ON January 20, 1942 “The following took part in the conference on the final solution (Endloesung) of the Jewish question”. The meeting was held in Berlin, Am Grossen Wannsee No. 56-58.
Moments from that meeting follow:
II. The meeting opened with the announcement by the Chief of the Security Police and the SD, SS Obergruppenfuehrer Heydrich, of his appointment by the Reich Marshal (1*) as Plenipotentiary for the Preparation of the Final Solution of the European Jewish Question. He noted that this Conference had been called in order to obtain clarity on questions of principle. The Reich Marshal’s request for a draft plan concerning the organizational, practical and economic aspects of the final solution of the European Jewish question required prior joint consideration by all central agencies directly involved in these questions, with a view to maintaining parallel policy lines.
Responsibility for the handling of the final solution of the Jewish question, he said, would lie centrally with the Reichsfuehrer SS and the Chief of the German Police (Chief of the Security Police and the SD), without regard to geographic boundaries.
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A man walks in front of the Topf and Sons company building prior the press conference to the exhibition ‘The Engineers of the ‘Final Solution’ Topf & Sons – Builders of the Auschwitz Ovens’ in Erfurt, central Germany, on Tuesday, Jan. 25, 2011. The words of the phrase read: ‘Always glad to be of service’. The memorial site and educational center to open this week on International Holocaust Remembrance Day documents the role played by a German maker of crematoria in the mass execution of Europe’s Jews and others. Hitler’s top men dreamed up the horrors of the Holocaust, but without the support of German engineers and industrialists like Topf & Sons, they would never have succeeded in murdering millions. Through technology developed and products built in the Topf & Sons factories, Auschwitz was equipped with four crematoria that resembled factories where as many as 8,000 corpses could be burned in a day.
A Topf and Sons company sign hangs in the exhibition ‘The Engineers of the ‘Final Solution’ Topf & Sons – Builders of the Auschwitz Ovens’ after a press conference in Erfurt, central Germany, Tuesday, Jan. 25, 2011.
The aim of this task was to cleanse the German living space of Jews in a legal manner.
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In the course of this final solution of the European Jewish question approximately 11 million Jews may be taken into consideration, distributed over the individual countries as follows:
Country Number
A. Altreich 131,800
Ostmark 43,700
Eastern Territories (2*) 420,000
Government-General 2,284,000
Bialystok 400,000
Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia 74,200
Estonia — free of Jews
Latvia 3,500
Lithuania 34,000
Belgium 43,000
Denmark 5,600
France: Occupied territory 165,000
France: Unoccupied territory 700,000
Greece 69,600
Netherlands 160,800
Norway 1,300
In this photo taken Monday, July 16, 2012 a letter reading “The Jews held at the Vel d’Hiv were sent to the Austerlitz train station this morning for deportation to the camps. Fifty sick people will be sent to Drancy. In about one hour the Winter Velodrome will be available” and coming from the Archives of Paris Police Prefecture is presented for an exhibition of French archives on Shoah in Paris. The chilling archives of the biggest World War II deportation of French Jews are being opened up to public view for the first time. It coincides with the 70th anniversary of the Vel’ d’Hiv roundup by Paris police of some 13,000 Jews over two days who were then sent to Auschwitz death camp. Photos, signatures and records of personal possessions from many of the victims are on display at a Paris district town hall. (AP Photo/Remy de la Mauviniere)
B. Bulgaria 48,000
England 330,000
Finland 2,300
Ireland 4,000
Italy, including Sardinia 58,000
Albania 200
Croatia 40,000
Portugal 3,000
Rumania, including Bessarabia
342,000
Images of four Amsterdam Jews who died in the Holocaust are seen on a building on Kromme Waal street where they lived during the war in Amsterdam, Netherlands, Wednesday, May 4, 2011. A project called “Jewish Houses,” part of Wednesday’s commemorations of World War II victims, encouraged Amsterdam residents to put up posters marking the 21,662 houses where Jews are known to have lived before the community was systematically sent to die in Nazi concentration camps. (AP Photos/ Evert Elzinga)
Sweden 8,000
Switzerland 18,000
Serbia 10,000
Slovakia 88,000
Spain 6,000
Turkey (in Europe) 55,500
Hungary 742,800
U.S.S.R. 5,000,000Ukraine 2,994,684
Three former Nazi officials sit with uniformed West German guards as they go on trial in MunichÂs Palace of Justice on Jan. 23, 1967, on charges of aiding in the mass murder of thousands of Dutch Jews in extermination camps. From right the defendants are, Wilhelm Harster, former major general in the SS Elite Guard, who is 62; Wilhelm Zoepf, 58, former SS major; and Gertrud Slottke, 64, aide to Zoepf. (AP Photo/Klaus Frings)
Byelorussia, 446,484
without Bialystok
Total: over 11,000,000
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A 1968 black an white file photo shows Oskar Schindler. Schindler during the Nazi era in Germany saved the lives of some 1,200 Jews by declaring them as necessary workers for the production in his factory and putting their names on the ‘Schindler List’ to prevent them to be sent to the Nazi death camps. In 1967 Schindler was honored as one of the Righteous Among the Nations. Monday, April 28, 2008 sees the 100th birthday of Oskar Schindler, who died in October 1974. (AP Photo/Peter Hillebrecht, File)
The influence of the Jews in all spheres of life in the U.S.S.R. is well known. There are about 5 million Jews in European Russia, and barely another 250,000 in Asiatic Russia.
