How did a 90-minute meeting make Germany's ministries partners in the Holocaust?

The Wannsee Conference did not decide to murder Europe's Jews. That murder was already under way. Mobile killing squads had been shooting Jewish civilians in occupied Poland and the Soviet Union for months, and a new extermination camp was being built at Belzec. What the meeting of 20 January 1942 did was enlist the German state: it made sure every ministry involved would cooperate in deporting Europe's Jews to be killed.

Fifteen officials met in a villa by a lake near Berlin. Most were state secretaries and senior civil servants. Hitler, Himmler and Goebbels were not there. Half were under forty, eight held doctorates, and eight were lawyers. Reinhard Heydrich, head of the SS security office, spoke for nearly an hour. Jews across occupied Europe would be deported to occupied Poland and murdered. Questions took about thirty minutes. The whole meeting lasted roughly ninety minutes.

No one objected to the plan itself. Officials raised practical points about Jews in mixed marriages and Jewish workers in war industries. The state secretary for occupied Poland said he hoped the killings would start as soon as possible. Then cognac was served. Adolf Eichmann, who wrote the minutes, later said the men spoke bluntly about "methods of killing, about liquidation, about extermination." His minutes used office language instead, such as "evacuation" to the east. The participants understood that it meant murder.

Heydrich had expected resistance. Instead, Eichmann recalled, the agreement went beyond anything he had expected. Historian Peter Longerich calls that agreement the meeting's crucial result, and the reason Heydrich circulated detailed minutes. Longerich and Laurence Rees argue the decision to exterminate the Jews came before Wannsee. Only one copy of the minutes survived the war. It was found in 1947 among seized Foreign Office files and used at the Nuremberg trials. Between 1941 and 1945, around six million Jews, about two-thirds of Europe's Jewish population, were murdered.