Karl Eberhard Schöngarth was a German SS officer during the Nazi era. He was a war criminal who perpetrated mass murder and genocide in German-occupied Poland during the Holocaust; he participated in the January 1942 Wannsee Conference, at which the genocidal Final Solution to the Jewish Question was originally planned. After the war, Schöngarth and six others were tried for murdering a downed American pilot, Americo S. Galle, in 1944. They were all found guilty. Five of them, including Schöngarth, were sentenced to death and executed in 1946.

The Wannsee Conference was a meeting of senior government officials of Nazi Germany and Schutzstaffel (SS) leaders, held in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee on 20 January 1942. The purpose of the conference, called by the director of the Reich Security Main Office SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, was to ensure the co-operation of administrative leaders of various government departments in the implementation of the Final Solution to the Jewish Question, whereby most of the Jews of German-occupied Europe would be deported to occupied Poland and murdered. Conference participants included representatives from several government ministries, including state secretaries from the Foreign Office, the justice, interior, and state ministries, and representatives from the SS. In the course of the meeting, Heydrich outlined how European Jews would be rounded up and sent to extermination camps in the General Government, where they would be killed.