Tuesday, February 20, 2007

The Wannsee Protocol

The site referenced contains an English translation of the Wannsee Protocol described below. It is disturbing but worth visting.

Source: http://www.h-net.org/~german/gtext/nazi/wanneng2.html
Note how the Nazis were even concerned with the 200 or so Albanian Jews.

The "Wannsee Conference" was not a name its participants would have given to their meeting; it is simply the most convenient description available for historians of the Holocaust. At a villa owned by the SS on the shores of a suburban Berlin lake called the Wannsee, mid-level bureaucrats from a number of Nazi agencies, all named in the introduction to the text, assembled at the request of Reinhard Heydrich, the chief of the Reich Security Main Office and head of the German secret police apparatus. Heydrich and his boss, Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, were in the process of assuming leadership in the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question," i.e., the murder of Europe's Jews by the Nazis. This meeting was a part of that process, as bureaucratic coordination would be required for the massive efforts to be undertaken throughout Europe to kill the 11,000,000 Jews described in the document. The Nazis ultimately succeeded in killing between five and six million of Europe's Jews, with hundreds of thousands, mainly in the Soviet Union, already dead by the time of this meeting

No comments: