The Wannsee Conference and the Final Solution: A Reconsideration

by Mark Roseman

On January 20, 1942, in a grand villa on the shore of Berlin's Lake Wannsee, a conference of Nazi officers produced a paper known as the "Wannsee Protocol," which laid the groundwork for a "final solution to the Jewish Question." This Protocol has always mystified us. How should we understand this calm, business-like discussion of holocaust? And why was the meeting necessary? Hundreds of thousands of Jews had already been shot by squads in Russia or gassed in the camp at Chelmno. Mark Roseman seeks to unravel this double mystery and explain how it was that on a snowy day, fifteen well-educated young men met to talk murder.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Holocaust, World War II, Germany, War, Military History

224 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2002

About the author

Mark Roseman is an English historian of modern Europe with particular interest in The Holocaust. He received his B.A. at Christ's College, Cambridge, M.A at Cambridge, and his PhD at University of Warwick. As of 2014 he is teaching history at the University of Indiana, Bloomington in the United States of America.

Reviews

[Jon Nakapalau · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just a small gathering...senior level functionaries...cogs in the machine...how do we go about implementing 'The Final Solution to the Jewish Question' - and then further conversation as cognac is served. Mark Roseman puts you there with the most horrifyingly 'banal' men history has ever known. Should be studied as the most detailed record we have of the planning of genocide.

[Checkman · Rating 4 out of 5]

A slim volume that examines the infamous Wannsee Conference that took place on January 20, 1942. Long considered to be the meeting where the "Final Solution" was decided upon Roseman reassess what the conference was about. Mark Roseman ,in this well researched book, looks at events that had transpired in Germany and the occupied territories in Eastern Europe over the previous five years (more or less). It's his contention that the Holocaust actually came about at the regional level mainly because the occupied territories in Eastern Europe simply couldn't support the large number of deported Jews as well as the local populations of Jews, Poles, Germans and so on. As a result local administrators began to kill off their local prisoners while the top level of the Nazi government gave conflicting guidance.

It's Roseman's thesis that Heydrich realized that events were moving towards genocide anyway and concluded that calling for a conference would serve a two fold purpose for him. First of all it would help to promote his career and bring him some attention (look at me everybody. I'm a self-starter who isn't afraid to have a meeting) and secondly it was an attempt to bring some central organization to what was still a rather decentralized approach of mass murder.

Essentially the Wannsee Conference was nothing more than a administrative meeting of bureaucrats trying to organize things and get the various subordinate organizations on the same sheet of music. Roseman does a good job supporting this thesis. Having worked for years at different levels of government (yes I am one of the leeches living off the taxpayers - of course I also pay taxes) I would have to say that Roseman succeeds. This is a very understated book. It isn't sensational and is not trying to shock the consciousness of the reader. The horrors of the Holocaust are well known. This book is horrifying because it looks at the bureaucracy that brought the genocide about.

[Ian Beardsell · Rating 4 out of 5]

When the bad guys in the movies say, "Take care of dose guys! Take care of them...with extreme prejudice..." everybody knows that "dose guys" are as good as dead. This is pretty much what happened at the luxurious lakeside manor house in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee in later January 1942.

Author Mark Roseman does a good job reminding us that the Wannsee protocol, essentially the meeting minutes taken at the one day conference, is not exactly a smoking gun for extensive plans for genocide that sealed the fate of millions of European Jews as the Holocaust accelerated beyond a point of no return. The most damning part of the protocol are just a couple of sentences around the plans to make labour camps so labor intensive that all of the workers will "essentially be lost due to the working conditions" while the hardier will "need to be taken care of via other special arrangements". Really, that is about it. No exhaustive plans with train schedules making quota deliveries to gas chambers and crematoria. Just vague remarks about the dire working conditions and considerations for special arrangements to ensure those who don't die of the hard labour will not survive. By this time of the war, the undersecretaries of the Reich government almost certainly understood the subtext of the meaning. The treatment of Jews, gypsies, communists, and other undesirables after the invasion of the USSR in the summer of 1941 were filtering down to their level. Indeed, Hitler himself was consulted several times by Heydrich, the Wannsee organizer, and his boss Himmler when they wanted to verify how to dispose of "useless eaters" in the eastern territories, and there was more pressure to clear Western Europe and the General Government area of occupied Poland of Jews so that more Germans had lebensraum.

