Wannsee and Auschwitz

Today's topic is shared by the more than 140 participants in this BlogBurst, to remember the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp, sixty years ago, on January 27, 1945, and the anniversary -- on January 20th -- of the 1942 Wannsee Conference. This is the second BlogBurst (first here), both organized by Joseph Norland of Israpundit; his BlogBurst text is here.

The horrors of Auschwitz sprung directly from the debates and decisions of Wannsee. The Conference was held in the formal dining room of an upper-class, but otherwise ordinary, villa on the outskirts of Berlin. Fifteen senior German officials (including Adolf Eichmann and Reinhard Heydrich) met to formalize their plan to annihilate the Jews of Europe. In the course of that Conference, the Nazi hierarchy established a mechanism for "the final solution." Thereafter, the shipment of Jews to eastern labor and death camps became the official policy of the Third Reich. Ever efficient and unashamed, the Nazis kept a record of the meeting (German original here), discovered in 1947 in the files of the German Foreign Office.

The Conference addressed every aspect of genocide in chillingly clinical logic and language, e.g., "Europe will be combed through from West to East," "forcing the Jews out of the various spheres of life of the German people." Ever efficient, the participants foresaw that, "[i]n the course of the final solution and under appropriate direction, the Jews are to be utilized for work in the East in a suitable manner. In large labor columns and separated by sexes, Jews capable of working will be dispatched to these regions to build roads, and in the process a large number of them will undoubtedly drop out by way of natural attrition."

The minutes reflect an intention to dispose of "roughly eleven million Jews." This figure was derived after a horrifyingly detailed discussion of those with only partial Jewish ancestry, sparing some only a quarter Jewish, and magnanimously exempting others from evacuation only if "sterilized in order to prevent any progeny . . . Sterilization will be voluntary, but it is the precondition for remaining in the Reich." The Wannsee Nazis debated death in detail, with precision engineering.

Several conference participants survived the war; the Wannsee record itself never was central to any Nuremberg war-crimes trial. The Conference, and the bureaucratic-sounding but murderous minutes, provide an enduring example of Hannah Arendt's Banality of Evil--a book she wrote while covering the 1961 trial of Conference participant Eichmann.

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Beth at My Vast Right Wing Conspiracy links to worthy posts outside the BlogBurst.