Jewish Leaders Mark Plotting of Holocaust : World War II: Their meeting where the killing was mapped is intended to prevent any repetition.

On a warm spring morning Tuesday, 45 years to the day after the collapse of Nazism, the Holocaust came full circle.

It happened outside the three-story stuccoed villa in the picturesque Berlin suburb of Wannsee where on Jan. 20, 1942, a handful of Nazi government officials gathered for just a few hours and clinically planned the extermination of European Jewry.

After a protracted, controversial debate in the Judaic world, a small group of Jewish leaders gathered on the villa’s grounds Tuesday with the stated aim of keeping the memory of what happened there alive so that it might never happen again.

A declaration written by Nobel Peace laureate and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel said in part:

” . . . when we Jews visit and listen to the somber and dark echoes at Wannsee, we aim at preventing future generations from inheriting our past as their future.”

Wiesel was absent because of an earlier commitment, but his brief statement was read in Hebrew, English and German. The ceremony was attended by several dozen Jews and a small group of German dignitaries. Many could not hold back their tears, unable to heed Wiesel’s injunction: “Cry? One must not cry here! If you begin, you will not stop. How many tears does one shed for thousands of communities?”

The commemoration came on the final day of the first formal gathering of world Jewish leaders in Germany since the rise of Nazism nearly 60 years ago. The gathering is part of a highly visible attempt by Jewish leaders to establish a new relationship with Germany as the process of reunification begins.

World Jewish Congress officials have praised the success of West Germany’s democracy, but there is apprehension as unity proceeds.

“My heart says stay away, but my mind says there is a new Germany here,” said World Jewish Congress Vice President Isi Leibler, explaining in an interview after the ceremony why he decided to attend. “With hope for the future, we must ensure that this new Germany will make a commitment that their children and the children of those children will understand (the Holocaust). Only then can we survive.”

Leibler referred to the powerful differences among Jews about the visit but said it was a matter of personal conscience. He said those who first supported the decision for the Wannsee ceremony were mainly concentration camp survivors.

“It’s not a good feeling to be here,” said Samuel Pastarnak, 67, an Auschwitz survivor who now lives in Nuremberg. “But it is something that must be done.”

The Wannsee ceremony occurred exactly 45 years after Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich surrendered unconditionally to the United States and its allies, ending World War II in Europe. The day was commemorated in several German cities.

Above all, Jewish leaders meeting here have repeated a single plea to German leaders and opinion makers: Don’t let the memory of the Holocaust die, don’t let it be falsified.

Tuesday’s trip to Wannsee was in that spirit, conference organizers said.

“I won’t pray here, for I personally believe God has turned his face away from this place, as he did at Auschwitz,” World Jewish Congress President Edgar M. Bronfman told the gathering.

For many, the horror of that meeting captured the horror of the Holocaust itself--that ordinary men, when told of the plan, never questioned it but instead planned the extermination of an entire race with a bureaucratic precision that made it seem simply one more routine task.

The exact number of those who attended the Jan. 20, 1942, meeting that sealed the fate of about 6 million Jews is unclear. Some accounts talk of 12, others 13 and still others 15.

One of Hitler’s top lieutenants, Reinhard Heydrich, presided, while a middle-ranking SS officer named Adolf Eichmann took the minutes. The rest were anonymous government and security functionaries.

The villa, then a little-used retreat for senior SS (elite force) officers, lies in a particularly leafy and tranquil district of what is now southwestern West Berlin, taking its name from a nearby lake that serves as a playground for the city’s residents. It was selected because of the sensitivity of the subject to be discussed.

According to Ekkehard Klausa, who administers memorial sites for the West Berlin government, historical accounts show that both Eichmann and Heydrich were extremely apprehensive that some of the meeting’s participants might protest what became known as the “Final Solution.”

They did not, and Eichmann and Heydrich celebrated that lack of dissent afterward with cigars and brandy.

While the decision to murder the Jews had been taken earlier by Hitler, those at the Wannsee meeting carefully defined who was a Jew, where the Jewish populations were located and how they would be transported from their homes to the death camps.

“Here, in the chamber rooms of this villa, regulations were determined that then went through the inevitable and proper bureaucratic procedure across hundreds of tidy desks to take the form of the cattle cars eastward, of barracks behind barbed wire and finally the gas chambers and crematoria,” the head of the German Jewish Council, Heinz Galinski, told the Tuesday gathering. “The horror that we connect with the names Auschwitz, Treblinka . . . they have their origins here in Wannsee.”

Tuesday’s ceremony concluded with the Israeli anthem.

The villa, which was a youth hostel for much of the postwar period, is being turned into a museum and seminar center on the Holocaust and Nazi period.

Elsewhere, the East German Parliament marked the day with a moment of silence and, for the second time in less than a month, admitted that East Germans share responsibility for the Holocaust.

“No one should forget guilt and no one should deny responsibility,” parliamentary Speaker Sabine Bergman-Pohl said in a ceremony.

Prime Minister Lothar de Maiziere asked Jews for forgiveness.

“We extend our hand in reconciliation and to work together for a common future,” he later said in a luncheon address to a joint meeting of the World Jewish Congress and the European Jewish Congress.

“A Germany without Jews never existed and it cannot exist without Jews. . . . A German unification cannot be a revival of 1933. We request you to have confidence in us,” he said.

De Maiziere also promised to fight a revival of anti-Semitic feeling among German youth.

“It fills us with concern. No people can get rid of the dark side of its past,” he said.

The Communists, who ruled East Germany for 40 years until last fall’s revolutions swept through the region, had always denied that their country had any responsibility for the Holocaust, claiming instead that, because Hitler also persecuted Communists, East Germany shared a common legacy with the victims of Nazism.