On this day in 1942, leading Nazi officials met at a villa in Wannsee, Berlin, to discuss the "Jewish question". Here, the policy of Jewish genocide was explicitly architected, although the "Final Solution" had been approved one year earlier.

The conference was attended by 15 high-ranking party and state officials, headed by Reinhard Heydrich, SS Lieutenant-General and head of the Reich Security Main Office. Other important attendees included Heinrich Müller, chief of the Gestapo, and Adolf Eichmann, who was executed in 1962 for war crimes in Jerusalem.

Because a policy of mass extermination had already been approved by Hitler in 1941 (especially as mass killings of Jews had already begun in occupied Europe), the historical importance of the meeting was not recognized by those present.

The purpose of formalizing the logistics behind the "Final Solution's" implementation was simply to emphasize that, once the deportations had been completed, the fate of the deportees became an internal matter of the SS, totally outside the purview of any other agency. Heydrich estimated that there were around 11 million Jews in Europe who would be targeted for extermination. Within a few months of the Wannsee Conference, the Nazis would begin installing the first poison-gas chambers in Polish extermination camps.

On January 20th, 1992, on the fiftieth anniversary of the meeting, the site was finally opened as a Holocaust memorial and museum known as the Haus der Wannsee-Konferenz (House of the Wannsee Conference).

"Those who suffer from conspiracy phobia are fond of saying: 'Do you actually think there's a group of people sitting around in a room plotting things?' For some reason that image is assumed to be so patently absurd as to invite only disclaimers. But where else would people of power get together - on park benches or carousels?"

- Michael Parenti