As part of Harbingers’ Magazine’s Special Newsroom 2026, I visited the lakeside villa in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee where, in January 1942, senior Nazi officials gathered for the Wannsee Conference, a meeting that became a crucial moment in the bureaucratic organisation of the Holocaust.

Walking through the luxurious villa I was confused of how such evil people could step onto a place of immensely impressive scenery and immediately stain its beauty forever. It was a spectacularly interesting process to accept that a place can be beautiful while knowing that some of the cruelest evils in the world were once in that room.

Chaired by Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA), the meeting lasted around 90 minutes. Its purpose was to coordinate the implementation of the Nazis’ so-called “Final Solution”: the systematic murder of Europe’s Jewish population.

Importantly, the Wannsee Conference did not mark the beginning of the Holocaust, nor was it the meeting when the Nazis first decided to murder Europe’s Jews. By January 1942, mass killings were already under way, particularly in Nazi-occupied territories in eastern Europe.

Instead, the conference helped secure cooperation between different parts of the German state for a continent-wide programme of deportation and mass murder.

What was the Wannsee Conference?

The Wannsee Conference was a high-level administrative meeting intended to coordinate different government institutions involved in implementing the “Final Solution”. It took place on 20 January at a grand villa on the shore of Lake Wannsee, in a wealthy suburb of Berlin.

Fifteen senior officials attended. Participants represented the SS (Schutzstaffel – the Nazi paramilitary organisation) and security apparatus, various government ministries, the Nazi Party administration and authorities governing occupied territories.

Among them were Roland Freisler from the Ministry of Justice, and Wilhelm Stuckart from the Ministry of the Interior, and, crucially, Adolf Eichmann, a key orchestrator of the Holocaust.

Why was it held?

The Holocaust was already underway by the time of the conference.

Following Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, Einsatzgruppen – mobile killing units – alongside other German forces and collaborators, had carried out mass shootings of Jewish communities across occupied eastern Europe. Other forms of mass killing had also begun.

The murder of millions of Jews across Europe, however, required the involvement of far more than the SS alone. Deporting Jewish populations across national borders, determining who would be classified as Jewish under Nazi racial laws, confiscating property and coordinating occupied territories involved numerous branches of the Nazi state.

Wannsee brought representatives of these institutions together. Heydrich sought their cooperation and asserted the central role of the Reich Security Main Office – which combined the Nazis’ security and intelligence services including the Gestapo and the SS – in coordinating the “Final Solution”.

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What was discussed?

The conference focused on how the “Final Solution” would be implemented across Europe.

One of the most striking surviving documents is the Wannsee Protocol, an edited record of the meeting compiled by Adolf Eichmann from notes taken during the conference rather than a verbatim transcript.

The document reveals the enormous geographical reach of the plan, extending even to countries with relatively small Jewish populations. The protocol listed Luxembourg and Albania, for example, alongside estimates of their Jewish populations. More strikingly, it included countries that were not under German occupation, such as Britain, Ireland, Sweden, Switzerland, Spain and Portugal.

Altogether, the protocol accounted for approximately 11 million Jews across Europe.

The protocol also discussed deportation eastwards and forced labour. Its bureaucratic language is particularly striking because it often obscures the murderous reality of the policies being discussed.

Why does it matter today?

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the Wannsee Conference is the range of institutions represented in the room.

SS officials sat alongside senior representatives of government ministries from across the Nazi state. Lawyers, administrators and officials used the mechanisms of government to help coordinate the persecution, deportation and murder of millions of people.

This complicates the comforting idea that atrocities are committed only by obviously evil individuals operating outside normal society. Genocide also requires systems: officials who produce classifications, transport arrangements, regulations and paperwork; institutions that cooperate; and professionals willing to use their expertise in the service of persecution.