On January 20, 1942, at a meeting of high-ranking representatives of the National Socialist regime, the systematic murder of up to eleven million Jews in Europe was discussed – a key date of the Shoah.
The memorial in the house of the Wannsee Conference in Berlin serves today as a place of remembrance of high-ranking representatives of the SS, NSDAP and various Nazi ministries who discussed details of the mass murder of European Jews here in January 1942.
(dpa) In summer she hears the loudspeaker announcements from the Wannsee lido on the opposite bank at her desk. In winter she sees the lake very quietly in front of her window, crows croak over trees on the banks. “It’s the ambivalence of this place, incredibly beautiful and incredibly tragic,” says the director Deborah Hartmann in her office in the house of the Wannsee Conference. “That is quite confusing.”
SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich invited high officials of the National Socialist regime to this Berlin villa on the Great Wannsee on January 20, 1942, in order to plan the murder of up to eleven million European Jews. 90 minutes should be enough for the discussion of the so-called final solution to the Jewish question. Breakfast was then planned.
It’s not just the place that is confusing. 80 years later, it seems almost unimaginable how people invented and implemented this unprecedented genocide, how educated gentlemen strengthened each other in a dignified atmosphere.
As early as mid-1941, Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring commissioned Heydrich to organize this so-called final solution in practice. Chancellor Adolf Hitler had even publicly threatened the “complete annihilation of the Jewish race”. The political decision had long been made, the machinery had already started with the shooting of tens of thousands in the areas ruled by Germany in Eastern Europe.
It would be a misunderstanding to assume that the Shoah was decided at the Wannsee Conference, says Matthias Hass, the deputy director of today’s educational institution at the historic site. “The level that sits here does not decide anything, it is not a level of political decision-making. It is the implementation of things that are already taking place. ” The 15 NS officers and officials who meet in the conference room with a view of the Wannsee are supposed to – you have to put it that way – optimize the machinery of death.
They are state secretaries from Berlin ministries, including the lawyer Roland Freisler, who later became the president of the People’s Court. They are representatives of the NSDAP, the security apparatus and the administration of the Eastern Territories. In addition to Heydrich, the central figure is SS officer Adolf Eichmann, head of the “Jewish Affairs and Evictions” section at the Reich Security Main Office.
With the meeting, explains Hass, Heydrich wants to assert his leadership role and secure the support of the various administrative units. In addition, “everyone who may not yet know what the final solution to the Jewish question actually means is: Europe-wide deportation to death, to mass murder:“ We are planning the murder of eleven million people. ””
The goal was not new for the participants, but the dimension was possibly, says Hass. Heydrich has meticulously collated for the appointment, where and how many potential victims of the planned “special treatments” can be found. The fact that Jews outside of the Nazi sphere of influence are also listed – for example 330,000 in England and five million in the Soviet Union – probably reflects the Nazi apparatus’ certainty of victory in the World War that began in 1939.
SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich was supposed to organize the so-called “Final Solution” in practice. To this end, he convened the Wannsee Conference.
The death list is part of the minutes of the Wannsee Conference. It explains how the Nazi state tried “legally” to “purge the German living space of Jews” through repression and persecution. Now the “emigration work” has come to an end and in its place “another possible solution, after appropriate prior approval by the Führer, is the evacuation of the Jews to the East.”
The 15-page protocol written by Eichmann continues in this language: sterile, belittling, bureaucratic. At the conference itself, however, according to Eichmann’s later statements, “mass murder was spoken of very bluntly,” writes historian Peter Klein from Berlin’s Touro College. Nobody had any fundamental concerns or objections. Rather, it was about competencies, the circle of victims, the sequence of deportations and more efficient murder methods, such as poisoning with diesel exhaust fumes or the poison gas Zyklon B instead of shooting.
After 90 minutes everything was actually cleared up. Heydrich had enforced his claim to power, the roles were assigned, the industrial killing planned with diabolical precision. There were no waiting times, no traffic jams, no shortage of trains – a “blazingly fast murder program,” says Hass. “At the time of the conference, around 80 percent of the victims are still alive. And a year and a half later, in the fall of 1943, 80 percent are dead. ” Murdered, worked to death, died of disease, starved to death. By the end of the war in 1945 a total of six million Jews in Europe.
How do you convey this to school classes today when they visit the villa, which was temporarily used as a country school home after the end of the war? How do you convey that to anyone at all? Matthias Hass does not think that this is hopeless. “We now have generations who are much more radically prepared to ask the hard questions,” says the vice director.
Why people do this, how fathers of families and beauties could become machinists of genocide at the same time, can perhaps never be explained, says Director Hartmann. “I think we have to learn to live with that, that some things just stay gray and cannot be answered clearly.”