An eerie appendix in the Wannsee Protocol itself is a tally of all the Jewish citizens of Europe organized into sections of German held, German occupied, or unoccupied territory. Make no mistake. Even though the Third Reich may have spoken of having all the Jews emigrate, possibly to Madagascar or Siberia, they definitely wanted to "get rid" of them all. Getting rid of them evolved by the end of 1941 into active genocide. Heydrich and Himmler used Wannsee essentially to get official buy-in to the programme, without making large and loud statements that could alarm the more sensitive. It was only a matter of the sensitive details around Zyklon B and train scheduling that needed working out at this point.

[Nadia · Rating 3 out of 5]

"On a snowy Tuesday morning, 20 January 1942, some fifteen senior officials gathered at the SD villa by the Wannsee lake."

Many historians have assumed that they gathered to discuss and plan the oncoming genocide of the Jews, how to organize the systematic killing and extermination. However, mapping out the words, events and people responsible is not quite easy and the organisation of the Holocaust remains partly veiled in mystery. The Wannsee protocol is the only surviving copy out of 30, sent out to the participants of the conference. According to Mark Roseman it remains ”the most emblematic and programmatic statement of the Nazi way of doing genocide."

However, what gives the document its importance is the doubt that surrounds it. Was the Wannsee conference really the turning point in deciding to carry out an all-out genocide, or has its role been warped and blown out of proportion by historians? Roseman discusses similar questions in this book and attempts to determine the role of this conference in the unfolding of the Holocaust. It is a short and concise book and a well-executed study of the subject in a formal, yet sometimes disjointed narrative.

The Final Solution and the answer to the ’Jewish question’ are phrases used by the men of the Reich, phrases that seem crystal clear and ambiguous at the same time. There is no doubt that the Nazis are guilty of genocide, but when and how did that decision fall into place and is there an isolated culprit? For example, the answer to the 'Jewish question' was not drafted by Hitler alone but with help from some of his closest men. In the second half of the 1930s it was Göring who attained the responsibility over the field and Reinhard Heydrich and his security police would also play a crucial part in the development the Final Solution. Roseman writes that "Wannsee emerges as an important act of closure in the process of turning mass murder into genocide."

He also briefly discusses the fact that all of the men present were highly educated and intellectually sophisticated, but this did not stop them from harbouring radical Nazi ideas. The Wannsee conference was probably an important turning-point in the Reich’s policy towards the Jews, and it was not decided upon by barbaric and uncivilized men as we would like to imagine but by seemingly intelligent individuals who held doctorates.

An interesting observation related to this is made towards the beginning: ”far more than society as a whole, the student body of the 1920s reacted to war, defeat, Germany's international humiliation and the massive economic difficulties of the time by endorsing radical racially anti-Semitic and ethnic-nationalist ideas.”

There exists no transcript of this conference, only the heavily edited protocol which deploys vocabulary such as ”removal” and ”evacuation” when referring to what should be done about the Jews. It may not have been this very event that set the Holocaust in motion but it was definitely part of a process that was fostered out of Hitler’s ideological climate, with Heydrich and Himmler at the centre. Although there exists no trace of a clear-cut order to exterminate, the Wannsee conference is important in the manner that it emerges as ”a kind of keyhole, through which we can glimpse the emerging Final Solution.”

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good, short read on the topic. More of an examination of when/how/to what extent the decision to commit genocide was undertaken and how the Wannsee meeting and minutes (protocol) factored than a pure study of the content of the meeting itself.

I read this as a follow on to watching the HBO film in this topic, Conspiracy, which is also a good interpretive piece on this subject.

[Katherine Addison · Rating 5 out of 5]

[The correct and complete title for this book is The Villa, The Lake, The Meeting: Wannsee and the Final Solution.]

