A memorial to the children of Lidice, a village in the Czech Republic, 20 km northwest of Prague, that was completely eradicated by the Nazis during World War II (10th June 1942). All adult men were shot. Women were shipped to the Ravensbrück concentration camp and most of the children gassed. Altogether 340 people were killed (192 men, 60 women and 88 children).
“For my days vanish like smoke; my bones burn like glowing embers. My heart is blighted and withered like grass; I forget to eat my food. In my distress I groan aloud and am reduced to skin and bones.” (Psalm 102:3–5)
January 20th is the anniversary of Germany’s infamous Wannsee Conference, signaling a turning point from the mass murder of Jews to a systematic genocide of European Jews in the gas chambers of Auschwitz and other death camps.
On that day, a group of Germany’s political elite met at the Villa Minous, the Nazi SS guest house on the Greater Wannsee lake located in a Berlin suburb, to decide on “the Final Solution to the Jewish question.”
Although Israel was birthed from the ashes of the Holocaust’s Final Solution, fulfilling Ezekiel’s prophecy of “dry bones in chapter 37,” the Jewish people today know that all the nations will soon gather against Jerusalem and the Jewish people.
Since the prophetic Four Blood Moons of 2014-2015, there has been a huge rise in anti-semitism worldwide and specifically in Europe including the numerous murders of Jews in Paris. This has left many Jews wondering today, if history is in the process of repeating itself.
On January 20, 1942, several high-ranking Nazi party and German government officials gathered at this beautiful villa in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee to discuss and coordinate the implementation of “the Final Solution to the Jewish question.”
The Long Reach of Wannsee
The Wannsee meeting hasn’t remained as something that happened in the past and was forgotten. This meeting was so world shattering that the results of it are still reverberating today.
Many families are still in pain from the loss of loved ones, including many members of our Bibles For Israel staff. Tragically, many families and communities just disappeared altogether. They must not be forgotten.
Far too few survived after entering a Nazi extermination camp even though the banner over the gate promised that “work sets you free.” This slogan appeared at Auschwitz (above) and other camps.
Is it possible that people are already undertaking big and small steps toward a new genocide?
“What needs to be done to ensure that the next generation of Jews has a future in Europe?” the World Jewish Congress President Ronald S. Lauder has asked. “This eruption of anti-Semitism has been an eye-opener for many people, and it would be wrong to go back to doing business as usual. Instead, we expect politicians and societies to address the root causes of this hatred, and to take appropriate action against it.”
Child on a street in the Warsaw Ghetto. (Bundesarchiv photo)
Present were several high-ranking officers of the Nazi party and the Nazi SS, along with members of the police, the government, as well as state secretaries from the Foreign Office, the justice, interior, and state ministries.
As a result of this conference, millions of people were displaced and murdered.
“Fifty million people, including 6 million Jews, perished because 12 men gathered in a palace in Germany,” said Beverly Newman, the founder and a director of the Al Katz Center for Holocaust Survivors and Jewish Learning. (Bradenton)
Reinhard Heydrich
SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, who was then the director of the SS-Reichssicherheitshauptamt (Reich Main Security Office; RSHA), called the meeting.
The goal was to ensure the cooperation of the administrative heads of various government departments in the implementation of the Final Solution to the Jewish question, in which most of the Jews of German-occupied Europe were to be deported to Poland and murdered.
“During the course of the Final Solution, the Jews will be deployed under appropriate supervision at a suitable form of labor deployment in the East. In large labor columns, separated by gender, able-bodied Jews will be brought to those regions to build roads, whereby a large number will doubtlessly be lost through natural reduction. Any final remnant that survives will doubtless consist of the elements most capable of resistance. They must be dealt with appropriately, since, representing the fruit of natural selection, they are to be regarded as the core of a new Jewish revival,” Heydrich announced.
Adolf Eichmann
Adolf Eichmann
Adolf Eichmann, one of Heydrich’s subordinates, kept the minutes of the meeting and handed out 30 copies to the participants.
The only surviving copy, marked No. 16 out of 30, was found in March 1947 among German Foreign Office files by American War Crimes investigators. (Jewish Virtual Library)
This one copy was discovered by Robert Kempner, a Jewish lawyer from Berlin and lead US prosecutor at the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. In a twist of sweet fate during the trial, Kempner prosecuted the man who revoked his German citizenship in 1935 — Wilhelm Frick.
