Wannsee ConfrenceJoin now to read essay Wannsee ConfrenceThe Wannsee Conference by Mark Roseman is an incredibly complex and ambiguous book. The book asks many questions, yet gives very few answers to major question. This is mostly because people do not know these answers. Conspiracy, the movie version of the book, fills in these questions, which seem to be left open by Roseman. Looking at these two works, The Wannsee Conference and Conspiracy, separately and together may help further our understanding of what really happened on January 20, 1942.
Roseman’s views on the Wannsee Conference are quite evident throughout his writing. He discussed how the Conference was a place where matters were discussed about the Jews. “…preparing the final solution of the European Jewish question.” This statement by Roseman makes it evident that the Jewish problem was being discussed, and they were looking for a solution. However, there is no evidence that the solution was going to be the mass killing of all Jewish people. With all this being said the realization is still that the mass killing of Jews still began to happen after this conference. Moreover, Roseman believes that the Wannsee Conference paved the way for the Holocaust. It did not cause it, but without it the Holocaust would never have existed.
Roseman does not believe that the Wannsee Conference reveals how the conference happened, but rather why it happened. The Nazi leaders all had a different idea on why the Jews needed to go, but the common assumption that they needed to be dealt with was there. By getting rid of the Jews then it would better the entire society or so they thought. “Hitler’s decision on deportation was a significant radicalization of existing measures and moved him significantly closer to realizing his long-expressed desire to rid Europe of its Jews.” At first it was just a deportation of the Jews, but that would not last long. The idea of just moving them was not good enough for everyone. More importantly it was not enough for Heydrich and Hitler. The deportation would soon turn into “evacuation” which was a fancier way of saying: kill all Jews. People often believe that the mass killing is horrible, which it is, but what people need to realize is that Europe truly thought they were going to improve themselves by killing the Jews.
Roseman believes that there is not a definite time in which the Holocaust started, but then the question arises: What can we take from the Wannsee Conference? Well in fact there are two major ideas, which the Wannsee Conference presents us with. The first being power. Power was not only being held by Hitler, but also by Heydrich and Himmler. A person can see the power held by Heydrich in the Wannsee Conference. “For the most part, Heydrich was disseminating conclusions arrived at elsewhere. On some issues, to be sure, the participants had something to say. Essentially their role was to listen and to nod.” Before, this conference had been labeled as a place where discussion would occur, but little to no discussion would ever occur. Because Heydrich wanted to make it clear to everyone that he was in power, and this would be his big moment. Stating of others’ opinions not needed. Heydrich had already made up his mind, and the people at the conference just needed to be informed of what had been decided.
The Wannsee Conference also provided historian with one more piece of information. For a long while people did not know the Wannsee Conference had happened, so people just assumed that the Holocaust happened. However, once going over the records we were able to see that mass killings began happening very soon after the conference. Leading people to wonder if that truly was what had been discussed at the conference. There is no right or wrong answer to when the mass killings were decided upon, but there are facts. These facts are undisputable that mass killing of the Jews picked up intensity after the meeting at Wannsee.
In the film Conspiracy they suggest that the Holocaust was decided at the conference. The Nazi officials were aware that one of the reasons they were meeting in Wannsee was to take care of the Jewish Problem; however, they seemed very unaware of the fact that the Holocaust would be the solution. In the beginning of the meeting you can see that people are trying to convey their ideas to the table, but they are often told to be quiet or that they will get to talk later, but they never get to talk. Dr. Joseph Bьhler was quoted in the movie saying, “If it is already built, WHY this meeting? Why BOTHER?” He was aware of the fact that this meeting was not for discussion. Not only was this conference to let the Nazi’s know the solution, which Heydrich had come up with, but also to demonstrate Heydrich’s power which I mentioned earlier. By not allowing the others to talk he was purely letting them know that the solution he had come up with, and they would follow, would be mass extermination.
The Holocaust in Wannsee was not only a very hard and fast process to do, it was also a fact that there existed a lot of problems and contradictions. Many of the problems that were being debated were of little importance to you though. For example, there was a lack of trust in the Jewish leaders, especially in Jerusalem and the Jewish state. You could say that there were many contradictions in Wannsee during this time, but you could also say that there were also many issues that were quite unique to a small percentage of the Jewish people.
This also included many problems that you had not encountered before, most especially:
1. The fact that the number of Jewish victims was very high. This was, after all, an area that had been lost during the Holocaust. One of the problems that is still debated is the amount of people who lost their lives in that period.
2. The fact that the Jewish state was a very small city. I think the real challenge was in this fact that the Jewish people, many of them still not fully settled, lived here, they were constantly threatened with deportation or forced sterilization.
3. The fact that the German and American governments were aware that their people were under threat for extermination, and in fact wanted them exterminated. They made all their efforts to keep them that way. These were the conditions of exile. These are not things you can see when going to Wannsee but would have done if the Nazis were right now, not only in Wannsee, but in every city and town from Berlin to Dresden:
When you talk to the Polish people, when they come to Wannsee, at their schools, at the schools of their Jewish brothers. At the hospitals, if the Nazi was at the hospital, then he would have to go there after the battle, as they were going through the hospital, in the beginning where they received the treatment.
The German government was aware that the Nazis were not going to follow through with the treatment. Many of our Polish friends in Wannsee have never heard of that at all. They would not come to Wannsee if they were under threat or if the Germans were not. They lived in the town themselves, in a place that still looks like it did five or six years ago today. They were very aware of that. Then they would have to go back into their homes and come back and go do what they were told. They did all of this kind of things in Wannsee.[4]
The Poles were also aware of the fact that they were not going to get the relief they were ordered to by the Germans.[5]
3. The fact that there was a lot of secrecy. You remember that during World War II, there was a government in Warsaw that was responsible for everything. It had to be controlled, it had to be monitored, it had to be kept under constant surveillance. I think they were quite aware of that in Wannsee and had a huge amount of control over every aspect of the daily lives of the Polish people. It was quite obvious that they all got the relief they were ordered to receive. This was especially obvious at Wannsee when they spoke only to the Germans. When the Holocaust got in the hands of the Polish people in Wannsee, they would say, “We do this,” although the authorities would just say, “We have a need to do something. It’s too dangerous for us to stay here for a long time.” That was the same thing that was going on in London the time of the War.
On the other side of things, in the days following World War II the population of Wannsee went down a lot during the war because it had to be isolated from the rest of Europe