This is my very favorite kind of history, the kind that says, "here's a mysterious thing that happened, let's look at all the evidence we have and see if we can figure it out." Roseman's mysterious thing is the conference at Wannsee (notorious for being the one place where you can actually pin down Nazi leaders talking about exterminating the Jews), and he does a wonderful job of contextualizing it and analyzing the evidence we have, and ultimately situating it persuasively in the progress of the Final Solution and the dance in the upper echelons of the Nazi government between amassing as much power for yourself as you could and sharing out the culpability to as many patsies as possible. This book is concise and elegant and I'd love to be able to write history like this.

[Michael Lewyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book seeks to explain (with a lot of speculation, given that some documents are missing) how the Nazi position gradually evolved from "get the Jews out of Germany" to "kill all the Jews." As late as 1940 or early 1941, the Nazis were not clearly planning upon mass extermination. But when the Nazis invaded Poland, they decided to exterminate local elites and intellectuals. And over the course of 1940 and 1941, mass killings became more and more common, and as the SS etc. got more used to mass murder, extermination started to seem plausible (and deportation less so, since the Nazi leaders in Eastern Europe did not want to be the receptacle for Jews from further west). By the end of 1941, extermination was official policy. By early 1943, most of the Jews murdered in the Holocaust were (according to the author) already dead.

[John Bond · Rating 5 out of 5]

Small book but great insight into Wannsee and the road leading up to it.

[John Mccullough · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a disturbing book and was meant to be so. The subject matter is obscene - the extermination of a whole people. The german loss in WW I and the disastrous treaty conditions of their surrender simply set the stage for WW II. Indeed, WW II is nothing more than WW I with a whole new generation born to be destroyed. Germany is crushed, humiliated, made to suffer awful economic consequences. But be careful what you wish for. In reaction, Germany slowly picks itself up, finds a suitable scapegoat - Jews and other "Untermenschen" - and proceeds to recover and then some. Emotions have been brought to a boiling point. Jews are more and more publicly scapegoated. Laws are passed making life more difficult. The Nazis slowly crank up the heat. First discrimination, then the thought of reservations (yes, the US is the example; genocide worked in the US to kill off native americans -and is still in place). Failing a place to put the reservations, simply deportation to the East in Poland and Russia as the German Wehrmacht advances. Ah, but things are not going well, so what to do to rid Germany of these people who are to be blamed for everything?? Well, elimination, of course. The book describes a conference in which what had been informally practiced became a little more formalised, with the military/police groups wresting advantage from the civilian laggards who were not previously enthusiastic. It also, I think, scared the civilians groups into falling in line. Mush of the book is speculative. So many important documents were destroyed, actively by the Nazis or simply burned as part of the collateral damage of war. Roseman is more archaeologist than historian as he is working with fragments of documents and trial transcripts; perforce he is obliged to infer, infer, infer. And repetitively, in so many circles. There is so much repetition. But the book ought to be read. I did not care for his over-use of adjectives - "murderous intentions" etc. It reads like a mild version of Shirer's Berlin Diary which is terrible in the over-use of adjectives. Much more effective is Primo Levi in his book, "If This Is a Man." Levi the chemist, Levi the scientist, like Joe Friday just tells what happened. Nouns and verbs - much more effective. The effect is much more compelling than Roseman's and Shirer's style. Still, the book must be read if we are to avoid duplicating this travesty on another people.

[Liam Berry · Rating 4 out of 5]

A thorough, well structured and well argued account of how Nazi Germany came to commit genocide. The book takes the Wannsee Protocol as it's central protagonist but gives an interesting history of the Nazi flair for murder and how that develops over the years leading up to the Wannsee conference. It then provides a critique of the document and other source material to ask the question, when and how was the decision to make genocide official policy taken.
The book's strong point is how objectively it weighs up the motivations and evidence relating to the many individuals involved in the lead up to and then instigation of the organised mass murder of the Jews, there is little in the way of hyperbole or drama, just facts and dates and names and a tying together of a number of timelines to attempt to develop an answer.
The book is well written although it does feel more or less like a very long essay, which I supppse it is really. Very informative but at times a little repetative. That is a minor criticism though as the book manages to give an excellent breakdown of its theories and arguements in just 107 pages, so it isn't like it outstays its welcome.
Thinking I might re-read Fatherland next to see what I make of it with this improved knowledge of the history of the administrative side of the Holocaust.

