Quoting Rich Brownstein’s Holocaust Cinema Complete, page 349:

[T]he [Fascists] had concluded that, because shooting the first million Jews in fields had been inefficient and had demoralized [Axis] soldiers who pulled the trigger, a better method of mass murder had been developed. The solution that day was revealed as Auschwitz and its gas chambers.

Pages 226–7:

On January 20, 1942, in an ornate villa, Am Großen Wannsee 56–58, in the Wannsee suburb of Berlin, 15 men gathered around a large conference table for a few hours. The typical understanding of the infamous Wannsee Conference was that the fate of European Jews was decided then and there. Laura Fries in Variety began her review of Conspiracy (TV 2001), the reenactment of Wannsee, by asserting:

It could be a boardroom at any Fortune 500 company where stockholders bicker over inventory and storage. Instead, the 15 men gathered in this lakeside resort home outside of Berlin are discussing the details of a “Final Solution” to purge all Jews from Europe. In this disturbing original movie, co‐produced by HBO and BBC Films, director Frank Pierson recreates the less than two hours it took for high‐ranking Third Reich officials to agree to the eradication of an entire race.65

This is a slight misreading of history. By the time of the conference, largely as a result of German mass murders by death squads after the invasion of Poland, approximately 2 million Jews had already been murdered. More broadly, the fate of Europe’s Jews had been cast with [the NSDAP’s] ascension to power nine years earlier, in 1933. If not then, certainly after the Nuremberg Laws in September 1935, when the status of German Jews was reduced to subhuman. If not then, the fate of Europe’s Jews was sealed when British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain capitulated to Hitler by signing the 1938 Munich Agreement, giving the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia to [the Fascist bourgeoisie]. Other events arguably could demarcate when the fate of Europe’s Jews was decided.

Yet, there is a pervasive belief that the Wannsee Conference was the beginning of the Final Solution. In fact, the Wannsee Conference was simply an example of vaunted [Fascist] efficiency and process, serving two specific housekeeping objectives: first, the political consolidation of the power by Obergruppenführer (three‐star general) Reinhard Heydrich to oversee the Final Solution, per his boss, Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler; and, second, the notification to the [Reich] politicians, military and civil servants that the remaining 11 million Jews within [the Third Reich’s] reach would be gassed, starved and worked to death at a rate of many thousands per day—millions per year—per Reinhard Heydrich.

In short, the real story of the Wannsee Conference is the successful power‐grab of Reinhard Heydrich, eliminating any doubt by those at the meeting who may have technically been Heydrich’s superiors or lateral to him, that they were either going to play genocide ball with him or be eliminated.

(Emphasis added.)


Click here for other events that happened today (January 20).

1932: Tōkyō demanded that China to dissolve anti‐Japanese organizations and pay compensation for losses incurred due to Chinese boycotts of Imperial goods.
1934: Berlin established the ‘Law for the ordering of National Labour’ (drafted by Leipzig’s mayor, and future resistance leader, Carl Goerdeler). This gave Reich managers absolute power to impose wage levels, monitor and discipline the workforce and in some industries restrict the right of employees to change their employment.
1938: Werner von Blomberg took a break from his honeymoon in Capri, Fascist Italy and returned to his office in Berlin.
1940: Fascist submarine U‐44 sank Greek steamer Ekatontarchos Dracoulis off Portugal at 0415 hours, massacring six, and U‐57 sank Norwegian steamer Miranda thirty miles off of Scotland at 0826 hours, slaughtering fourteen (but leaving three alive).
1941: Somebody murdered a Reich officer is killed in Bucharest, sparking a rebellion and pogrom by the Iron Guard. At the Berghof residence near Berchtesgaden, Adolf Schicklgruber mentioned to Benito Mussolini and Galeazzo Ciano that the Third Reich viewed the Soviet Union as a threat, but did not yet reveal the plan to invade.
1942: While Erwin Rommel received Swords to his Knight’s Cross medal, the Imperial advance guard crossed the border into Burma heading for Moulmein.
1943: An Axis Inspector of Concentration Camps advised camp commandants to reduce rate of death for camp prisoners; however, officials gave camp doctors orders to kill the sick and the debilitated.
1944: Berlin suffered 2,300 tons of Allied explosives.
1945: The Greater German Reich commenced the evacuation of 1.8 million people from East Prussia, around the same time that Béla Miklós’s provisional government in Hungary agreed to an armistice with the Allies.
1973: Lorenz Böhler, Axis physician, expired.