Today is the 80th anniversary of the Wannsee conference—one of the most infamous dates in the history of humanity—as I am reminded in this Wall Street Journal review of historian Peter Longerich’s book, Wannsee: The Road to the Final Solution. Fifteen men in a laid-back 85-minute meeting at a lakeside manor in a bucolic suburb of Berlin, deciding how to go about exterminating the Jews—every last one of them that Nazi Germany could get its hands on—or, it should be specified, to exterminate them more efficiently than had been the case over the previous six months, following the German invasion of the Soviet Union, when SS-led Einsatzgruppen murdered 1.5 million Jews with bullets. Gas was more efficient, so the Nazis determined.
Reading the WSJ article, I thought of a 1984 West German TV film, Die Wannseekonferenz, that I came across in 2020 on YouTube, which reenacts the Wannsee conference based on the single remaining copy of the minutes taken by the stenographer. The film, which is worth 85 minutes of one’s time, may be watched with English subtitles here.
On the general subject, the next time you, dear reader, are in Berlin, make sure to set aside a few hours of your time to visit—if you haven’t already—the Topography of Terror. And the next time I’m in Berlin, I will take the S-Bahn to Wannsee to visit the Haus der Wannsee-Konferenz.
UPDATE: I visited the House of the Wannsee Conference in May 2022. It’s a 45-minute or so S-Bahn ride from the center of Berlin, then a bus connection, so is an expedition, but is definitely worth it for the pedagogical exposition in the manor.
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