Wannsee house was never owned by a jew

Contrary to a claim made in the 2001 movie Conspiracy (alas, full of historical inaccuracies), Wannsee House was NEVER owned by a Jew. Author of the script for the movie probably confused Villa Marlier/Minoux with the Liebermann Villa located just 400m from Wannsee House.

Liebermann Villa belonged to Jewish artist Max Liebermann – German painter and printmaker, and one of the leading proponents of Impressionism in Germany and continental Europe. In addition to his activity as an artist, he was an avid art collector – he assembled a sizeable collection of French Impressionist works.

In reality, had three owners – and all of them were Germans and diehard National-Socialists. And two of them were major swindlers. Crooks. Frauds. Con artists. Wannsee House was built in 1914 by Ernst Ferdinand Emil Marlier – German pharmaceutical manufacturer (and a con artist).

Marlier engaged architect Paul Baumgarten (later a favorite architect of Adolf Hitler) to build a magnificent villa, overlooking the Gro;er Wannsee lake, in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee. The villa was built in a few months… however, by that time Herr Marlier was up to his ears in business, financial and legal trouble.

In 1905, the Pharmaceutical Institute of Berlin determined that Marlier’s medicines consisted of nothing more than tartaric acid, citric acid, sodium chloride, and egg yolk and thus were essentially placebos. In 1907, the German government forbade the sale of Marlier’s flagship drugs Antipositin and Antineurasthin.

By 1907, Marlier was already having problems with police headquarters, which warned that Marlier’s preparations “did not have the properties ascribed to them in their sales information”. He conned his buyers – cut and dry, plain and simple.

He managed to cling to his villa for almost seven years but in 1921 was finally forced to sell the Wannsee Villa to industrialist Friedrich Minoux for 2,300,000 reichsmarks (an astronomical sum at that time). Some kind of karma was probably involved because the buyer was later exposed as another con artist whose cons far exceeded those of the seller.

Friedrich Minoux accumulated his “start-up capital” by working for Hugo Stinnes – an industrialist and politician who was considered to be one of the most influential business leaders in Europe (and possibly in the whole world).

Minoux achieved considerable financial success working for Stinnes, at one point earning as much as 350,000 gold marks per year — an enormous sum at the time. Then he started his own business ventures and in 1919 became a member of the board of the United Citizens of Berlin Coal Dealers AG, and began to diversify his business interests to paper production, automobile manufacturing and coal and steel production.

In 1923 Minoux left the Stinnes conglomerate completely to build his own industrial empire. In 1926 he acquired half of the shares of the German-Romanian Petroleum Company AG (Derupag).

His main source of income at the time became The Friedrich Minoux Society for Trade and Industry, which was a coal wholesale business (that’s how he met Marlier who also had business interests in coal).

Minoux opposed the Weimar Republic and maintained contacts with right-wing extremists, military federations, and politicians. He allegedly financed NSDAP since at least 1923 and through the Nazi connections became notable figures in German political and social circles after Hitler came to power.

He was no stranger to financial crime – in 1938, in his last major business deal, Minoux purchased the Jewish-owned Offenheimer Cellulose and Paper Works company for less than 1 million Reichsmarks.

The actual value was more than RM12 million, but by that time Nazi actions against Jewish businesses had intensified, and the owner of the mill was forced to sell to Minoux for a pittance.

Ultimately, he fell victim to his gargantuan greed. In August 1941 he was convicted of defrauding the Berlin Gasworks. At the time this was considered the largest business swindle of the Nazi era.

He was sentenced to five years imprisonment and hefty fines. From his jail cell in Berlin, Minoux sold (was forced to sell, actually) the Wannsee House to Stiftung Nordhav – essentially a real estate investment fund owned by the SS, established by Heinrich Himmler and managed by Reinhard Heydrich.

Its board of directors included such prominent SS leaders as Werner Best, Walther Schellenberg and the mentor of the latter Herbert Mehlhorn who was up to his ears in the “Holocaust Project” – he was one of the key operators of Chelmno killing center.

The foundation’s purpose was to obtain real estate to be used as rest and recreation centers for top SS officials (first and foremost, those of RSHA) and their families. Hence, it is no surprise that Heydrich chose it as the site for Wannsee Conference.