On a recent trip to Berlin, I took a day trip to the picturesque borough of Wannsee for a tour of the notorious #56–58 Am Grossen Wannsee or Haus der Wannsee-Konferenz (House of the Wannsee Conference). This was the location where senior bureaucrats and thugs of the Nazi regime met to discuss the implementation of the directive passed on to Reinhard Heydrich by Hermann Göring to make "all necessary organisational and technical preparations for a comprehensive solution of the Jewish Question". Anyone who follows our Prof. Ted DeCoste's excellent scholarship on this matter, or has seen the excellent HBO movie "Conspiracy" based on the transcripts of this meeting should already be familiar with the nature and significance of this meeting in the scheme of things. Many historians have argued (quite correctly in my view) that the concept of mass genocide as a Final Solution to the Jewish Question was crystallized at this meeting, and that the means of carrying out the genocide was also possibly settled there. These two matters are of course contested, particularly since there is no explicit record of both in the minutes of the meeting, which was extensively doctored by Heydrich and Eichmann.
One thing that struck me on my visit to the Wannsee villa (which is now a memorial and educational site) is that the official position (supported by documentation at the site, and a plaque at the entrance) appears to be that the meeting did not decide the killing of the Jews and the means of doing so. However, as historian Mark Roseman argues in his must-read account titled "The Villa, The Lake, The Meeting: Wannsee and the Final Solution", while no hard and fast proof is present in the minutes (and understandably so), the progression of events in Nazi Germany prior to the Wannsee Conference, the clever use of euphemistic language in the only surviving record, and whatever can be gleaned from post-war testimonies of Nazi perpetrators such as Eichmann support the conclusion that the "participants [at the meeting] knew they were talking about murder" and that, as the minutes reveal, "various possible kinds of solution were discussed."
The other thing that struck me as very deplorable while viewing the documents at the site is the degree of involvement of highly educated (and one would suppose, reasonable) men, majority of them lawyers (see example thumbnail photos below, MORE HERE)
, in this shameful event. Not that I was not aware of this before visiting Wannsee - Prof DeCoste has written about this, and there is that scene in Conspiracy where all the lawyers in the room were asked to raise their hands. However, it was a strange experience to stand in a room surrounded by the egregious deeds and legacy of fellow members of the bar. No doubt a grave reminder of the responsibilities placed upon us by our call to the legal profession, and of a need to constantly re-examine the uses and limits of our highly specialized skills.
Recent Comments