(Jan. 20, 1942) Meeting of Nazi officials in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee to plan the "final solution" to the "Jewish question.
" It was attended by 15 Nazi senior bureaucrats led by Reinhard Heydrich , head of the SS and Gestapo , and included Adolf Eichmann , chief of Jewish affairs for the Reich Central Security Office. It marked a turning point in Nazi policy toward the Jews. An earlier idea, to deport all of Europe's Jews to Madagascar, was abandoned as impractical in wartime. Instead, the newly planned final solution would entail rounding up all Jews throughout Europe, transporting them eastward, and organizing them into labour gangs. The final protocol of the Wannsee Conference never explicitly mentioned extermination, but, within a few months after the meeting, the first gas chambers were installed at Auschwitz and Treblinka . See also Holocaust .