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International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust: 70 Years After the Wannsee Conference

January 24, 2012
On January 20, 1942, at a German resort called Wannsee, 15 Nazi leaders gathered at the behest of Reinhard Heydrich, Adolf Hitler’s deputy, to plan what was euphemistically referred to as the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question” in the territories occupied by the Nazis. This plan led to the deaths of six million Jews. On Friday, January 27, 2012, a tribute session was held at the Legislative Palace to mark the “International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust.”
Although the systematic annihilation of Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe began with the outbreak of war in September 1939 (in Germany, it began with the “Night of Broken Glass” pogrom in November 1938), primarily through mass shootings carried out by the“Einsatzgruppen”(execution squads), the invasion of territories under Soviet control, given the large number of Jews living there, necessitated the creation of a more systematic and efficient method of extermination to achieve the goal of wiping out the Jews. This conference is one of the proofs of the uniqueness of the Shoah, in that it was there that the extermination of all the Jews in the world was planned, as long as they remained within the reach of the Third Reich.

Lieutenant Colonel Adolf Eichmann was responsible for the design and operation of the extermination camps which, combined with the more than one million murdered by the Einsatzgruppen and those who died due to the living conditions in the ghettos and concentration camps, killed 6,000,000 Jews over the next three years.

On January 27, 1945, Soviet troops liberated the largest of these camps: Auschwitz–Birkenau, marking the beginning of the end of this barbarity. The date has been designated by the United Nations as the International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust. The Permanent Commission of our country’s Legislative Branch, in compliance with this UN resolution, holds an annual Tribute Session, which took place on January 27 at the Legislative Palace.