On January 20, 1942, Reinhard Heydrich, the head of the Nazi Security Police and the SS Security Service, and fourteen other senior SS officers, Nazi Party officials, and civil servants met in a villa in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee to discuss preparations for the Final Solution. When American legal investigators uncovered minutes (the sixteenth copy out of an original thirty) for the meeting among German Foreign Office records in March 1947, the meeting rapidly attained postwar notoriety and became known as the Wannsee Conference.

The conference's impact lay partly in the clarity with which its minutes (or so-called Protocol) revealed Nazi thinking. Consisting largely of an extended presentation by Heydrich, the Protocol offered a sober account of the evolution of Nazi policy on the Jews, culminating in "new possibilities in the East." A table slated 11 million European Jews, divided up by country, for inclusion in the plan....