Wannsee Conference (1942)

Full Description

A meeting of senior Nazi officials held on 20 January 1942 at a villa in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee. Chaired by Reinhard Heydrich, it coordinated the administrative machinery required to extend the killing of Jews to all occupied territories. The conference did not decide that the Holocaust would happen — mass murder of Jews in the east was already underway — but it established the bureaucratic framework and responsibility for its Europe-wide implementation.

Critical Perspective

The Wannsee Protocol is a document of almost unbearable banality. Senior officials discussed the murder of eleven million people with the language and tone of a business meeting. Hannah Arendt’s concept of the “banality of evil” finds its clearest illustration here: the perpetrators were not monsters but bureaucrats who had normalised mass murder within the framework of their professional duties.