Wannsee + 80

 

Yesterday, I watched a webinar commemorating the 80th anniversary of the infamous Wannsee Conference. That January 20, 1942 event was so named for its meeting place in a villa in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee (photo), at which senior Nazi German government officials planned and coordinated the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question," which resulted in the deportation and eventual mass murder of most of the Jews of German-occupied Europe. This bureaucratic conference of 15 Nazi officials from Germany and occupied Eastern Europe (8 of them with doctorates in law) was convened by Reinhard Heydrich, the "plenipotentiary" for what the webinar speaker called "the logistics of committing murder." Indeed, it was less the end-goal of extermination but the methods of implementation that were discussed at Wansee and that the conference almost immediately so infamously set in motion .

I was reminded of something Tony Judt once wrote in Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, that, in those countries occupied by the Germans, World War II was particularly a war against civilians. Some 19 million civilians died as a consequence of that war. Of these, of course, some 6 million were Europe's Jews, whose complete annihilation had become an explicit German war aim.

By the time of the Wannsee Conference, the Soviet army had recently begun its counter-offensive and the U.S had entered the war. In retrospect, we might consider those events to have marked a turning point, but that was hardly fully obvious as yet. The Germans were still in effective control of most of Europe, and that effective control enabled the amazing bureaucratic efficiency that characterized the deportations and eventual exterminations now known as the Holocaust and which continued even when it was already obvious that the war was lost. Mass murder is infinitely evil, but there was something superlatively evil about the bureaucratic efficiency and pathological normalcy that characterized the planning and implementation of Wannsee's Final Solution. Adolf Eichmann himself later recounted how he and the others relaxed, smoking and drinking cognac, after the conference.

The webinar speaker spoke of "the palpable sense of the presence of evil" that seems to permeate the conference room even today. It is that "palpable sense of the presence of evil" that historical memory connects us to, which is why the serious study of history is so vital.