[Simon · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting read. Roseman pulls together the research into the conference as it existed at the turn of the century. He concludes that the Wannsee Conference was indeed important, less as the beginning of the Final Solution --- slaughters were taking place prior to January 1942, including at Chelmno extermination camp for at least the previous month --- than as its endorsement as the inevitable outcome. The conference had been postponed from December 1941 because of the declaration of war upon the United States. In its original conception, it may have been intended primarily as a means for settling the Mischlinge question, but Roseman argues that Heydrich then used it to ensure that the destruction of European Jewry was the ultimate outcome. He also includes a translation of the memorandum produced after the surprisingly short gathering (roughly 1 1/2 hours). This is less the minutes than the talking points that were considered important by Heydrich, who ran it as a tight ship. It would be useful to read how the screenwriter for HBO's Conspiracy constructed the actual dialogue spoken by the characters, since there is insufficient sense of what individuals actually said in the memorandum. The Wannsee memorandum itself survived in only one copy of about thirty produced, and that was serendipity.

Roseman's last sentence is chillingly elegant: "Speaking to one another with great politeness, sipping their cognac, the Staatssekretare really had cleared the way for genocide."

[Trish · Rating 4 out of 5]

A study of what made intelligent men agree to a path of genocide. It deals with the lead-up to Wannsee conference, including trying to identify when the actual move from deportation of the Jews to genocide was made, as well as the conference itself and to what degree the subject of genocide was openly discussed.

Its also interesting to read having recently re-watched https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0266425/...

[Jerry Ozaniec · Rating 5 out of 5]

Since I was new to this aspect of the Nazi period, this was particularly revealing. It was clear and concise although it assumed you were aware of the fact that the meeting took place and that it was significant in setting out the 'Final Solution' to the Jewish problem. Chilling but essential reading for anyone who has an interest in the inhumanity of man.

[Adam Johnson · Rating 5 out of 5]

a must read for anybody wishing to understand the holocaust, well written and researched,really sets the scene of the most horrific meeting that ever took place, and the workman like almost joyous energy that was evident amoung the great and the good of the nazi establishment.

[Rob · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good book on an awful subject. Roseman details the chilling conference in which the decisions on how to proceed with the Jewish Holocaust.

[Amicus (David Barnett) · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very depressing book to read. The phrase "the banality of evil" kept coming to mind.

[Simon Parsons · Rating 5 out of 5]

Chilling. This is a detailed exploration of a moment in history and an attempt to assess its significance.
Most disturbing is the acceptance of mass murder by educated men who fully ascribed to Nazi racial theories. These were not neutral civil servants who were separated from the political process but were part of it.
Richard Evans suggested that the Nazis downgraded higher education, that it was subsumed by Nazi ideology. It is strange to think that these men were working towards creating a state that would be less able to produce people of their level of education

[Speesh · Rating 5 out of 5]

It was in March 1947, collecting information for the Nuremberg trials, that the staff of the US Prosecutor mad the discovery. Stamped Geheim Reichssache - 'secret Reich matter' - and tucked away in a German Foreign Office folder, were the minutes of a meeting. The meeting had involved fifteen top Nazi Civil Servants, SS and Party officials and had taken place on 20 January, 1942, in a grand villa on the shores of Lake Wannsee. The US officials had stumbled across the only surviving copy of the minutes, no.16 out of an original thirty.

Mark Rosenman argues very convincingly against some of the more hyperbolic rhetoric there has arisen around the Wannsee meeting's place in the whole black catalogue of Nazi social and war crimes. In that he places it not at the start, nor in the middle nor at the end of the path towards all-out execution of the Jewish peoples. He puts it in its proper place. It seems to me, what he is saying that it was almost a way of Heydrich making sure that all the various departments involved in past present anf future aspects of what we now call The Holocaust could be shown to be culpable. By holding the meeting, and outlining the plans that already were in motion, or would come to be, as a consequence of current circumstances and the already in-motion plans, he made sure that all the various departments could not then or after an unsuccessful war, ever claim to have had no knowledge of the matter. As Eichmann first began his defence with. The 'just following orders' lowly official excuse. Which, when confronted with details of his active participation before during and after the meeting, he then acknowledged. In part, the meeting was the "if I'm going down for this, you are too" meeting.

