House Of The Wannsee Conference In Berlin In 2006 Editorial Photo

This exterior view of the elegant lakeside villa, known in German as Haus der Wannsee-Konferenz, on the outskirts of Berlin, is now a landmark museum which serves as a documentation, preservation and teaching center of one of the seminal events of the Holocaust, the January 20, 1942, meeting of the `final solution to the Jewish question.` Detailed discussions were held among 15 members of the Nazi SS. Party and government officials. The meeting was led by Reinhard Heydrich, Chief of the Nazi Security Police, who outlined plans for the ensuing wartime period of disenfranchisement, displacement, deportation, and extermination of European Jewry. Adolf Eichmann took notes. A high Nazi official, it fell to him to be in charge of the extermination program, mostly aimed at the Jews of Europe. In 1914 a prosperous drug manufacturer, Ernst Marlier built the grand house, and sold it in 1921 to a wealthy German industrialist, Friedrich Minoux, an early Hitler supporter. In the late 1930s Heydrich arranged for the Nazis to take it over and it became a hangout of the SS. The mayor of West Berlin turned the building into a museum in 1982. On the 50th anniversary of the conference, in 1992, the German senate designated the building an official museum, and a documentation and educational center used as well to inform teachers and students of the Nazi atrocities.