Friday, March 29, 2024 -
Print Edition

Ugly, inexplicable, 80th anniversary

Wannsee Conference, 1942. ‘The Final Solution to the Jewish Question’

The year 2022 should not pass without mention of an anniversary for which the only possible adjective is evil: the Wannsee Conference of 1942.

This conference confirmed and planned the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question.”

On January 20, 1942, Nazi representatives of the vast German bureaucracy met in a suburb of Berlin, “Wannsee,” to plan the murder of European Jewry, that is, to ensure that the entire Nazi apparatus knew of and cooperated with the genocide.

We note above that the Wannsee Conference also “confirmed” the genocide because, by 1942, the Nazis had already murdered at least one million Jews in open pits, in mobile poison gas vans and in ghettos, largely in the Soviet territory that Hitler invaded in June, 1941.

All this, to the Nazi mind, was “inefficient.” There needed to be a more efficient way to murder millions of people — and to conceive of the effort in its totality, its “final solution.”

There is another Wannsee adjective that accompanies “evil.” The Wannsee Conference was also inexplicable. How could people, anyone, plot a campaign of mass murder; but still more, how could lawyers and PhDs plan a mass murder?

That is who attended the Wannsee Conference: men of the law and highly educated men. More than half of the attendees held a PhD. How could they, of all people, settle in 90 minutes on a plan to exterminate the 11 million Jews who had not already been exterminated?

There is no answer and never will be an answer. Perhaps, in the end, pure evil is inexplicable; perhaps “evil” subsumes “inexplicable.”

Keep in mind: Wannsee was a lunch conference. Decisions and logistics for mass murder were devised over a pleasant meal, overlooking a beautiful, inviting lake.

Keep in mind: Among German government agencies represented at the conference was the Dept. of Justice. Neither its representative nor anyone else in attendance raised any objection, moral or otherwise, to the warrant for genocide.

Is it a sign of conscience, however infinitesimally thin, that these evil people kept the protocols of the conference secret? No one would have known about the Wannsee Conference had a copy of the protocol not been found after the end of WW II by Robert Kempner, an American prosecutor at Nuremberg, in seized Nazi files. Was it sheer strategy that led these men to keep their diabolical plan secret?

Questions, questions. Never answers, not when it comes to the sheer hatred of Jews by the Nazis. But there is this clarity, a paradoxical and ironic one: the clarity of obfuscation. The Nazis would not annihilate the Jews; rather, there would be a “final solution,” an “evacuation to the East.” Nazis would not kill the Jews via slave labor; rather, there would be “natural reduction.” Nazis would not round up and sequester Jews; rather, Nazis would “comb through” territories. Nazis would not murder; rather, there would be “suitable treatment.” Euphemisms of horror. The despicable linguistic legacy of totalitarianism.

Among the leaders of the Wannsee Conference was Adolf Eichmann, who more than any individual implemented the mass murder. Trains had to be built, or redirected. Schedules had to be kept. Duplication had to be avoided. It is not an easy task to move thousands of people a day to their deaths under the cover of deception. Somebody had to figure this all out. There were countless evil Nazi somebodies who implemented the Holocaust, but the chief somebody was Adolf Eichmann.

He came fully prepared to the Wannsee Conference. Methodically, he had compiled a list of 32 areas of Jewish settlement with their Jewish population, ranging from 200 Jews in Croatia to 333,000 Jews in England to 5,000,000 Jews in the USSR. They all added up to 11 million. Eichmann knew where the living Jews were and precisely how many had already been murdered. He was the accountant of death. Even after the war, when on trial in Israel, Eichmann sat passively, unmoved, unemotional, as the evil and the pain he had inflicted was detailed before him by survivors whom he had tortured, whose families he had gassed and burned.

Deuteronomy charges:

“Do not forget!”

Copyright © 2022 by the Intermountain Jewish News




Leave a Reply