80 Years Ago the Nazis Planned the ‘Final Solution.’ It Took 90 Minutes.

THE NEW YORK TIMES: As Germany observes the anniversary of the Wannsee Conference, witnesses of the Nazi era are dying and antisemitism is resurgent in Europe and the United States.

Portraits of European Jews murdered during the Holocaust, at the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, on Wednesday. | Sean Gallup/Getty Images
BERLIN — On Jan. 20, 1942, 15 high-ranking officials of the Nazi bureaucracy met in a villa on Lake Wannsee on the western edge of Berlin. Nibbles were served and washed down with cognac. There was only one point on the agenda: “The organizational, logistical and material steps for a final solution of the Jewish question in Europe.”

Planning the Holocaust took all of 90 minutes.

Eighty years after the infamous Wannsee Conference that meticulously mapped it out, the bureaucratic efficiency of it remains as unnerving as ever.

The minutes taken that day and typed up on 15 pages do not explicitly refer to murder. They use phrases like “evacuation” and “reduction” and “treatment” — and divide up the task among different government departments and their “pertinent specialists.”

“You read that protocol, and it’s chilling,” said Deborah E. Lipstadt, a renowned Holocaust scholar. “It’s all very camouflaged language. But then you look at the list of countries and the number of Jews they planned to kill. Eleven million people they were going to go after. They had very big plans.”

The anniversary of that fateful meeting has a special resonance at a time when survivors of the Holocaust are dwindling and antisemitism and the ideology of white supremacy are resurgent in Europe and the United States, along with attacks targeting Jewish people and ethnic minorities. Just last Saturday a man took a rabbi and three members of his congregation hostage in a synagogue in Texas. » | Katrin Bennhold | Thursday, January 20, 2022

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Hace 80 años, los nazis planificaron la ‘solución final’ en solo 90 minutos : Mientras Alemania recuerda el aniversario de la Conferencia de Wannsee, los testigos de la era nazi están muriendo y el antisemitismo vuelve a resurgir en Europa y Estados Unidos. »

The Truth about Jerusalem’s Grand Mufti, Hitler and the Holocaust

Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin al-Husseini meeting
with Adolf Hitler in Dec. 1941.

JEWISH JOURNAL: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu went too far in recent comments that Nazi collaborator Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem before and during World War II, played a “central role in fomenting the Final Solution” by trying to convince Hitler to destroy the Jews during a 1941 meeting in Berlin. But Netanyahu was right on when he emphasized the Mufti’s Holocaust complicity and activities before, during, and after the war when the Mufti lied about alleged Jewish intentions to expel Muslim and Islam from Jerusalem’s Temple Mount—the same lie that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas repeats today in support of the current “knife Intifada.”

Netanyahu said: “Hitler didn't want to exterminate the Jews at the time, he wanted to expel the Jews. "And Haj Amin al-Husseini went to Hitler and said, ‘If you expel them, they'll all come here.' 'So what should I do with them?' he asked. He said, 'Burn them’.”

Netanyahu’s quotation of the Grand Mufti is word-for-word accurate, but it is not true that the Fuhrer needed the advice of Islam’s leading anti-Jewish fanatic to implement the Final Solution. That was his dream as far back as 1919 as a letter that he authored and signed now on display at the Simon Wiesenthal Center Museum of Tolerance documents.

Prime Minister Netanyahu has been accused of “a dangerous historical distortion” and even “Holocaust Denial” from the predictable political quarters who even dismiss the Grand Mufti as “a lightweight” inconsequential in the history of the Holocaust. This claim wrongly mitigates the Mufti’s mindset and crimes as one of the Hitler era’s leading anti-Jewish haters. » | Abraham Cooper * and Harold Brackman ** | Wednesday, October 21, 2015

* Rabbi Abraham Cooper is Associate Dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center.

** Dr. Harold Brackman, a historian[,] is a consultant for the Simon Wiesenthal Center.

Extract: Khatami Attacked, Ahmadinejad Denies the Holocaust
YNET NEWS: Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad delivered a speech at Tehran University, hinting once again that the Holocaust never took place.

According to him, "If the Holocaust was planned by the West, why won't you allow any research on the Holocaust? The Holocaust has turned into a black box and they won't let anyone open it and examine it… If this is such an important event, why won't you let us reveal the reality to the entire world?"

'Zionists greatest criminals in history'

Ahmadinejad reiterated his past "proposal", to have the Jews immigrate to other country. "Why don't they immigrate to Canada or the United States? They can go live in other countries. The Palestinian people don’t have to pay for your crime. What is the Palestinians' sin?

"The Zionists are the greatest criminals in history. Resisting the Zionists is a national duty and a religious commandment and a human duty. The Zionist regime is a tree with rotten roots," Ahmadinejad said.

He added, "It's clear that this fake regime was established for colonialist goals, and there is no logic behind its establishment." The crowd responded by chanting, "Death to Israel." [Source: YnetNews] Dudi Cohen and Reuters | Friday, September 18, 2009

BBC – Auschwitz: The Final Solution
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Lest We Forget – Auschwitz: The Nazis and the Final Solution
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