Institute for Historical Review

13. The Mythical Conference of Jan. 20, 1942

While Soviet Jews were allegedly being shot at random wherever they could be found-a charge which has been exposed as untrue-an important conference is supposed to have taken place in Berlin, Am Grossen Wanssee Nr. 5658, on January 20, 1942. Reinhard Heydrich allegedly presided -at this conference and is alleged to have said that he was commissioned by Göring to discuss plans for eliminating the Jews of Europe (Das Dritten Reich und die Juden, pp. 120ff.). Hans Frank is given credit for having provided information about this conference for the prosecution, but he makes no mention of this in his memoirs, Im Angesicht des Galgens (In the Shadow of the Gallows, Munich, 1953). Furthermore, it is a painful fact that Frank was never given the opportunity to explain or confirm each and every excerpt allegedly taken from his forty-two volume personal file as Governor-General in Poland. No-one has ever been found to substantiate the alleged information about this conference, although Interior State-Secretary Wilhelm Stuckart, who has wrongly been given credit as "the principal author of the 1935 Nuremberg laws (Adenauer's aide Hans Globke was the actual author), and Under-State-Secretary Hans Luther of the German Foreign Office were listed as present.

Heydrich supposedly said that emigration of Jews from Europe was futile because not more than 537,000 had departed since 1933. This ridiculously low figure, is Contradicted at every turn by official German statistics. The figure of 537,000 would scarcely exceed the emigration of Jews from Poland alone, during the period. Heydrich is also supposed to have, said that there were eleven million Jews in Europe, and that 95 per cent of those were in the German area of occupation. Actually, more than one-half of the European Jews are indicated in the same statement as being in the 1941 territory of the USSR and more than one million are listed for Vichy France and England. The absurdity of those figures is obvious. Yet the alleged protocol indicates that they were accepted without contradiction by the learned and well-informed gentlemen at the conference.

The next step in Heydrich's supposed plan for the elimination of the Jews would be to concentrate them in key areas, and hence this alleged conference of January 1942, is regarded as a signal for the second phase in the liquidation of the Jews. Shortly afterward, the Germans proceeded to move some of the Warsaw Jews into the Lublin area, and 310,322 of them had been sent out by the end of the summer of 1942. The first deportations of any Jews from Germany are specified by Poliakov for October, 1941, and these proceeded the more general action in the occupied countries.

Sven Hedin, Ohne Auftrag in Berlin (In Berlin without Assignment, Buenos Aires, 1949, pp. 141ff.) discussed the sending of 1200 Jews from Stettin with Heinrich Himmler as early as March, 1940. Hedin was in Germany from Sweden in connection with a private effort to secure German mediation in the Russo-Finnish war of 1939-1940. He was in possession of a Swedish journalist's report asserting that brutal conditions had prevailed among the Jews from Stettin, but Himmler denied this and he declared that only one old woman had died on the trip. This would mark an obvious exception to Poliakov's assumption that no Jews from Germany were being transported before October 1941.