The Wannsee Conference was a high-level meeting of Nazi officials that took place in Berlin on January 20, 1942, to discuss the Final Solution of the Jewish Question.
Called by Reinhard Heydrich, the head of the Reich Security Main Office which controlled both the Gestapo and the SD, the conference was originally called for December 9, 1941, but fallout from the Japanese invasion of Pearl Harbor and a temporary worsening of the situation on the Eastern Front led to its postponement. The gathering of 14 senior SS officers, Nazi Party officials and civil servants finally convened on January 20 at a splendid villa on the shores of Berlin's Lake Wannsee.
One of Heydrich's subordinates, Adolf Eichmann, took minutes, thirty copies of which were evidently distributed among the participants and other interested parties in the following weeks. The only surviving copy, marked No. 16 out of 30, was found in March 1947 among German Foreign Office files by American War Crimes investigators. After that discovery, the minutes, or Wannsee Protocol, rapidly attained postwar notoriety.
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