January 20, 1942, a meeting of senior government officials of Nazi Germany was held in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee.
Representatives of several ministries of Nazi Germany, as well as the SS representatives were participants in the conference, chaired by Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Reich Main Security Office (RSHA).
It is significant, that any top-level Nazi – Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels, Heinrich Himmler, Hermann Goering - did not participate in the conference.
Political decisions on the physical extermination of Jews in Europe were made before 1942, therefore, the goal of the Nazi policy towards Jews was not discussed at the Wannsee Conference. The meeting was to specify “technical questions”: the scope, stages and interaction during the so-called “final solution of the Jewish question” (Gem. Endösung der Judenfrage). The Nazis defined a plan for the total killing of 11 million people with this euphemism. The Conference Protocol, which was led by SS Obersturmbanf?hrer Adolf Eichmann, includes many such expressions that were supposed to camouflage and soften the real genocide content. In particular, large-scale deportations to ghettos in eastern Europe (primarily in occupied Poland, the Baltic countries, Belarus, and Ukraine) were originally called “evacuation” or “resettlement” to the East (Evakuierung, Umsiedlung), and the process of killing millions of people was called “special treatment (interpretation)” (Sonderbehandlung).
Out of a total of 11 million people, doomed to death by the Nazis in Wannsee, about 3 million were Jews of Ukraine. This indicator has a relative character, because it only takes into account the Jewish population of the occupying Reichskommissariat “Ukraine” and the military occupation zone. A significant part of the modern Ukraine territory was a part of the occupying Governorate General (where, according to the Protocol, it was planned to kill about 2.3 million people), Hungary (more than 742 thousand people), Romania (42 thousand).
The Wannsee Conference is a landmark event that emphasized the irreversibility of the Nazi genocide policy against European Jews. The killing of more than 6 million people was its result.
Now the house in Wannsee, where the meeting took place, is a memorial research center for the Holocaust history and one of the Museum “Jewish Memory and Holocaust in Ukraine” partner.
Dilfuza Hlushchenko, Yehor Vradii