Re ections on the Wannsee Conference

Reflections on the Wannsee Conference

Dr Simon Holloway

The Holocaust, for all of its sprawling chaos, clearly operated in accordance with a series of plans. We know the identities of many of the individuals responsible for those plans, and we know of the existence of innumerable others. It stands to reason that in every one of its particulars, those plans owed their genesis to speci c points in time. A moment, beyond recollection, at which fateful decisions were made.

For a short while, historians believed that they had uncovered one such moment: the precise date on which the decision to murder the Jews of Europe received administrative approval.

Known popularly as the Wannsee Conference, this was a meeting that took place on the shores of Lake Wannsee, in Berlin. There, on January 20, 1942, fteen senior representatives of the SS and Nazi Party met at a magni cently appointed villa. With occasional breaks for refreshments, they discussed in some detail the evacuation of Jews from their homes across the continent, and their deportation ‘to the east’.

According to the minutes, one of the issues to have most vexed the participants concerned whether to include in those deportations Jews in mixed marriages, or those labelled mischlinge: people with one or two Jewish grandparents, and thus a certain quantity of ‘Jewish blood’. As to the precise fate of those who were deported, the minutes seem to indicate that nobody was in the dark. The minutes state, for example, that the evacuated Jews will immediately be put to work at building roads. Since most will perish ‘by natural causes’, the surviving remnant must be considered the most resistant, and the most capable of forming the nucleus of a new Jewish civilisation. The experience of history, they go on to relate, is suf cient to demonstrate that such hardened individuals ‘will have to be dealt with appropriately’.

There is much within these minutes – brief though they may be – to arouse a sense of horror. On one page, countries are listed together with their estimated Jewish populations. Separated into those already under German control and those yet to be occupied by Germany, they provide the overall gure of 11 million. Only Estonia is already marked as Judenfrei (free of Jews), but it is evident that this was the plan for the others as well.

What kind of monster is capable of deliberating on such issues? Who are the men who could so calmly discuss the commission of genocide?

Of the fteen men present, there were seven representatives of the SS and security apparatus and eight senior bureaucrats: ve who represented ministries with especial interest in the Jewish Question, and three who represented the civilian administration in the occupied East. Over half of the men present held doctorates – mostly in law.

The villa overlooking Lake Wannsee, at which the delegates met in January, 1942. Photo: A. Savin, WikiCommons

At a time when only a very small percentage of the German population was receiving higher education, the quali cations of these particular men are striking. But while striking, it is by no means unusual. While these men were going over the particulars, as outlined in the minutes, hundreds of thousands of people (the overwhelming majority of them Jewish) were being shot by armed squads at the order of SS Einsatzgruppen and German police battalions. The men in charge of those operations almost all had doctorates. One of them (known, by German convention, as Dr Otto Rasch) held two.

And yet, while historians for a time considered this conference the occasion on which the murder of Europe’s Jews received approval, we now know that not to be case. On the contrary, the Final Solution had been proceeding apace for some six months by the time these fteen men met on a cold January morning to argue about its particulars.

In fact, although they could not have known it, at the very time that they were engaged in their macabre discussion, a Jewish man named Szlama Winer was crossing the countryside of western Poland and into the General Government. Along the way, he stopped at villages to warn Jews of what he had witnessed, but was met with shock and disbelief. Arriving eventually at the ghetto in Warsaw, he met Hersh Wasser: a man who was prepared to take his testimony.

Szlama had escaped, although he lacked the vocabulary to describe precisely what he had escaped from. It was not a camp – this he knew – but a mere manor house, to which Jews from the region were being sent by truck and at which they were being murdered through the use of carbon monoxide. The manor was located in a remote village called Chelmno, which had been chosen by the district governor Arthur Greiser as a convenient place to annihilate all of the Jews of his district.

Szlama’s experiences, working as a “grave-digger” (as he described it) had indicated to him that the murderous persecution of his people was reaching unprecedented and unimaginable heights. In fact – although Szlama had no way of knowing this – the number of Jews murdered by this stage was already staggeringly large. But while Szlama could not have known this, the man who recorded his testimony did.

Hersh Wasser was a close friend and colleague of Emanuel Ringelblum: a Polish historian who lived and worked in the city of Warsaw. As has been justly celebrated, Ringelblum was at this time presiding over the accumulation of a secret archive that went by the code name, Oyneg Shabbes (The Joy of the Sabbath). While this archive featured a number of contributions from other ghetto residents, one of the things that made it so signi cant is that it also featured interviews with refugees to Warsaw: people like Szlama Winer, who could share their experiences.

As a result of such interviews, Hersh Wasser was already well acquainted with the violence that was proceeding to the east and to the west of Warsaw, and as Chelmno was the rst location of its kind, the information provided by Szlama provided an important warning as regards upcoming deportations, which would commence from Warsaw in July of that same year.

Hersh survived the Holocaust. Remarkably, he was one of only three members of the secret archive to have survived, and the only one who knew where it was buried. That we have access to the tens of thousands of documents within it is truly nothing short of a miracle, but it is a miracle that highlights the enormity of what did not remain.

While Hersh survived, Emanuel Ringelblum did not, and neither did most of the other occupants of the Warsaw Ghetto. Szlama Winer, who ed Warsaw, where he was hunted by the Gestapo, made his way to Zamosc, from where he was subsequently deported to Belzec and murdered. He perished, but his testimony – recorded in the secret archive of the Warsaw Ghetto – remains.

One of the tragedies that we encounter when we study the Holocaust is that the naming of individual perpetrators is so much easier than is the naming of individual victims. Fifteen men sat around the table in Wannsee, and for every one of those men we know their names, their opinions, their various accomplishments. Of their millions of victims, most are – as individuals – forgotten.

Based on the principle that everybody has a name, the Jewish Holocaust Centre seeks to redress that imbalance. January 20th, this year, marked the 80th anniversary of the meeting in Wannsee, but it is important that we think about more than just the events that transpired on that one particular day. It is important that we seek to preserve the memory of the victims, and that we honour the legacy of our survivors.

A core part of that legacy is that we share a common humanity. It is important to appreciate that the individuals responsible for these terrible crimes were themselves human beings. They were not monsters, and nor were they in any ontological sense ‘evil’. The evil lies within the nature of their deeds, while what is monstrous is that such deeds can be committed by ordinary people.

As all who engage in this history know, the possibility of such unbounded persecution was only provided by the careful eradication of the victims’ humanity. By dehumanising Jews and by normalising that dehumanisation, people who should have baulked at the possibility of violence were brought to its commission. Our task is to countenance that by emphasising our shared humanity, and by contributing to a greater empathy for all.

We anticipate the opening of our new museum in late 2022, and look forward to honouring our survivors, their families and their communities. Most importantly, we look forward to continuing to transmit our survivors’ stories of liberation and survival: a sombre message of what humans are capable of doing to one another, and a celebration of the spirit of resistance.

A page from the minutes, in which the estimated

Jewish populations of Europe are tabulated.

The chart is divided between territories under

German control, and territories yet to be under

German control. Estonia (Estland) is already marked judenfrei: free of Jews.