and called for a similar treatment with pathogenic microorganisms.
The term Jewish Question has its origins in this era and said nothing more than that the existence of Jews in Germany was its big problem. When the Nazi Party took the scepter in 1933, it began to apply increasingly stringent measures of segregation of Jewish citizens, before concluding that the Jews had to disappear at all costs from every inch of German territory.
The next step would be the open persecution of the Jews and the deprivation of their citizenship, through the racist Nuremberg Laws of 1935, and their relocation to a ghetto finally during the outbreak of World War II, before being transferred to concentration camps. turned into hells of death…
The conference in Wannsee, a suburb of Berlin, on January 20, 1942, brought together high-ranking government officials and the leadership of the SS to discuss the intensification of the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question" (Endlösung der Judenfrage), according to the official minutes of the conference.
The conference was orchestrated and chaired by Reinhard Heinrich, and what he really wanted was the cooperation of the party offices and the state services to send the Jews of German-occupied Europe to Poland and kill them.
There were representatives from each competent ministry (Foreign Ministry, Justice, Interior, etc.), as well as high-ranking government officials, as well as senior SS officials. Present were, say, names such as SS lieutenant colonel Adolf Eichmann, Lt. Gen. Otto Hoffmann, also Gestapo lieutenant general Heinrich Miller, Third Reich general secretaries Alfred Meyer and Ralod, and so on. sizes.
Despite the fact that the Nazis invaded Poland In September 1939 and from June 1941 the Jewish population of Europe was systematically exterminated, Heinrich protesting the slow pace of the Final Solution.
Heinrich even came to the conference with the written mandate of Hermann Goering on hand, dated July 31, 1941, which instructed him to formally submit and submit a plan for the "final settlement of the Jewish question" in the territories that had fallen under German control. .
The conference determined the final modus operandi: bring us the Jews and we will kill them, the SS said more or less. Clearly more difficult was their task of determining exactly who was officially a Jew, a step necessary to assess the size of the gloomy enterprise.
The conference lasted only 1,5 hours and resulted in the Wannsee Protocol, which Eichmann clarified, paying close attention to the wording so that there were no objections. The genocide of the Jews was now becoming an internal matter of the SS and the state apparatus now had on its backs simply transporting the victims to the door of the extermination camps.
Historians today consider the conference to be merely executive, purely organizational, indicating that it is no coincidence that none of Hitler's Himmler and Goebbels he was not there. It was the bureaucracy of the Holocaust, the microcosm of horror.
Only one of the 30 copies distributed to those present and rescued was eventually used as evidence in the Nuremberg trials, as it was clear that all those present were complicit in the genocide.
At that 1942 conference, Heinrich and his associates concluded that 11 million Jews in Europe were the ultimate goal of the Final Solution. And that the operation would be carried out exclusively by the SS, removing the burden from the troubled state apparatus.
Prior to this, the systematic extermination of European Jews had normally begun with the German invasion of Soviet Union in June 1941. While Operation Barbarossa was raging in rage at the front, on the sidelines of the battle, Himmler had formed a death squad of 3.000 men, consisting of secret police agents, the Gestapo, the SD and the Waffen-SS, to dispossess without much fuss Jews and communists in the lands that fell into the hands of the Axis.
And because their work was of the utmost importance, they were supported by 21 military battalions, some 11.000 men. Their first action was the massacre of 5.500 Polish Jews in Bialystok. In this mobile way 440.000 Jews were killed by December 1941 and the Final Solution became known to the SS detachments as a side action of the war. On December 18, Himmler recorded the blissful response of Hitler when he learned the numbers: "Kill them as partisans!" Some 800.000 Jews would be executed in this way and buried in mass graves.
Himmler was in charge of this first phase of the Final Solution, but when the second phase began, Heinrich was placed in charge. He was the one who conceived the idea of "industrial murder" and tried it for the first time in December 1941, sending the Jews of the Polish Lodz ghetto to the gas vans.
By the time two months later it was decided to intensify the Final Solution, Heinrich had already demonstrated the effectiveness of his method, that is, gas extermination. His inspiration was also the concentration camps in the far eastern territory of Poland.
The extermination camp in Belzek, occupied Poland, began to be built in October 1941 and was ready and operational by March of the following year. Until the summer of 1942, two other infernos operated there, Sobibor and Treblinka.
Operation Reinhardt was also known by its code name for the deadliest phase of the Holocaust, the genocide of Polish Jews in the gas chambers of Eastern Europe with the most effective Zyklon B gas now. New extermination camps were set up quickly (Auschwitz-Birkenau and Maidack) and by the end of the operation in 1943, some 2 million Jews had been killed. At the same time, the "Holocaust with bullets" (as opposed to the "Holocaust with gas"), the mass murder of ghetto Jews, continued.
Two-thirds of the total number of victims of the Final Solution were exterminated before February 2. By then Adolf Eichmann had already devised and activated his own assassination plan for the West from his headquarters in Berlin. The systematic phase of his own operation began in June 3 and German railway trains landed in the hells of Germany the stacked bodies of the Jews of Belgium, Bulgaria, Greece, Romania, Slovakia, France, Hungary. Italy, the Netherlands and even Scandinavia.
The cremation of the corpses to destroy the evidence began in the spring of 1943 and continued until the autumn, making Heinrich Himmler as happy as he was that October when he was to speak to the leadership of the Nazi Party in occupied Poland. At the Poznan Congress on October 6, Himmler explained why the Nazis considered it appropriate to kill women and children alongside Jewish men: "We made the difficult decision to wipe these people off the face of the earth," he said, among other things.
What happened to the protagonists of the Holocaust? Hitler and Goebbels committed suicide in the spring of 1945 to avoid falling into the hands of the Allies; Himmler committed suicide the day after his capture by the British; Heinrich was assassinated by Czech partisans in 1942; when he was captured by the Israeli secret services and hanged.
As for Goering, he was sentenced to death by the Nuremberg trials, but committed suicide the day before his execution…