The Wannsee Villa: Aligning the Ministries

Reinhard Heydrich gathers that morning, in a villa beside the Am Großen Wannsee lake, fifteen senior officials of the SS, the party, and the Reich ministries. Tasked a few months earlier by Hermann Göring with preparing an "overall solution" to what the regime calls the Jewish question, he presides over the table. At his side is Adolf Eichmann, who drafted the invitation and is preparing the minutes.

The killing machine is already running in the east: behind the armies of the eastern front, mobile units shoot Jews by the tens of thousands, and the first killing centres are entering service. But deportation on a continental scale exceeds the means of the police alone. It requires the railways, nationality law, the seizure of property, the agreement of the civil administrations — levers held by state secretaries jealous of their prerogatives. There remains, too, the burning legal question of the Mischlinge, persons of mixed descent whom the ministries want to handle in their own way.

Heydrich must impose his line on this assembly: assert the primacy of the SS and bend every ministry from the outset to total deportation; compromise by ceding ground to jurists such as Wilhelm Stuckart, who pushes a rival administrative solution on the fate of the Mischlinge; or leave the points of friction open so as not to antagonise the administrations and win their cooperation step by step.