Waffen SS Troops load trucks with bodies under the watchful eye of British and Canadian troops after the concentration camp had been liberated. Date: 16/04/1945
Under appropriate direction the Jews are to be utilized for work in the East in an expedient manner in the course of the final solution. In large (labor) columns, with the sexes separated, Jews capable of work will be moved into these areas as they build roads, during which a large proportion will no doubt drop out through natural reduction. The remnant that eventually remains will require suitable treatment; because it will without doubt represent the most [physically] resistant part, it consists of a natural selection that could, on its release, become the germ-cell of a new Jewish revival. (Witness the experience of history.)
Europe is to be combed through from West to East in the course of the practical implementation of the final solution. The area of the Reich, including the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, will have to be handled in advance, if only because of the housing problem and other socio-political needs.
Auschwitz Concentration Camp SS-guard Wilhelm Boger, 56, pictured in Frankfurt on April 3, 1964, where he is on trial for war crimes. Witness Maximillian Sternol, 70, testified that Boger, named by his former prisoners “the devil of Auschwitz”, supervised the slaughter of 2,349 Jewish men, women and children who composed a special section of Auschwitz reserved for families, and the liquidation of thousands of the camps gypsies in the summer of 1944. Asked by the prosecution how he knew that exactly 2,439 Jews were killed in one action alone, Sternol answered: “‘i’ll never forget that number for as long as I live, because Boger made me count each and every one of his candidates as they were loaded onto the trucks that took them to the gas chambers.”
The evacuated Jews will first be taken, group by group, to so-called transit ghettos, in order to be transported further east from there.
An important precondition, SS Obergruppenfuehrer Heydrich noted further, for the carrying out of the evacuation in general is the precise determination of the groups of persons involved. It is intended not to evacuate Jews over 65 years old, but to place them in an old-age ghetto — Theresienstadt is being considered.
In addition to these age groups — about 30% of the 280,000 Jews who were present in the Altreich and the Ostmark on October 31, 1941, were over 65 years old Jews with severe war injuries and Jews with war decorations (Iron Cross, First Class) will be admitted to the Jewish old-age ghetto. This suitable solution will eliminate at one blow the many applications for exceptions.
FILE – In this 1943 file photo, a group of Polish Jews are led away for deportation by German SS soldiers during the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto by German troops after an uprising in the Jewish quarter. Sixty years after a landmark accord started German government compensation for victims of Nazi crimes, fund administrators and German officials say payments to Holocaust survivors are needed more than ever as they enter their final years. German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble is to sign off officially Thursday Nov. 15 2012 on revisions to the original 1952 compensation treaty, increasing pensions for those living in eastern Europe and broadening who is eligible for payments. (AP Photo, file)
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The trial of the former commandant of the Extermination Camp Auschwitz, Rudolf Hoess, who has admitted to the responsiblity of the gassing of four million prisoners. Date: 24/03/1947
A group of Jews, including a small boy, is escorted from the Warsaw Ghetto by German soldiers in this April 19, 1943 file photo. The picture formed part of a report from SS Gen. Stroop to his Commanding Officer, and was introduced as evidence to the War Crimes trials in Nuremberg in 1945. French newspaper Le Figaro reported Saturday May 23, 1998 that Tsvi Nusbaum, a man born in Palestine and now living in New York, may be the boy with his hands up.
