On the morning of January 20, 1942, fifteen well-dressed, highly educated men gathered around a conference table in a lakeside villa in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee. The meeting lasted about ninety minutes and looked like any government summit, but its purpose was to coordinate the administrative logistics for the murder of eleven million people. This episode examines the sources of the Wannsee Conference to dismantle a common myth: the Holocaust was not decided in that room. Mass shootings by the Einsatzgruppen, the Hunger Plan, and a decade of escalating legal persecution from the 1933 civil service law to the 1935 Nuremberg Laws were already underway.

With Göring's written authorization already in hand, Reinhard Heydrich convened representatives of the Justice, Interior, and Foreign ministries, the Four Year Plan, and the occupation gove ...