On January 20, 1942, top Nazi officials and representatives of the Reich authorities met in Wannsee, a suburb outside of Berlin. At this meeting, chaired by Reinhard Heydrich, the Reich Security Main Office formed the extermination plans for the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question.” The
Wannsee Conference, as it is now called, led to the creation of a network of extermination camps designed to systematically murder the entire European Jewish population.
Before the killing centers opened at Birkenau, Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, and Majdanek, more than 1.5 million Jews had already been murdered by the Germans, their Axis allies, and local collaborators in Ukraine, Belarus, and other USSR republics. These were the first victims of the Holocaust.