The Wannsee Conference: Another Lie Crushed

One of the more commonly perpetuated myths around the Holocaust is that the Nazis held a conference in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee on January 20, 1942, where the “extermination of the Jews was planned.”

One of the high-profile claims in this regard was made by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, at the UnitedNations in 2009, when he held up a copy of the minutes of the Wannsee meeting, and told the world that:

“There, on January 20, 1942, after a hearty meal, senior Nazi officials met and decided how to exterminate the Jewish people. The detailed minutes of that meeting have been preserved by successive German governments. Here is a copy of those minutes, in which the Nazis issued precise instructions on how to carry out the extermination of the Jews. Is this a lie?”

The simple answer to Netanyahu’s question is, yes, this is a lie. An outright, shameless, blatant lie.

The actual minutes of the Wannsee Conference can be read in their entirety—in the original German here,

In reality, the Wannsee meeting and its minutes do not contain a master plan to kill Jews;

– Nowhere in the meeting’s minutes is genocide discussed, planned, proposed, or even suggested;

– The Wannsee meeting never discussed gas chambers, shootings, or any of the fantasies propagated by the exterminationists;

– The Wannsee Minutes reported that there were only 4.5 million Jews under German control (yet 4.3 million Jewish compensation claims have been lodged against the postwar German government);

– The Wannsee meeting was a planning meeting on how Europe’s Jews should be deported, via transit camps, to the East; with able-bodied Jews being forced to build roads and other labor intensive tasks in those regions;

– The Wannsee Conference also made allowance for specific exceptions to Jewish evacuation, such as Jewish German World War I veterans; ALL Jews over the age of 65; and ALL Jews working in industries vital to the German war effort, to be released from the threat of evacuation and be allowed to stay in Germany.

There is therefore, no justification for the allegation that the Wannsee Conference was a ‘master plan for mass murder’ and everyone who claims this to be the case, from Netanyahu down, is simply lying.

That the Wannsee Conference never discussed killing Jews in any way, has actually been confirmed in public by Yehuda Bauer, professor of Holocaust Studies at the Avraham Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Bauer is also the founding editor of the journal Holocaust and Genocide Studies, and a member of the editorial board of the Encyclopaedia of the Holocaust, published by Yad Vashem in 1990.

He is not, therefore, as some Holocaust storytellers claim, some obscure figure, but a leading and major—in fact, one of the most senior—Jews promoting the Holocaust fable.

As long ago as 1992(!), Bauer, speaking at a conference held in London to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Wannsee meeting, told the audience that the claim that Wannsee was a “master plan” to kill Jews was nothing a but a “silly story.”

Bauer’s remarks were reported in the Jewish Telegraphic Agency of January 23, 1992, and the Canadian Jewish Times of January 30, 1992.

Titled “Nazi Shceme Not Born at Wannsee, Israeli Holocaust Scholar Claims,” the JTA report continued:

London (JTA)—An Israeli Holocaust scholar has de-bunked the Wannsee Conference, at which top Nazi officials are said to have gathered at a villa in a Berlin suburb in 1942 to draw the blueprints of the ‘Final Solution.’

According to Prof. Yehuda Bauer of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Wannsee was a meeting, ‘but hardly a conference’, and ‘little of what was said there was executed in detail.’

Bauer addressed the opening session of an international conference held here to mark the 50th anniversary of the decision to carry out the “Final Solution”. “But it was not made at Wannsee”, the Czech born scholar said.

“The public still repeats, time after time, the silly story that at Wannsee the extermination of the Jews was arrived at, Wannsee was but a stage in the unfolding of the process of mass murder,” he said.

His comments were repeated in the Canadian Jewish News, which read as follows:

Wannsee’s importance rejected

London (JTA) — An Israeli Holocaust scholar has debunked the Wannsee Conference, at which top Nazi officials are said to have gathered at a villa in a Berlin suburb in 1942 to draw the blueprints of the “Final Solution.”

According to Prof. Yehuda Bauer (photo) of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Wannsee was a meeting, “but hardly a conference”, and “little of what was said there was executed in detail.”

“The public still repeats, time after time, the silly story that at Wannsee the extermination of the Jews was arrived at.”

In other words, even the leading “Holocaust scholar” in Israel knows that to claim that the Wannsee Conference was all about “killing Jews,” or as Netanyahu told the United Nations, that the minutes contain “precise instructions on how to carry out the extermination of the Jews . . .” is an outright lie, a “silly story.”

Once again, like everything else associated with the “Holocaust,” the Wannsee Conference myth collapses when subjected to even the most basic investigation.