IV. In the implementation of the plan for the final solution, the Nuremberg Laws are to form the basis, as it were; a precondition for the total clearing up of the problem will also require solutions for the question of mixed marriages and Mischlinge.
Most of these prisoners are Russian and Polish Jews, just a few manage to raise themselves for the photographer on April 25, 1945 at Buchenwald concentration camp, Germany. The pained expression on the face of the one at extreme left, denotes the agony he is in. (AP Photo)
The Chief of the Security Police and the SD then discussed the following points, theoretically for the time being, in connection with a letter from the Chief of the Reich Chancellery:
1. Treatment of first-degree Mischlinge
First-degree Mischlinge are in the same position as Jews with respect to the final solution of the Jewish question. The following will be exempt from this treatment:
a) First-degree Mischlinge married to persons of German blood, from whose marriages there are children (second-degree Mischlinge). Such second-degree Mischlinge are essentially in the same position as Germans.
b) First-degree Mischlinge for whom up to now exceptions were granted in some (vital) area by the highest authorities
of the Party and the State. Each individual case must be re-examined, and it is not excluded that the new decision will again be in favor of the Mischlinge.
The grounds for granting an exception must always, as a matter of principle, be the deserts of the Mischling himself (not the merits of the parent or spouse of German blood.)
The first-degree Mischling exempted from evacuation will be sterilized in order to obviate progeny and to settle the Mischling problem for good. Sterilization is voluntary, but it is the condition for remaining in the Reich. The sterilized Mischling is subsequently free of all restrictive regulations to which he was previously subject.
Prisoners look out from behind a barbed wire enclosure at the Dachau concentration camp in Germany in 1945. Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler organized concentration camps as a “final solution” to eliminate European Jewry in his pursuit of the purity of the Aryan race. Auschwitz, Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen were other camps involved in exterminating over 6,000,000 Jews. The Allied Forces liberated the death camps and their fortunate survivors in 1945. Germany surrendered on May 7, 1945. (AP Photo)
2. Treatment of second-degree Mischlinge
Second-degree Mischlinge are on principle classed with persons of German blood, with the exception of the following cases, in which the second-degree Mischlinge are considered equivalent to Jews:
a) Descent of the second-degree Mischling from a bastard marriage (both spouses being Mischlinge).
b) Racially especially unfavorable appearance of the second-degree Mischling, which will class him with the Jews on external grounds alone.
c) Especially bad police and political rating of the second-degree Mischling, indicating that he feels and behaves as a Jew.
Even in these cases exceptions are not to be made if the second-degree Mischling is married to a person of German blood.
3. Marriages between full Jews and persons of German blood
Here it must be decided from case to case whether the Jewish spouse should be evacuated or whether he or she should be sent to an old-age ghetto in consideration of the effect of the measure on the German relatives of the mixed couple.
4. Marriages between first-degree Mischlinge and persons of German blood
a) Without children
If there are no children of the marriage, the first-degree Mischling is evacuated or sent to an old-age ghetto. (The same treatment as in marriages between full Jews and persons of German blood, [see] para. 3.)
b) With children
If there are children of the marriage (second-degree Mischlinge), they will be evacuated or sent to a ghetto, together with the first-degree Mischlinge, if they are considered equivalent to Jews. Where such children are considered equivalent to persons of German blood (the rule), they and also the first-degree Mischling are to be exempted from evacuation.
5. Marriages between first-degree Mischlinge and first-degree Mischlinge or Jews
In such marriages all parties (including children) are treated as Jews and therefore evacuated or sent to an old-age ghetto.
6. Marriages between first-degree Mischlinge and second-degree Mischlinge
Both partners to the marriage, regardless of whether or not there are children, are evacuated or sent to an old-age ghetto, since children of such marriages commonly are seen to have a stronger admixture of Jewish blood than the second-degree Jewish Mischlinge.
SS Gruppenfuehrer Hofmann is of the opinion that extensive use must be made of sterilization, as the Mischling, given the choice of evacuation or sterilization, would prefer to accept sterilization.
Secretary of State Dr. Stuckart noted that in this form the practical aspects of the possible solutions proposed above for the settling of the of mixed marriages and Mischlinge would entail endless administrative work. In order to take the biological realities into account, at any rate, Secretary of State Dr. Stuckart proposed a move in the direction of compulsory sterilization.
To simplify the problem of the Mischlinge further possibilities should be considered, with the aim that the Legislator should rule something like: “These marriages are dissolved.”
Never forget.
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