Editing Wannsee Conference (section)

== Interpretation ==
[[File:Bundesarchiv Bild 183-R98683, Reinhard Heydrich.jpg|thumb|upright|[[Reinhard Heydrich]]]]

The Wannsee Conference lasted only about ninety minutes. The enormous importance which has been attached to the conference by post-war writers was not evident to most of its participants at the time. Heydrich did not call the meeting to make fundamental new decisions on the Jewish question; massive killings of Jews in the conquered territories in the Soviet Union and Poland were ongoing. A new extermination camp was under construction at [[Belzec extermination camp|Belzec]] at the time of the conference, and other extermination camps were in the planning stages.{{sfn|Longerich|2010|p=309}}{{sfn|Breitman|1991|pp=229–233}} The decision to exterminate the Jews had already been made, and Heydrich, as Himmler's emissary, held the meeting to ensure the cooperation of the various departments in conducting the deportations.{{sfn|Longerich|2010|p=310}} Observations from historian [[Laurence Rees]] support Longerich's position that the decision over the fate of the Jews was determined before the conference; Rees notes that the Wannsee Conference was really a meeting of "second-level functionaries", and stresses that Himmler, Goebbels, and Hitler were not present.{{sfn|Rees|2017|pp=251–252}} According to Longerich, a primary goal of the meeting was to emphasise that once the deportations had been completed, the fate of the deportees became an internal matter of the SS, totally outside the purview of any other agency.{{sfn|Longerich|2000|p=14}} A secondary goal was to determine the scope of the deportations and arrive at definitions of who was Jewish and who was ''Mischling''.{{sfn|Longerich|2000|p=14}} "The representatives of the ministerial bureaucracy had made it plain that they had no concerns about the principle of deportation ''per se''. This was indeed the crucial result of the meeting and the main reason why Heydrich had detailed minutes prepared and widely circulated", said Longerich.{{sfn|Longerich|2010|pp=306, 310}} Their presence at the meeting also ensured that all became accomplices and accessories to the murders that were about to be undertaken.{{sfn|Longerich|2000|p=7}}

Eichmann's biographer [[David Cesarani]] agrees with Longerich's interpretation; he notes that Heydrich's main purpose was to impose his own authority on the various ministries and agencies involved in Jewish policy matters, and to avoid any repetition of the objections to the deportations and genocide from his military and civilian subordinates that had occurred earlier in the annihilation campaign. "The simplest, most decisive way that Heydrich could ensure the smooth flow of deportations", he writes, "was by asserting his total control over the fate of the Jews in the Reich and the east, and [by] cow[ing] other interested parties into toeing the line of the RSHA".{{sfn|Cesarani|2005|pp=110–111}}