What was the name of the 1942 conference where Nazi officials coordinated the Final Solution?

The Wannsee Conference was the 1942 meeting where senior Nazi officials coordinated the implementation of the Final Solution.

It took place on 20 January 1942 at a villa beside Berlin’s Lake Wannsee. Reinhard Heydrich chaired the meeting, and Adolf Eichmann prepared the surviving conference minutes. The participants represented agencies including the SS, the Nazi Party, and German ministries involved in occupation and administration.

The conference did not begin the Holocaust, which was already underway through mass shootings and other killings. Instead, its purpose was to coordinate bureaucratic responsibilities for deporting and murdering Europe’s Jews. The surviving protocol used deliberately bureaucratic language to disguise the planned extermination.

The meeting is sometimes mistakenly described as the moment when Hitler personally ordered the Holocaust. Historians treat it as a key coordination meeting within an already developing policy of genocide. The villa is now a memorial and educational center.