The minutes are coldly bureaucratic in describing the pan-European plan for the genocide of the Jewish People.
Because they only sum up what was discussed, the minutes do not give a completely accurate picture of what transpired. It is known, however, that the main element of the conference was Heydrich’s extended exposition of past, present, and future policies.
Page 6 of the minutes list Europe’s Jewish population (Holocaust Research Project)
None protested, as far as can be discerned from the minutes themselves or from other sources of the time as well as postwar testimony.
Kempner himself, who had held a post in the pre-1933 Prussian Justice Ministry, found it incredible that such individuals, apparently civilized men, eight of whom held doctorates, agreed with the plan.
The Protocol stands without equal as an example of the calm and orderly governance of human extermination. (Jewish Virtual Library)
Euphemisms were used to cloud the clear intent, such as Heydrich’s discussion of protocols for “new possibilities in the East.”
Eleven million European Jews, which are listed by country, were included in these “possibilities.”
Jewish children in the Lodz Ghetto in German-Occupied Poland are rounded up for extermination in the Chelmno death camp.
“Murder and elimination and annihilation were discussed,” he confirmed. (Holocaust History)
For the most part, all those attending were in agreement about the need to find a “final solution” to the Jewish question. The purpose of the buffet luncheon / meeting was logistics, how to carry this out. (Holocaust Explained)
Up until this time, extermination in German-occupied territories had been mostly piecemeal with Einsatzgruppen (task force) death squads employing locals to gather the members of Jewish communities. They murdered them and then buried them in mass graves like trash.
Other Jews had been herded into mass ghettos, such as the Warsaw Ghetto and that of Lvov Poland, where they were starved in a slow, agonizing death.
A man holds a Jewish infant who starved to death in Poland’s Warsaw Ghetto. Photos such as this served to record the horrors of ghetto life for posterity.
The Plan to Eliminate the Jews
“With cunning they conspire against your people; they plot against those you cherish.” (Psalm 83:3)
The Nazis (National Socialist German Workers’ Party) rose in power following WWI, promoting an ideology of anti-Semitism and racial hygiene through eugenics — an attempt to improve the quality of humanity’s gene pool by eliminating all unfit specimens.
They also promoted the need for territorial expansion.
The Nazis intended to invade Poland and the Soviet Union and deport or kill the Jews and Slavs living there, since they were viewed as inferior to the Aryan “master race.”
In Germany, the legal discrimination of Jews had been put into force immediately following Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor on the 30th of January 1933, at which time he and the Nazi party that he led seized dictatorial power.
Executions of Jews by German army mobile killing units (Einsatzgruppen) near Ivangorod, Ukraine. The above photo was mailed from the Eastern Front to Germany and intercepted at a Warsaw post office by a member of the Polish resistance collecting documentation on Nazi war crimes.
The Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service was passed as early as April 7, 1933, making it illegal for Jews to practice law or to serve in the civil service. Other legislation restricted them from other professions.
Initially, economic sanctions, such as these labor laws, as well as violence, had been employed to force Jews to voluntarily leave the country. The killings began following the invasion of Poland in September of 1939 and accelerated following the invasion of the Soviet Union in June of 1941.
In July of 1941, Hermann Goring, head of Germany’s defense forces and second in command to Hitler, authorized Heydrich in writing to prepare a plan for the “total solution of the Jewish question” in those areas that were under German control and to organize the participation of all relevant government organizations.
As well, to define the limits of the exterminations, they had to determine who were Jewish.
The Nazis subjected millions of people (both Jews and other victim groups) to forced labor under brutal conditions. From the establishment of the first Nazi concentration camps and detention facilities in the winter of 1933, forced labor — often pointless and humiliating, and imposed without proper equipment, clothing, nourishment, or rest — formed a core part of the concentration camp regimen. (USHMM)
Historians differ when it comes to the significance of the conference, since Jews were already being slaughtered in territories of the Soviet Union that had been occupied by the Germans six months before the meeting.
As well, the Belzec and Chelmno death camps in Poland were operating at full tilt — the largest chambers gassing 2,000 Jews at a time.
