Daily Bread for 1.20.16

Good morning, Whitewater.

Wednesday in town will offer an even chance of morning snow showers and a high of twenty-one. Sunrise is 7:19 and sunset is 4:52, for 9h 33m 13s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 85.9% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Aquatic Center Board meets at 7 AM today, and the Fire/EMS Task Force at 7 PM.

On this day in 1942, senior officials of Nazi Germany meet at what’s now know as the the Wannsee Conference:

The Wannsee Conference (German: Wannseekonferenz) was a meeting of senior officials of Nazi Germany, held in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee on 20 January 1942.

he villa at 56–58 Am Großen Wannsee, where the Wannsee Conference was held, is now a memorial and museum.

The purpose of the conference, called by director of the Reich Main Security Office (RSHA) SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, 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. Conference attendees included representatives from several government ministries, including state secretaries from the Foreign Office, the justice, interior, and state ministries, and representatives from the Schutzstaffel (SS). In the course of the meeting, Heydrich outlined how European Jews would be rounded up from west to east and sent to extermination camps in the General Government (the occupied part of Poland), where they would be murdered.

The Wannsee Conference lasted only about ninety minutes. The enormous importance which has been attached to the conference by postwar writers was not evident to most of its participants at the time. Heydrich did not call the meeting to make fundamental new decisions on the Jewish question. Massive killings of Jews in the conquered territories in the Soviet Union and Poland were ongoing and a new extermination camp was already under construction at Belzec at the time of the conference; other extermination camps were in the planning stages.^[28]^[64] The decision to exterminate the Jews had already been made, and Heydrich, as Himmler’s emissary, held the meeting to ensure the cooperation of the various departments in conducting the deportations.^[65] According to Longerich, a primary goal of the meeting was to emphasise that once the deportations had been completed, the implementation of the Final Solution became an internal matter of the SS, totally outside the purview of any other agency.^[66] A secondary goal was to determine the scope of the deportations and arrive at definitions of who was Jewish, who was Mischling, and who (if anybody) should be spared.^[66] “The representatives of the ministerial bureaucracy had made it plain that they had no concerns about the principle of deportation per se. This was indeed the crucial result of the meeting and the main reason why Heydrich had detailed minutes prepared and widely circulated”, said Longerich.^[67] Their presence at the meeting also ensured that all those present were accomplices and accessories to the murders that were about to be undertaken.^[68]

Heydrich, himself, did not live to see the unconditional surrender of the genocidal regime he served; he died of sepsis later in 1942.

Puzzability‘s Asia Fantasia series continues with Wednesday’s game:

This Week’s Game — January 18-22

Asia Fantasia

We’re working on eastern time this week. For each day, we’ll give a three-by-three letter grid in which we’ve hidden the name of a major city in Asia, followed by its country, with a total of 11 or more letters. To find it, start at any letter and move from letter to letter by traveling to any adjacent letter—across, up and down, or diagonally. You may come back to a letter you’ve used previously, but may not stay in the same spot twice in a row. You will not always need all nine letters in the grid.

Example: