Gerhard Klopfer, 81; Nazis’ ‘Final Solution’ Plotter

Former Nazi SS Gen. Gerhard Klopfer, the last surviving member of the 1942 Berlin conference that plotted the “final solution” to systematically kill European Jews, has died at age 81.

Alfred Streim, head of the Nazi Documentation Center in Ludwigsburg, confirmed Wednesday that Klopfer died Jan. 28 at a home for the elderly outside the Baden-Wuerttemberg city of Heilbronn.

About 15 top-ranking Nazis, including Klopfer, gathered Jan. 20, 1942, in Berlin’s lakeside Wannsee Villa to plot what the Nazis called the “final solution,” the extermination of the Jews remaining in Nazi-occupied Europe. About 6 million Jews were killed between 1933 and 1944. The conference also plotted the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Gypsies and others considered undesirable by the Nazis.

Never Convicted

Klopfer was never convicted of war crimes because of what officials called a lack of evidence.

Streim confirmed that Klopfer was the last surviving member of the Wannsee conference, which was held under the chairmanship of Reinhard Heydrich, who was in charge of organizing the mass extermination of the Jews. Heydrich was killed in Prague in June, 1942, by the Czechoslovak Resistance.

Adolf Hitler ordered the meeting but did not attend. Klopfer participated as an aide to Deputy Fuehrer Martin Bormann.

Hitler left it to Heydrich to inform those attending that all remaining Jews would be used as slave labor, then systematically eliminated as Nazi plans for conquering Europe progressed.

Among those at the conference were Adolf Eichmann, who was executed for war crimes by Israel in 1962, and Roland Freisler, the president of the Nazi’s People’s Court in Berlin that sentenced more than 5,000 people to death.

Case Dropped

Although Klopfer was charged at the Nuremberg war crimes trials, the Allied court decided in 1951 to drop the case against him after determining he had not had enough power to have influenced Nazi policy in “the final solution.”

Klopfer eventually moved to Neu Ulm in West Germany’s Bavaria state, where he was given permission to resume practicing law in 1956.

Streim said the Nazi Documentation Center, which reinvestigated Klopfer’s case on suspicion of accessory to murder, “closed the case against Klopfer on Feb. 29, 1962, after prosecutors in Ulm decided there was insufficient evidence” to charge him.