Historians see the role and timing of the Wannsee Conference differently.
It is believed that it may have been held in order to quell the concerns of some Berlin officials that Berlin Jews were being included in the shootings in the Soviet Union. While they were comfortable with the extermination of Russian and Eastern European Jews, they were less comfortable with their fellow Germans being included in the massacre. It is possible that Heydrich used this meeting to ensure that all the Reich’s ministries were on board with the program. (Jewish Virtual Library)
The main purpose of the conference for Heydrich, however, was to impose his leadership with regard to the Jewish question. He wanted to suppress any opposition to the deportation of Germany’s Jews and wanted to attain agreement with respect to special categories of exemption, such as highly decorated WWI veterans and such borderline categories as the so-called Mischling (those with both Aryan and Jewish ancestry).
In the end, even though the conference may have put together a plan for the total genocide of Europe’s Jewish community and made Heydrich the supreme commander of that plan, Hitler or Himmler were responsible for the final decision to implement it.
The Nuremberg Race Chart reveals the pseudo-scientific racial division that was the basis of racial policies of Nazi Germany. Only people with four German grandparents (four white circles – leftmost column) were considered to be “full-blooded” Germans. German nationals with three or four Jewish ancestors (at rightmost) were considered Jews according to the Nuremberg laws. The center column shows the Mischling grade, either 1 or 2, depending on the number of one’s Jewish ancestors who were members of a Jewish congregation.
Collaborating Governments
Included in the protocols were those countries that were cooperating with the Nazis, such as Slovakia, Croatia and Romania; Italy and France were not expected to be a problem.
Only the Nordic countries were expected to object and were to be left to the last.
Dr. Josef Buhler, Secretary and Deputy Governor to the General Government of Poland requested that the “solution” begin in his territory since, according to Buhler, the majority of Jews there were unfit for work and carried diseases.
Buhler promised that Heydrich’s work “would have the support of the authorities of the Governor General.”
He had only one request: “that the Jewish question in this area be solved as quickly as possible.”
German paramilitary occupants (members of Volksdeutscher Selbstschutz) in Sępólno Krajeńskie, Poland gathered Jews at the city’s marketplace in the autumn of 1939. The German sign they are holding reads, “We are going to Palestine.” This was a deception. All Jews from Sępólno were murdered in Radzim internment camp.
Apathy and Anti-Semitism
“On that day, when all the nations of the earth are gathered against her, I will make Jerusalem an immovable rock for all the nations. All who try to move it will injure themselves.” (Zechariah 12:3)
The villa at 56–58 Am Grossen, Wannsee now serves as both a memorial and a museum to the planning and genocide of the Jews of Europe.
An overview with regard to the historical background of anti-Semitism and racism is also included.
Individual rooms at the center focus on various governmental organizations that were involved. For example, one room is dedicated to the Ordnungspolizei (uniformed police) and another to the Wehrmacht (army) as well as the civil administration in the occupied territories. Another room deals with the subject of collaboration, and another deals with the question as to how much the German people knew about what was happening. (ghwk)
As God prophetically regathers the Jewish people to Israel, their Arab neighbors want to destroy them
In light of the Holocaust, the escalation of anti-Semitism is alarming.
It was only as recently as 2013 that the number of Jews residing in Israel exceeded the number who were exterminated in the Holocaust — six million.
And, today, Israel is faced with the reality of neighboring nations, plus Iran and others, who are actively seeking political alliances and military and nuclear capabilities to defeat and exterminate them.
Of course, Palestinian organizations are in that number. The Introduction to the Hamas charter states: “For our struggle against the Jews is extremely wide-ranging and grave, so much so that it will need all the loyal efforts we can wield, to be followed by further steps and reinforced by successive battalions from the multifarious Arab and Islamic world, until the enemies are defeated and Allah’s victory prevails.” (The Jerusalem Fund)
Despite these nefarious purposes, the world labels the terrorists as victims; this scenario is sadly similar to the situation for the Jews at the time of the Wannsee Conference when the perpetrators deceitfully called themselves victims and labeled the victims criminals.
And today, like yesterday, far too many stand by and fail to act.
As German historian Georg Wilhelm Frederick Hegel said almost 200 years ago, “We learn from history that we do not learn from history.”