It is partly this aim of making a case for collective guilt, and why they felt it necessary, that I haven't fully got hold of yet. The facts are it happened. That you can not argue against. Why they felt the need to have wiggle room, of they were assured, or assured themselves of, winning, I'm still looking for. I came away with thinking it might be that in 1942, there were signs of resignation to a defeat (it was mentioned, at least privately), but that if they could rid Europe of the Jews, that victory and the acceptance of Nazi right, would follow.

Obviously, the "drank cognac and smoked cigars" is used in a headline grabbing way. These were real bastards gathered here, as ordinary bastards, planning this sort of thing, would have dines on monkeys brains and cockroaches. But the mundane, nothing special, nothing to see here aspect of the smoking cigars, etc, brings to the fore the important angle idea of how the Nazis saw this - at the time. They had had the idea so ingrained in them, and had ingrained it both themselves and willingly, that Jews were the thing that was stopping them from assuming their destiny, that it was necessary to treat the murders as a problem, a logistical problem, to solve. How to transport the Jews to be killed, how to stop them, and public sympathy from finding out, or sympathising with their plight, once they were at their 'final' destination, how to dispose of the Jews.

The Villa, The Lake, The Meeting is a sombre and thorough investigation into the background to the Wannsee meeting, what can be surmised about what happened at the meeting, and its later and wider consequences. Thoroughly recommended for anyone interested in finding out about not quite, as the title suggests, the origins of the Final Solution, but its later stage of development. A book that will stay with me forever.

The site of the conference, the Villa of the title, is now restored and is a museum. You can find them on Facebook (in German).

Blog: Speesh Reads
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[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

On the 20th of January, 1942 a secret meeting was held at an elegant villa on the shore of the Wannsee. Boasting full catering services and lovely view of the lake, 18 men of the Reich met for 90 minutes and then retired to enjoy cognac and cigars. The topic? Nothing less than the systemic murder of over 11 million European Jews. The only topic that met any form of discussion was the definition of Mischlinge or mixed blood Jews. What was the definition? What should be done to them? There was not one word of dissent amongst the attendees.

What possessed educated men (nearly half held a PhD) to endorse (with vigour) government sanctioned genocide? As has been shown time and again in history, a charismatic leader arises and leverages the dissent of the populous in order to drive their own agenda. Hitler had been espousing hate against the enemy of the people, the Jews. Curated propaganda painting the Jews as sub-human, vermin and carriers of disease had been around since before his rise to power in 1933. Hitler set the tone and occasionally set boundaries for acceptable policy and action to deal with the final solution of the Jewish question.

Over time, cultural norms, government policy and laws allowed and encouraged the expulsion, forced labour and subsequent execution of Jews and other undesirable elements. This tone was set from the top and ambitious young men strived to impress and took it upon themselves to interpret metaphors such as ‘evacuation’. Prior to the conference at Wannsee Hitler made sure never to be too specific or have any orders captured in writing. He spoke in metaphors, basked in the glory of large audiences spewing the vile rhetoric of hate and watched as his vision was executed. Wannsee resulted in the institutionalisation of murder into policy of genocide.

Anyway, this is dark history, it happened over 70 years ago. It couldn’t possibly happen again? History is not so sure, if we forget are we bound not to repeat? This terrible chapter of history leaves us with so many warning signs. Beware the charismatic leader running on a policy of racial nationalism, dividing the population into us and them. Those not like us are the enemy, rapists, murderers, drug smugglers and people from sh*thole countries coming to take your jobs and spread disease. We ignore the signs at our own peril.

