January 20, 1942: The Wansee Conference Produces "The Final Solution"

January 20, 1942: The Wannsee Conference is held outside Berlin. There, a new phrase was created for what to do about the Jewish people of Europe: Die Endlösung, or "The Final Solution." Because they didn't think that what they were already doing – arresting, imprisoning, sending to slave-labor camps – was enough.

Harvests were poor in Germany in 1940 and 1941, and food supplies were short, as large numbers of forced laborers had been brought into the country to work in the armaments industry. If these workers, as well as the German people, were to be adequately fed, there must be a sharp reduction in the number of "useless mouths," of whom the millions of Jews under German rule were considered, in the light of Nazi ideology, the most obvious example.

On July 31, 1941, Hermann Göring gave written authorization to SS Senior Group Leader Reinhard Heydrich to prepare and submit a plan for a "total solution of the Jewish question" in territories under German control, and to coordinate the participation of all involved government organizations. Various occurrences in World War II led to delays. On January 8, 1942, Heydrich sent new invitations to a meeting to be held on January 20. The venue for the rescheduled conference was a villa at Am Großen Wannsee 56-58, 14 miles southwest of central Berlin.

The resulting Generalplan Ost (General Plan for the East) called for deporting the population of occupied Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union to Siberia, for use as slave labor or to be murdered. The minutes of the Wannsee Conference estimated the Jewish population of the Soviet Union to be 5 million, including nearly 3 million in Ukraine.

In addition to eliminating Jews, the Nazis also planned to reduce the population of the conquered territories by 30 million people through starvation, in an action called the Hunger Plan, devised by Herbert Backe. Food supplies would be diverted to the Wehrmacht (German armed forces) and German civilians. Cities would be razed, and the land allowed to return to forest or resettled by German colonists.

The objective of the Hunger Plan was to inflict deliberate mass starvation on the Slavic civilian populations under German occupation by directing all food supplies to the German home population and the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front. Nazi ideology had the Slavic peoples as a "lesser" "race," along with Jews. According to the historian Timothy Snyder, 4.2 million Soviet citizens -- largely Russians, Belarusians, and Ukrainians -- were starved by the Nazis as a result of Backe's plan.

Oppression had already been underway for 9 years. Now, the Holocaust began.

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January 20, 1942 was a Tuesday. Baseball and football were out of season. The NBA hadn't been founded yet. There was 1 game in the NHL: The New York Rangers beat the Boston Bruins, 4-2 at the Boston Garden.