Fifteen men, many with doctorates from German universities, attended the meeting. By this time, the slaughter of Jews at the hands of the Einsatzgruppen and, more recently, at the Chelmno death camp was already far along. Heydrich's invitees were not the uninitiated. Most knew that mass murder of Jews had become state policy. Thus, the purpose of the Wannsee Conference was not to launch the Final Solution but to coordinate full implementation. Heydrich's meeting would ensure that all of the leaders in attendance, and the bureaucracies they supervised, were on the same page.

SS Lieutenant-Colonel Adolf Eichmann, head of the office of Jewish Affairs and Evacuation, prepared the meeting's final record, which Heydrich and Gestapo chief Heinrich Müller carefully edited before approving the text for the 30 copies that were made. Only one of those copies, the 16th, survived the war. Containing another of the Holocaust's most alarming reports, its fatal points included Heydrich's announcement that through the "final settlement" of the Jewish problem, "Europe will be cleaned up from the West to the East." According to his calculations, some 11 million Jews--"from Ireland to the Urals and from the Arctic to the Mediterranean," as historian Christopher Browning puts the point--would be "involved in this Final Solution of the European problem." Group by group, Jews would be sent to transit ghettos and then "to the East." Elderly Jews would go to "an old-age ghetto." The able-bodied, "separated according to sexes," would be selected for hard labor, which would eliminate many by "natural causes." The survivors would "have to be treated accordingly" to prevent "a Jewish reconstruction."