January 20, 1942General sourceWell documented
The Wannsee Conference and the 'Final Solution'
On the timeline · around January 20, 1942 ·
What happened
Fifteen senior Nazi and German government officials met at a villa on Berlin's Lake Wannsee to coordinate the 'Final Solution to the Jewish Question' — the systematic murder of Europe's Jews. Reinhard Heydrich outlined a plan encompassing some 11 million Jews across Europe and assigned the SS to lead the killing.
Why it matters
Wannsee did not begin the genocide, but it coordinated the machinery of the Holocaust, in which roughly six million Jews were murdered.
How we know
A surviving copy of the meeting's minutes — the Wannsee Protocol — records the participants and the plan.