[Lawrence Patterson · Rating 4 out of 5]

A short book about a short meeting but one that probably set in train the genocide of Jews by the Nazis in the second half of the second world war. The murderous activities of the Nazis did not start at this time - they had been practising killings long before the war started and had increased the rate at the invasion of Poland and later further increased the rate as the USSR was invaded. In fact, hundreds of thousands of Russian POW's suffered genocide before many Jews. This book debates the theory between what is mass murder and what is genocide. To move people into a desperate situation where most die because they have little means of survival could be called murder but to kill them in controlled situations by shooting or gassing could be called genocide. Well, that is like having a discussion on a pinhead in my opinion - if the intent is to exterminate a race by whatever means it counts as genocide in my view. This book covers not just what happened at Wannsee but the build-up through the Nazis years in power, the calibre of those at this conference and the place it played in confirming the genocide that was practised firstly at a local level and which became the hallmark of a despicable regime across the continent controlled by Germany. In fact if you read the protocol, that comes out of the meeting, it details the numbers of Jews that were considered to be part of the final solution - including those in countries not yet conquered and in neutral states such as Sweden and Switzerland. It is the detail and arrogance of this murderous regime that makes this a sad but enlightening read - the author's detail wakes one up to the sheer depravity of the minds that ruled Germany between 1933 and 1945. The book is well researched and though dry in parts it tackles a subject where documentary evidence is limited -it, however, is supported by the subsequent actions of one of histories most evil regimes.

[Larry · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Wannsee Conference was a meeting of Nazi bureaucrats in January 1942. Convened by Reinhard Heydrich, the security chief, its participants discussed the implementation of the Final Solution. The meeting also served to consolidate Heydrich's hold on the Nazi bureaucracy. It produced a "protocol" (i.e., minutes) that was meant to be destroyed after the meeting. One copy survived and provides a chilling insight into the Nazi mind at work. (Note: Kenneth Branagh's movie, "Conspiracy," is a dramatic rendering of the conference and is stunning. When I showed it to a social studies teaching methods class as part of a World War II unit, they sat stunned after seeing it.) Roseman's book is the best treatment of the conference to date.

[Judy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mark Roseman has provided an incredible study on the Wannsee Conference and its role in the implementation of mass genocide in Nazi Germany. Roseman evaluated his sources logically, and provides excellent arguments to support his findings. The book also includes the translated Wannsee Protocol, which is especially helpful in evaluating the protocol for yourself. If you are interested in the outset of the Holocaust, this is a seminal work in understanding the sequence of events leading up to mass genocide in Nazi Germany.

[Stephen Hancock · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent so far. Highly recommend a watch of the movie ‘Conspiracy’ which is accurate text-wise and each character is given the attributes known to be a part of the real person. As for the book? Very informative with excellent footnotes. Only drawback on the kindle version is that the footnotes often fail to take you to the footnote when the respective number is pressed and, when it does take you to the footnote it often then fails to take you back to the text. Minor frustration. More to read ......

[Deborah · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very balanced view of the Wannsee conference and it's implications. Roseman does bring in several other opinions of the events and gives his reasons why he does not believe they give a correct view of the situation. The bottom line is this - was this conference the place where genocide of the Jews was decided to was this more of an administrative meeting to work out the details?

[Carlos · Rating 4 out of 5]

By the end of the book, I could not make up my mind if Wannsee was indeed a turning point for the final solution or not. Nonetheless, a very interesting book. I was particularly impressed by how evolved was the discussion on half-jews and quarter-jews and how those with a little bit of German blood were different from jews from other countries.

[kate mcgrail · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting, surprisingly easy to read book about the genesis and progression of the final solution. Well written and engaging despite the emotiveness of the topic.
Well explained conclusions that make the thought that it all happened despite a lack of forthought and planning some how more frightening than if it had been planned more thoughly.

[Deborah Borges · Rating 3 out of 5]

A análise do documento é interessante e pertinente, mas são muitos outros atores e fatos envolvidos na questão judaica desde o início do governo nazista na Alemanha, o que, na minha opinião, pedia narrativas mais detalhadas.

[Clayton Brannon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Short comprehensive book on the conference that many thought was the beginning of the holocaust. Delves into why and why not this conference may have been the beginning of the mass killings on a scale that was unknown before.

[Martin Empson · Rating 4 out of 5]

A horrific insight into how a fascist state's bureaucracy and some of its leading fascist figures can plan genocide. Roseman uses the Wannsee conference document to show the way that the Holocaust evolved out of fascist ideology and the reality of Nazi Germany. Important reading.

[Crissy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't think that you can describe this as an enjoyable read as the subject of murder is despicable, but it is well researched. The author looks at the evidence concerning those who involved themselves with the 'final solution'.