Reviewing Wannsee: The Road to the Final Solution—”A single meeting can distill the essence of evil”

This jarring disconnect between atrocity and humanity is reflected in the meeting’s minutes, which contain no hint of anyone even hiccupping at the specifics of genocide. On the contrary, an eager appetite for ethnic cleansing could not have been more apparent.

This is the chilling point at which Nazism’s increasingly savage anti-Jewish policy had arrived by 1942, writes the historian Peter Longerich in his scholarly account, “Wannsee: The Road to the Final Solution.” The Reich’s ever-accelerating murder machine was already in motion, with massacres across occupied Europe responsible for the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Jews. But there was as yet no single command coordinating the escalating butchery. Heydrich’s goal was to present an orderly, consolidated plan for the horrific path forward.

Herein lies the significance of the Wannsee Conference. It is this plan, as reported in the conference minutes, that provides decisive evidence and allows no place for the perpetrators—at all levels and branches of the Nazi hierarchy—to deny their participation in or hide their responsibility for the Holocaust.

So intent were the Nazi leaders on leaving behind no evidence of their culpability, Mr. Longerich explains, that most of the arrangements for slaughter were agreed upon orally. As for the documents that were not destroyed, they seldom revealed the full scope of the annihilation, using indirect wording to mask their intent. That makes the single remaining copy of the minutes—Heydrich had distributed 30—as important as it is rare: It is the clearest, most comprehensive surviving blueprint for the Holocaust, drafted by the Nazi leadership. Moreover, Mr. Longerich points out, the inclusion at the conference of attendees from across the broadest swath of Nazi government—the Reich Chancellery, the Ministry of Justice, the Interior Ministry, the Foreign Ministry, the armaments sector, the Nazi Party itself—attests to the active participation and joint complicity of one and all.

Well-known for authoritative biographies of Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler and Joseph Goebbels, as well as his comprehensive history “Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews,” Mr. Longerich places the meeting’s minutes, 15 pages long, at the center of his analysis. (A reproduction, in full, of the German original, as well as a complete English translation, is included.) Although the book itself is relatively brief, the grisly subject and the density of its argument necessitate periodic breaks for air. Yet Mr. Longerich’s in-depth deconstruction yields unparalleled insight into the Nazi regime’s blood-soaked goals.

The minutes, which were kept by Adolf Eichmann—whom Heydrich had appointed as overseer of the death-bound deportations of Jews to occupied Poland—indicate that the final solution would increasingly feature the deployment to “the East” of ever-larger numbers of Jews condemned to slave labor. As a result, the minutes project, “the majority will doubtless succumb to natural wastage.” As for those who do not, or are deemed “unfit for work,” another method of liquidation was being readied, one for which “practical experience” was being gathered. The indirect wording, Mr. Longerich explains, is nothing less than code for death by gassing, which the Nazis had introduced to kill the mentally ill as early as 1939 and had expanded since to murder Jews. Even prior to the Wannsee Conference, gas chambers were being built at the planned extermination camp in Bełżec, Poland.

Given that the Holocaust was already under way, Mr. Longerich posits that Heydrich’s real purpose in convening the conference was to establish his authority for all future operations. And what carnage he envisioned: “Europe will be combed from West to East,” the minutes promise, and “around 11 million Jews will be involved.” His calculation went beyond Germany and German-occupied territory to include countries not yet conquered but that Nazi leaders presumed soon would be: the United Kingdom, Portugal, Sweden, Switzerland, Spain, Turkey and the Soviet Union.

All this speaks to Heydrich’s—and the Nazis’—desire “to cleanse German living space of Jews,” as the minutes put it, and ensure that no Jews would remain alive lest they release “the germ cell for a new Jewish regeneration.” Only this obsession can explain the lengthy discussion at Wannsee devoted to the status of mixed-marriage offspring. The Nuremberg racial laws of 1935 defined as a Jew anyone with three Jewish grandparents, while those with only one or two Jewish grandparents were classed as Mischling, or “mongrel” (first or second degree), to be partially protected from discrimination. Heydrich wanted to “ride roughshod” over the laws, according to Mr. Longerich, to bypass delays that might be caused by time-consuming judgments about who is Jewish.