Sunday will mark for us yet another dawn, another Sabbath, another day, another unit in our lives. But for the Jews of the world, the day stands as the 60th anniversary of the single central event of the 20th century. For on January 20th, 1942, at the villa beside Lake Wannsee in Berlin, the Nazis assembled their middle-ranking administrative officers to discuss the details of implementing the Final Solution, writes Kevin Myers.
Few events in the history of Third Reich so clearly reveal its steady, lunatic intentions. The Wannsee conference was rather like a modern executive brainstorming weekend session in a big country house; but instead of devising ways of selling Coke or Fords or Big Macs, or refining and refocusing on corporate targets, these executives were working on the means of implementing Project Holocaust.
In one sense, the Wannsee conference changed nothing. The murder of the Jews was under way, in accordance with the overall strategy announced in Europe's media (including this newspaper) in 1939. On January 30th of that year, Hitler had promised the extermination of the Jews in the event of war. The Wannsee conference fell almost precisely on the third anniversary of that promise.
Company culture
As an example of on-going project management, of company culture subverting individual values, Wannsee was extraordinarily successful. The Harvard School of Business Studies could hold it up as a textbook example of what the weekend conference can achieve. Mark Roseman's recent account of the conference The Villa The Lake The Meeting (Allen Lane) describes how participants in Wannsee were radicalised by the experience.
He quotes Adolf Eichmann: "Not only did everybody willingly indicate agreement, but there was something else, entirely unexpected, when they outdid each other, as regards the demand for a Final Solution to the Jewish Question. The biggest surprise, as far as I remember, was not only Buhler but above all Stuckart, who was always cautious and hesitant, but who suddenly behaved there with unaccustomed enthusiasm."
This is a classic example of the conference as liberator. The collective overwhelms the individual, and the most reticent experiences a surprise repression of the ego. The dark forces of his id thus unleashed, he outbids his companions in extremes. The moderate became the pioneer of immoderation, the new if only temporary pack-leader, and the consensus towards evil shifted downwards by another degree.
The Wannsee conference has many things to tell us, not least that those who embraced the final solution were well-educated, urbane men. Two-thirds of the participants had university degrees, and over half of them were doctors, mostly of law. Nearly half were in their thirties or younger - Stuckart, the most important figure in the Minister for the Interior, whose militancy surprised Eichmann, was only 39 - and only two were over 50.
Genocide had begun
To be sure, the genocide of the Jews had begun long before Wannsee, and not just by the SS, which had been butchering Jews since early in the campaign against the Soviet Union from June the previous year. The regular German army, the Wehrmacht, was also involved in these atrocities, and moreover, at a formal level.
In October 1941, Field Marshall Reichenau, commander of the German Sixth Army, issued orders calling on German soldiers to be "avengers of all bestialities inflicted upon the German people and its racial kin. Therefore a soldier must have full understanding for the necessity of a severe but just atonement on Jewish sub-humanity." (This order was reissued by Field Marshall Erich von Manstein of the Eleventh Army, which over the succeeding days killed thousands of Jews in the Crimea. Manstein later became consultant to the West German army and a well respected figure in Bavaria).
What Wannsee provides is a clear and well-documented insight into the collective will within Nazi Germany to embark upon the greatest crime in the history of civilisation. Nobody present was in any doubt about what they were discussing: the murder of Europe's Jews. The issues were whether the healthy among the Jews should be used as slave labour before they were murdered (or worked to death), or whether all Jews should simply be killed, and how widely the circle of Jewishness should be interpreted. Do you kill someone who is half-Jewish, or simply sterilise them and use them as slaves?
Clear state project
So, although by the time those officials had gathered at Wannsee hundreds of thousands of Jews had been murdered, the conference marked a turning point, a moment of liberation: from then onwards, the murder of Jews was not a spontaneous or informal expression of personal feeling, or simply a statement of Nazi ideology, but was now part of a formal plan, a clear state project which was authorised throughout the apparatus of the Third Reich. Wannsee was the final curtain on the rule of law within the Third Reich: within the following year, the worst of the Holocaust, some 3 million Jews were killed across Europe.
As such, Wannsee serves as one of the darkest moments in world history. From then onwards, murder was no longer a matter of individual will but merely one of administration. The Final Solution still required regular inspiration from above by Himmler, or through him, by Hitler, but Wannsee's significance is that on this weekend 60 years ago, the representatives of Germany's administrative class gave a green light to genocide.
And when they had done so, they lit their cigars and rather agreeably relaxed, drinking cognac and chatting. After all, it had been a rather trying day.