On this date 84 years ago, the Wannsee Conference took place.

By the fall of 1941, the Nazi leadership decided that the ever-evolving Final Solution would mean the physical destruction of the Jews of Europe. By December, the first killing center became operational at Chelmno in Poland. At the Wannsee Conference on January 20, 1942, Reinhard Heydrich, Adolf Eichmann, and about a dozen other mid-level Nazi officials met at a beautiful villa in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee, a popular recreation destination.

The purpose of the conference was to decide the logistics – especially the leadership role of the SS – in the coordination and execution of the Final Solution, the mass murder of European Jewry. The Nazi regime intended to murder eleven million European Jews in the conquered territories of the East. By the time the war and the genocide were over, the regime, with significant help from its collaborators, took the lives of some six million Jews and more than 200,000 Sinti and Roma.

Conspiracy (Frank Pierson 2001) is a compelling film that takes the history of the conference seriously. I wrote about it in November (link below).