In Europe

in the war. The first invitation – the conference was postponed once – dates from 29 November, 1941. One week later the German troops had ground to a halt at the gates of Moscow, Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor and Hitler had declared war on the United States. This lent the campaign to exterminate the Jews of Europe a powerful political and ideological overtone. ‘The world war has arrived!’ Joseph Goebbels shouted on 12 December. ‘The destruction of the Jews must be its consequence.’
    The internal summit meeting, accompanied by a luncheon, was finally held on 20 January. The participants included the state secretary of internal affairs, Wilhelm Stuckart, the director general of the Eastern Occupied Territories, Georg Leibbrandt, SS-Oberführer Gerhard Klopfer from the party chancellery, Gestapo chief of operations Heinrich Müller, and SSGruppenführer Otto Hofmann from the head office of race and settlement, fifteen top bureaucrats in all. The meeting was chaired by Reinhard Heydrich. Minutes were taken by SD-Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann, head of the Gestapo's Jewish emigration department.
    Eichmann's minutes have been preserved: fifteen neatly typed pages of euphemistic officialese. Heydrich opened the meeting and reported that he, with the Führer's permission, had been charged with streamlining the ‘final solution to the European Jewish question’. The goal was to purify, in a ‘legal fashion’, the German
Lebensraum
of all Jews. The ‘evacuation of the Jews to the east’ had already begun, ‘as a possible alternative to emigration’. Carefully compiled lists were then handed out – cognac had meanwhile been served – showing the number of Jews in each country: 131,800 in the Old Empire, 165,000 in occupied France, 160,800 in the Netherlands, 3,500 in Lithuania, 0 in Estonia (‘Free of Jews’), 58,000 in Italy, 200 in Albania, 5 million in the Soviet Union, etc. A striking feature is the enormous ambition reflected in the count: European territories over which Germany as yet held no sway, such as Britain (330,000), Switzerland (18,000) and Spain (6,000), were included as a matter of course.
    The parties agreed that Europe must be ‘combed out, from west to east’. Huge columns of able-bodied Jews were to be sent east, where, as the minutes noted, ‘a great number will be reduced by natural elimination’. Those remaining were to be ‘treated in equal fashion’; experience had shown, after all, that failure to do so would leave ‘hearths of infection’ for a Jewish resurrection. A special ghetto would be formed at Theresienstadt, the old fortified city north-west of Prague, for Jewish veterans, war invalids and the aged. All complaints and questions could in this way be dealt with ‘at a single blow’.
    To sum all, what this flood of bureaucratic language was all about was that the function of the roaming death squads was to be replaced by enormous extermination plants, with fast and efficient lines of supply. Special death camps were designed, unlike normal concentration camps, with almost no cells or barracks. The entire system was intended to ‘process’ huge numbers of prisoners within several hours after they stumbled weakly from the train. Preferably without commotion.
    The Berlin bureaucrats saw to it that the entire operation took placewith unprecedented speed and smoothness. Operation Reinhard, the mass murder of the Polish Jews, began in May 1942. The first trains with Slovakian Jews arrived at Auschwitz. That summer the Dutch, Belgians and French followed. By late 1942, according to SS statistics, four million of Europe's eleven million Jews had already been exterminated.
    The minutes of the Wannsee meeting contain no word about the fate of the some 800,000 Roma and Sinti Gypsies. After a great deal of official discussion, it was decided in November 1943 that Gypsies with a permanent place of residence would receive the same treatment as the rest of the population, while wandering Gypsies would be allocated the same status as Jews. In fact, the rounding up of the Gypsies was much less systematic: it had no major ideological motivation, Hitler and Himmler were not interested in them, and besides, most of them were as poor as church mice. They had nothing to plunder. Nevertheless, several hundred thousand Sinti and Roma were killed during the Second World War.
    In Europe's most notorious meeting room, portraits of the fifteen participants now hang. Two of them