House of the Wannsee Conference

History of the villa

A businessman’s villa, 1914-1940

Villa and garden were constructed in 1914-15 for the businessman Ernst Marlier according to the designs of the architect Paul O. A. Baumgarten. In 1921 Marlier sold the estate to Friedrich Minoux who had made his fortune as director-general of the Hugo Stinnes trust. In 1923, the year of severe crisis (inflation, French occupation of the Ruhr area, Hitler-Putsch in Munich), Minoux offered the army high command his cooperation as secretary to establish a cabinet with dictatorial authority. Conspiratorial meetings with like-minded individuals were held in his Wannsee villa. These political ambitions failed because in November 1923 the high command of the German army abandoned their putsch plans against the Weimar Republic. Talks between Minoux and Free corps and Nazi leaders came to no conclusion.

Purchase for the SS Security Service (SD), 1940

After Minoux had left the Stinnes trust he started a wholesale coal business in Berlin. In the years 1924 to 1938, as board member of the Berlin gasworks, he had embezzled at least 12 million Reich marks from the gasworks along with two accomplices. He was arrested for this in May 1940. During his custody he sold villa and estate for the market price of 1.95 million Reich marks to the “Nordhav Foundation”, which handled real estate business for the SS Security Service (SD). In September 1939 the SD merged with the Security Police (Criminal Police and Secret State Police, called “Gestapo”) to form the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA). Leaders of the SD and the Security Police were now the new patrons of the villa.

SD locations in Berlin Wannsee, 1937-1945

In 1937, the SS Security Service (SD) established a secret institute for research about Eastern Europe at lake Grosser Wannsee. This “Wannsee Institute” produced intelligence reports on the Soviet Union and Eastern European countries. With the conversion of Villa Minoux into a SS guesthouse, casino, and house for conferences, the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) branch in Berlin Wannsee became one of the most important locations of this organisation in Berlin. 

In 1941, the International Criminal Police Commission headed by Heydrich moved into a villa at lake Kleiner Wannsee. In 1942, the SD set up a radio headquarters (the “Havel Institute”), which directed spy and sabotage actions against the Soviet Union (“Operation Zeppelin”). As a result of the allied air raids on the center of Berlin, the RSHA moved its staff and offices to Wannsee. It was here that Walter Schellenberg, head of the SD branch for non-German countries, started to work in 1944. The villas of suburban Wannsee were popular with other NS departments and high level officials as official and private residences.

Jewish forced laborers and the “Wannsee Horticultural School”, 1940-1943

From 1940 on, the SS had the gardens of their villas tended by forced laborers in a “closed Jewish labour unit”. In  the “Wannsee Horticultural School” headed by Georg Alexander and with the assistance of a teacher, Jizchak Schwersenz, juvenile Jews were cared for. In 1942, Schwersenz went underground together with friends and students and survived. The remaining horticultural students were seized at their place of work by the Gestapo as part of the “Fabrikaktion” of 27 February 1943, when Jews still living in Berlin as forced laborers were deported. They were taken to Auschwitz where most of them were murdered.  The SS then deployed East European forced laborers to tend the gardens in Wannsee.

Guesthouse of Security Police and SD, 1941-1945

The guesthouse of the Security Police and Security Service (SD) in Minoux’s former villa opened in October 1941. Among the guests were high ranking SS-Officers, commanders of the “Special Task Forces” [Einsatzkommandos] or secret service men of allied countries. The Head of the Domestic SD, SS-Gruppenführer Otto Ohlendorf, moved his headquarters to the villa in October 1944. Here his colleagues discussed with representatives of other departments questions related to “Volkstumspolitik” as well as long-range plans of the German Resistance on the reform of German administration. In December 1944, Ohlendorf ran a conference on “Sociological Issues and Tasks” in which professors from different universities and employees of various offices took part. At the end of the war, Head of Gestapo Heinrich Müller also worked temporarily in Wannsee. There he negotiated with a deputy of the Red Cross in Geneva on the transfer of the camps Ravensbrueck and Sachsenhausen.

August Bebel Institute of the SPD, 1947-1952, 
and school hostel, 1952-1988

At the end of the war the building was used by the Red Army and later on by the US Army. For a while it stood empty and almost all the furnishings were plundered. In 1947, the August Bebel Institute of the Berlin Social Democratic Party moved into the building. From 1952 on, the site was used as a school hostel for classes from the Neukoelln district of Berlin. 1988 saw the conversion and historical reconstruction of villa and garden in order to set up a memorial site.
 

Joseph Wulf’s Initiative and the Inauguration of the Memorial Site, 1965-1992

The historian Joseph Wulf, a Jewish resistance fighter and survivor of Auschwitz, published the first comprehensive documentations on the NS regime available in Germany. In 1965 he strongly suggested to establish a documentation center in the villa. Wulf gained worldwide prominent supporters, but the Berlin Senate was not prepared to make the building available. In 1974, Wulf committed suicide. In the 1980s, his ideas were taken up again. Gerhard Schoenberner, a pioneer in publishing on NS crimes in Germany, was commissioned by the Berlin Senate to prepare the memorial and the permanent exhibition.

The “Memorial and Educational Site House of the Wannsee Conference” was opened in 1992 on the 50^th anniversary of the conference on the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question”.

Opening of the new permanent exhibit in january 2006.