KL-17-Wannsee-MS

Comment

Comment by Bruce Grenville on April 1, 2017 at 1:01am

The Wannsee Conference was a meeting of senior government officials of Nazi Germany and SS leaders, held in a villa (60c stamp) in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee on 20 January 1942.

The purpose of the conference, called by the director of the Reich Main Security Office Reinhard Heydrich ($1.35 stamp), was to ensure the cooperation of administrative leaders of various government departments in the implementation of the Final Solution to the Jewish question, whereby most of the Jews of German-occupied Europe would be deported to Poland and murdered. At Wannsee, Heydrich emphasized that once the mass deportation was complete, the SS would take complete charge of the exterminations. A secondary goal was to arrive at a definition of who was formally Jewish and thus determine the scope of the genocide.

One copy of the minutes of the conference survived the war. It was found by Robert Kempner in March 1947 among files from the German Foreign Office. It was used as evidence in the Nuremberg Trials.

The 45c shows Vidkun Quisling, CBE (1887 – 1945), a Norwegian military officer and politician who nominally headed the government of Norway after the country was occupied by Nazi Germany during World War II. He had previously collaborated with the British, and was awarded the Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for his services to Britain. His name has now become a synonym for a person who callously and traitorously works for an enemy of his country.

The 5c shows some of the inmates of Auschwitz Concentration Camp, set up by the Third Reich to imprison unwanted persons and use them as slave labour. The network of slave labour camps brought huge profits to the top German industrialists, much of which they continue to enjoy today. Auschwitz was liberated in 1945.