The Wannsee Conference was held on the morning of January 20, 1942, in a villa on a grand estate in west Berlin. Reinhard Heydrich, second only to Heinrich Himmler in the hierarchy of the SS, organized the event with the express purpose of reaching what he called “the total solution of the Jewish question in Europe.” This was the formula for genocide. The 15 men present were representatives of Nazi institutions such as the Reich Chancellery, the Foreign Ministry, the Ministry for the Occupied Territories, the Propaganda Ministry, and the Office of the Four-Year Plan. All of them were already key figures implementing genocide and were at Wannsee to put the finishing touches to it.
Born around the turn of the century, these men had grown up with the strictly conservative moral values of the kaiser’s Germany. About half of them had fought in the First World War and as many again were “March violets,” the phrase reserved for careerists who joined the Nazi Party in March 1933 once Hitler had come to power. Four were state secretaries, that is to say senior civil-service officials in one of the ministries of the various states. Ten were university graduates and nine were qualified lawyers of whom all but one had a doctorate. Two who stand out are Heinrich Müller, head of the Gestapo, and Adolf Eichmann, already known as an efficient executive of genocide and so well-versed in the terminology used to cover the conference that Heydrich asked him to write the minutes.
In the history of Europe there had been massacres — Saint Bartholomew’s Day in France in 1572 is said to have left at least 30,000 dead — but nothing like genocide had ever occurred. An apparently trivial detail in this book gives away the enormity of the conference. At the time, a policeman from neutral Sweden was meeting German policemen who were old acquaintances of his. When they told him about the conference, he felt obliged to pass the information on to British intelligence.
A foremost historian of the Nazi Reich, Peter Longerich has written biographies of Hitler and the two henchmen, Himmler and Joseph Goebbels, whose loyalty was an integral part of Hitler’s power. What with a bibliography of approximately 400 titles, and the reproduction of the conference’s original minutes in German with an accompanying English translation, Longerich’s new book is more like an extended essay, short and to the point.
Hitler, as Longerich puts it, “authorized every important measure concerned with ‘Jewish policy.’” His vision of the world bore no relation to reality. Jewish conspiracies and warmongering existed only in his imagination. In normal circumstances, his anti-Jewish speeches would have been written off as the fantasies they were. Usually the rule of law is enough to restrain and marginalize those whose fantasies are a danger to society. For reasons that go deep into the history of Germany, Hitler was able to impose his vision of the world on the German nation and so cause the collapse of its moral structure.
Becoming chancellor, Hitler in 1935 passed measures that turned the law into a simple expression of his will. Jews were now to be deprived legally of their rights. More than that, Germans were given the right to do harm to Jews. Anything that took the fancy of any Nazi thug, conduct that would have been criminal in old days, was now authorized. About 250,000 Jews had the foresight to emigrate in the Thirties. Strict conditions specified what they could take with them. Nazism was popular because it offered a license to go profiteering at the expense of Jews. Longerich gives the figure of 190,000 Jews still remaining in Germany at the outbreak of war to make what they could of it.
Hitler’s first intention had been to deport every last Jew unconditionally to anywhere that would accept them, though he could not specify where that might be. In a notorious speech delivered on January 30, 1939, he showed where his imagination was taking him. “If international-finance Jewry inside and outside Europe should succeed once more in plunging nations into another world war, the consequences will not be the Bolshevization of the earth and thereby the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.”
After the Wehrmacht campaigns, Jews in occupied Poland and the Soviet Union were in effect hostages awaiting whatever fate Hitler had in store for them. For a short while, Hitler typically persuaded himself that the Jews in the United States had the power to put pressure on their government not to enter the war. Events soon proved that this was another of his illusions. Himmler’s main war aim was to incorporate huge territories in the East and turn them into exclusive ethnic reserves for Germans.
Einsatzkommandos were special SS units responsible to Himmler and given the task “to kill systematically the members of an only vaguely defined Jewish-communist elite,” writes Longerich. In the course of 1941, Belzec, Treblinka, Auschwitz, and other concentration camps were being built or extended in order to install gas chambers. Himmler visited concentration camps and saw for himself the mechanics of mass murder. That November, Goebbels published an article which made out that Hitler’s pre-war threats were prophetic. “The Jews are suffering a fate that, though harsh, is amply deserved. Pity or regret are completely out of place. World Jewry is now undergoing a gradual process of annihilation.” An entry in Goebbels’s diary in March 1942 speaks of “a fairly barbaric procedure” being used, one “not to be described in any detail.” By the end of that year, special units had killed at least 500,000 Jewish civilians.
Confusingly, Heydrich had extracted a special brief from Hermann Goering, Hitler’s right-hand man, which effectively put him in charge of the whole program of genocide. The Wannsee Conference had the objective of establishing Heydrich’s absolute authority. The characteristic struggle for power that might have developed between Heydrich and Himmler was dramatically resolved in June 1942 when partisans in Czechoslovakia assassinated Heydrich.
German wartime atrocities are the subject of a huge literature of record and analysis. Ordinary men became killers largely because they did not have the character or the means to see where Hitler’s imaginary vision of the world was likely to land them. In a few exceptional instances, however, members of the SS or police battalions did refuse orders that would have made killers of them.
Longerich makes it unmistakably plain that the Party official who sits at his desk and works out how to rationalize brutality is more truly responsible for atrocities than the thoughtless rank and file who commit them. The language of the conference was jargon designed to obscure the bureaucratic inhumanity that preceded and promoted thuggish ignorance. “Fit for work” was the term chosen for a minority of Jews who could be set to work on projects in the conquered territories, for instance constructing highways. In the course of this slave labor, “the majority will doubtless succumb to natural wastage.” The toughest among them may survive and “will have to be dealt with accordingly.”
The counterbalancing category “unfit for work” amounted to a certificate for death in a gas chamber. Dr. Bühler, state secretary of the General Government, otherwise a diminished and German-occupied Poland, told the conference that the 2.5 million Jews in his state could be murdered on the spot if they were declared “unfit for work.” The number of parents and grandparents who were Jewish determined whether children of mixed marriages counted as Jews and should be deported. One state secretary proposed compulsory sterilization of these children. Genocide was set to involve 11 million Jews altogether, but this was guesswork based upon victory in the war, for it included those living in countries not occupied by the Germans, including England, Ireland, Spain, and Turkey.
After the war, the state secretaries and lawyers with their doctorates could hardly remember whether they had been at the conference or what part in it they had played. A single participant said that the regime’s Jewish policy was shameful but he had “simply carried on and waited for the end.” Educated and rational men in their position did not have to make it their life’s task to fulfill Hitler’s uneducated and irrational vision of the world. This scholarly account of a handful of Nazi murderers goes as far as it can in exposing the kind of thing that happens when the moral structure collapses, and in its fine and unstated way it is also a penance.
Editor’s Note: An earlier version of this piece misstated the date that the Wannsee Conference was held.
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