203: The Holocaust: Killing Squads, Ghettos, & Gas Chambers

Greg Jackson (0:01)

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It's nearly 12 noon on a cold winter's morning, January 20th, 1942 We're in a western suburb of Berlin, Germany, standing before a stunning three-story neo-classical mansion known as the House of Wannsee. We're going to head inside in just a moment, but before we do, let me explain that we're here to witness a meeting unlike any other I can think of in history. Here, the head of the Reich Security Head Office, SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, or anglicized as Reinhard Heydrich, will lead 14 other high-ranking members of the Nazi Party and government in a discussion prompted by instructions issued months earlier by the number two man in all of Nazi Germany, Reich Marshal Hermann Göring, about coordinating their various offices and departments to carry out what they're calling, to quote them, the final solution to the Jewish question. Now, this quote unquote solution or plan is hardly new. The anti-Semitic Nazi state has already removed hundreds of thousands of Jews from its expanding empire, forcibly relocating them to cramped neighborhoods called ghettos or to concentration and labor camps. The Nazis have also begun their mass killings. Early on, their SS-led mobile killing squads, or Einsatzgruppen, relied almost exclusively on bullets, but more recently, they have begun experimenting with using the exhaust from vans to gas their Jewish victims. In brief, Reinhard Heydrich isn't presenting a new plan as much as aligning everyone's efforts on a systematic, efficient, and economic means of, to quote this meeting's soon-to-be-written minutes, forcing the Jews out of the various spheres of life and the living space of the German people. Close quote. Yes, this is a dark meeting. One as sinister in purpose as the grounds we're standing on are gorgeous. And on that grim note, let's head inside this stately manor. In a magnificent and ornately decorated room, 14 men, likely dressed in crisp uniforms, listen attentively as Reinhard Heydrich talks. The tall, handsome, 37-year-old Obergruppenführer, with blue eyes and a sharp part in his receding blonde hair, opens his remarks with a review of Nazi Germany's Jewish policies to date. He tells the men before him that, back in the 1930s, their policy was, quote-unquote, forced emigration, which, he claims, removed a combined 537,000 Jews from Germany, Austria, and the protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. But as of last year, 1941, they replaced this costly, inefficient and slow process with the evacuation of the Jews to the East, a policy that came, he notes, with appropriate prior authorization from the Führer. That's right, evacuation has Adolf Hitler's express approval.