The setting was as elegant as it was secluded: a villa in that “colony of Alsen” which in the second half of the nineteenth century had brought wealthy Germans to build homes on the banks of the Wannsee, in the Berlin district of Steglitz-Zehlendorf. One of those residences, originally of the industrialist Ernst Marlier, had passed into the hands of the Nazis in 1940 and precisely in that frame at h. 12 of January 20, 1942, a secret meeting of 15 members of the National Socialist bureaucracy took place: the Wannsee Conference. Two documents mainly account for that event, which...