The Wannsee Conference and the Operation Reinhard Camps

On 20 January 1942, Reinhard Heydrich convened a conference at a villa on Berlin's Wannsee lake, bringing together senior SS, Nazi Party, and various German state ministry officials. Its purpose was to coordinate, administratively, the deportation and systematic extermination of Europe's Jews; the meeting included a presentation of estimated Jewish population figures for each European country as targets of the plan, and it used the euphemism "Final Solution of the Jewish Question" to refer to the planned extermination. Adolf Eichmann served as the logistical officer responsible for organizing the deportations, and the meeting itself was strikingly administrative and bureaucratic in character, with no recorded ethical debate over the legitimacy of extermination.