The Wannsee Conference: How Bureaucrats Planned the Holocaust

On January 20, 1942, fifteen men met in a villa on Lake Wannsee in Berlin. Over lunch and cognac, they coordinated the genocide of Europe's Jews. This episode follows the meeting from its origins—Heydrich's need for authority, the initial invitation in December 1941—to the 90-minute conference itself. We discuss the attendees: Reinhard Heydrich, Adolf Eichmann, and the state secretaries who represented the Interior Ministry, the Justice Ministry, the Foreign Office, and others. The 'Wannsee Protocol' survives, a chillingly euphemistic document listing eleven million Jews targeted for 'evacuation to the East'—code for murder. We also look at what the conference didn't do: it didn't order the Holocaust; it formalized a killing process already underway. The episode explores the banality of evil, the bureaucratic language of destruction ('Final Solution', 'special treatment'), and how ordinary civil servants became mass murderers. For listeners of Fexingo History, this is a deep dive into the administrative machinery of genocide. #WannseeConference #Holocaust #FinalSolution #ReinhardHeydrich #AdolfEichmann #NaziGermany #Berlin #WannseeProtocol #Genocide #WorldWarII #BureaucracyOfMurder #AmGrossenWannsee #Shoah #1942 #ThirdReich #History #FexingoHistory #Germany Keep every episode free: buymeacoffee.com/fexingo