The Wannsee Conference of the Nazi officials was held on 20 January 1942, in Grosser Wannsee, a suburb of Berlin, in order to reach a "final solution to the Jewish question."

The conference was attended by 15 senior Nazi elders. The meeting was chaired by Reinhard Heydrich, leader of the SS and the Gestapo. Also in attendance was Adolf Eichmann, head of the Jewish Affairs Department at the Central Security Headquarters in the Reich. The idea of ​​deporting Jews from Europe to Madagascar was rejected as impractical. The result of this meeting is an agreement for all Jews to be gathered and interned in the East, and then organized into working groups. The term "extermination" is not explicitly mentioned in the report from this meeting, but months after the conference, the first gas chambers were made in Auschwitz and Treblinka.

In July 1941, Hermann Göring ordered Heydrich to draw up a plan for a final settlement of the Jewish question. Heydrich developed that plan considered to be unsurpassed in terms of crime of liquidation and extermination of the Jewish people in Europe and in the world. The goals of this plan were the following:

• expulsion of Jews from places where German people live

• expulsion from certain regions of vital interest for the German people

Due to the cooperation necessary with other institutions of the Nazi apparatus, Heydrich convened a conference at the villa in Wannsee with the leaders of the institutions needed for this project. Although not driven by idealism like the others, Heydrich, as leader of the conference, managed to remove all doubts and thus gain the support of all institutions.

Many believe that the massacring of the Jews did not begin on 20 January 1942. In the months before the Wannsee Conference, half a million Jews were killed – most of them shot, including women and children, especially in areas of the Soviet Union occupied by the German Wehrmacht in the summer of 1941.

Adolf Eichmann, main collaborator of Heydrich and participant during the conference, openly admitted many years later. After his spectacular kidnapping in Argentina, carried out by the Israeli secret services, at a trial in Jerusalem in 1961, when asked what was discussed at the villa, he said: "Different forms of killing were taken into account.".