House of the Wannsee Conference Memorial and Educational Site

Gedenk- und Bildungsstätte Haus der Wannsee-Konferenz

On January 20, 1942, a conference of high-ranking SS functionaries and representatives of the Reich leadership took place on the topic of »the Final Solution of the Jewish question« in a villa in Berlin's Wannsee district. The »House of the Wannsee Conference« memorial presents information about the conference at its historic site and the genocide of the European Jews.

History

On January 20, 1942, high-ranking members of the SS, police as well as representatives of all important ministries met in a villa at the banks of the Großer Wannsee lake for a conference upon invitation by the head of the Reich Main Security Office Reinhard Heydrich. The aim of this conference was to coordinate among leading state institutions the murder of the European Jews. Historians also assume that Reinhard Heydrich hoped to strengthen his position as the organiser of the »Final Solution«. Heydrich's colleague Adolf Eichmann drew up a protocol of the points of order: it speaks of a »natural reduction« of Jewish labourers who are to be deployed in road construction in the east. The remaining part of these Jews was to be »treated accordingly«. For a long time, historical scholars considered January 20, 1942 – based on Eichmann's protocol – the date on which the National Socialists made the decision on the annihilation of European Jews. However, at the time, the »Final Solution« was already being implemented and the decision had been made at an earlier point. Hundreds of thousands of Jews had been shot by SS mobile killing squads and local collaborators in the territories occupied by the German Wehrmacht in Poland and the Soviet Union since the summer of 1941. Countless Jewish families from the »German Reich« had been deported by the SS to camps and ghettos in the east prior to the »Wannsee Conference«. Many of them were asphyxiated in gas chambers and gas vans. The conference of January 20, 1942 was initiated to coordinate the extermination efforts undertaken by various state authorities.

Berlin, around 1930, Villa on the banks of the Großer Wannsee 56-58, Gedenkstätte Haus der Wannsee-Konferenz

Berlin, 2002, House of the Wannsee Conference, Gedenkstätte Haus der Wannsee-Konferenz

Victims

It is estimated that between 5.4 and 6 million European Jews were murdered during the Holocaust. According to the protocol of the Wannsee Conference, the annihilation of up to 11 million Jews all over Europe was planned.

The entry to power of the National Socialists in 1933 heralded the state persecution of opponents of the regime, Jews, Roma – who were classed as »gypsies« -, the sick and many other groups. For the first time, anti-semitism became part of the government policy of a modern state and the persecution of all groups was progressively heightened. The process was characterised by the interplay between state regulation, violence from supporters of the regime and rabble-rousing propaganda from the press. The acts of terror against the Jews in November 1938 (»The Night of the Broken Glass«), culminating in around one hundred deaths, marked the prelude to the complete exclusion and murder of the Jewish minority. With the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939, large parts of Europe fell under German control. In Eastern Europe in particular a multi-tiered system of camps and extermination sites was established, in which the SS murdered up to six million Jews, among them around 165,000 German Jews. It is estimated that around seven million Germans lost their lives in the war, including almost 3.5 million civilians. Around 28 million residents of the occupied Soviet Union (both soldiers and civilians) and three million non-Jewish Poles met a violent death. These groups are still barely commemorated in Germany. Germany came under Allied occupation in 1945 and 1949 saw the foundation of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), who had very different cultures of remembrance. The GDR profiled itself as an »antifascist« state. The former concentration camps at Buchenwald, Ravensbrück and Sachsenhausen became »National Memorials« and primarily documented the communist resistance during the war. In the Federal Republic, the dominant memory was initially of the victims of Allied bombing raids and those who had fled or been expelled from their homes in the former territory of the Third Reich. It was left to specific groups to remember Nazi persecution, the Holocaust or the resistance. With the exception of the war crimes trials, there was no public discussion of perpetrators or involvement in crimes. However, the situation was to change in the mid-1960s, when the statute of limitations for murder was lifted following a lengthy debate. Also during this period, memorial sites were established at former concentration camps (1965: Dachau and Neuengamme; 1966: Bergen-Belsen) and the German Resistance Memorial Centre was opened in 1968 in West Berlin. However, it was not until the 1980s that a diverse and often small-scale landscape of memory developed as the result of local initiatives. Following German unification in 1990, a national memorial site concept was developed and there was a major review of German sites of memory. The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin was inaugurated in 2005. The Topography of Terror, a comprehensive documentation of National Socialist crimes and perpetrators, has opened with a new centre in May 2010; the documentation centre »Flight, Expulsion, Reconciliation« followed suit in 2021. In the meantime, central memorials in Berlin have been erected to commemorate further groups of Nazi victims as well: the murdered Sinti and Roma, the patients murdered in the context of the Nazi’s »Euthanasia« killings and the persecuted homosexuals. The German victims of National Socialist terror in the former Eastern territories of the Third Reich were forgotten by both German states after the end of the war. For decades, memory of these victims was only preserved by West German associations for Germans born in these territories and it mainly excluded the period from 1933 to 1945.

Remembrance

Following temporary usage for different purposes, the Villa served as a state boarding school for the Berlin district of Neukölln between 1952 and 1988. Already in the 1980s, plans were formulated concerning converting the former SS guest house into a memorial site. The cooperation of various institutions made the opening of a memorial site possible in 1992, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Wannsee Conference. Among the members of the memorial's support association are: the state of Berlin, the federal state, the Central Council of Jews in Germany, the two leading churches, the workgroup of various associations of people who fell victim to persecution, and the German Historical Museum.
The institution is best known for its diverse educational programme. The open spaces on the premises have been integrated into the memorial's concept and can be used to display temporary open-air exhibitions.
In January 2020 a new temporary exhibition entitled »The Conference at Wannsee and the Murder of the European Jews« was presented to the public. In contrast to the earlier temporary exhibition it is designed in a more inclusive and easily accessible way. It is focused above all on the role of the 15 officials who took place at the Wannsee Conference, offering at the same time a general overview of the history of the Holocaust while also touching upon subjects such as anti-semitism and discrimination.

Berlin, 2020, View of the permanent exhibition, Gedenkstätte Haus der Wannsee-Konferenz, Svea Hammerle

Possibilities

Lectures series on ideological, political and social aspects of the history of National Socialism, archive, reference and media library, seminars and all-day workshops for school groups and adults

Open

Daily 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., reference and media library Monday to Friday 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., closed on holidays

Contact

http://www.ghwk.de

info@ghwk.de

+49 (0)30 805 001 0

Am Großen Wannsee 56-58
14109 Berlin

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