The Wannsee Conference (German: Wannseekonferenz) was a meeting of senior officials of Nazi Germany, held in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee on 20 January 1942 during World War II. The purpose of the conference was to ensure the cooperation of administrative leaders of various departments in the implementation of the final solution to the Jewish question. The conference, called by Chief of the Reich Main Security Office (RSHA) Reinhard Heydrich, was attended by representatives from several government ministries, including state secretaries from the Foreign Office, the justice, interior, and state ministries, and representatives from the Schutzstaffel (SS). In the course of the meeting, Heydrich outlined the proposal of final extermination of European Jews in German-occupied Europe under the pretext of resettlement. The plan called for removing them from their home environment and deporting them by train to extermination camps in the General Government territory of occupied Poland, where they would be murdered out of sight primarily by gassing. Soon after the invasion of Poland in September 1939, the persecution of European Jewry was raised to unprecedented levels, but indiscriminate killing of men, women and children began in June 1941 after the onset of Operation Barbarossa against the Soviets. On 31 July 1941 Hermann Göring gave written authorization to Heydrich to prepare and submit a plan for a "total solution of the Jewish question" in territories under German control and to coordinate the participation of all involved government organisations. At Wannsee, Heydrich emphasized that once the mass deportation was complete, the SS would take complete charge of the exterminations. A secondary goal was to arrive at a definition of who was formally Jewish and thus determine the scope of the genocide. One copy of the Protocol with circulated minutes of the meeting survived the war. It was found by the Allies in March 1947 among files that had been seized from the German Foreign Office. It was used as evidence in the Subsequent Nuremberg Trials. The Wannsee House, site of the conference, is now a Holocaust memorial.

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