Germany reflects upon ‘the Final Solution’

GERMANY commemorates its darkest hour of a murderous century today, as politicians, religious leaders and a handful of survivors remember a meeting of 70 years ago that set in motion the greatest genocide programme in history.

In a little under two hours on 20 January, 1942, between the hours of 11am and shortly before 1pm, functionaries of the Nazi state hammered out the details of “the Final Solution to the Jewish Question in Europe”.

The language at the meeting chaired by SS general Reinhard Heydrich was opaque but its meaning not; it was nothing less than a plan for the industrial-scale murder of Jews in killing factories in occupied Poland.

The villa where the meeting occurred, once owned by a Jew, is now a museum and a place of pilgrimage. Thousands visit each year to walk upon the parquet floors and gaze out at the tranquil waters of the Wannsee lake, just as the desk-murderers of the Third Reich did that day. It stands as one memorial among thousands to six million murdered Jews but in many respects is the most important. What was decided within its walls forever changed mankind.

At synagogues across Germany, the anniversary is being remembered, as it is in Jewish communities across the world.

Before Wannsee, Jews were being done to death in mass shootings, ghettos, Gestapo prisons and concentration camps; after it, they were doomed to die in gas chambers by the tens of thousands every day.

“The importance of this anniversary cannot be overstated,” said a spokesman for the association that runs the Wannsee villa as a permanent Holocaust memorial. “It was 70 years ago but the historical message that evil can flourish if we allow it to is as pertinent now as it was then.”

“Seventy Years After Wannsee” is the theme of the commemoration events, which involve Christians for Israel, Helping Hand Coalition, European Coalition for Israel, Initiative 20 January and other NGOs and partner organisations in co-operation with German government agencies.

German president Christian Wulff will address a two-day historical conference at the villa beginning today which is drawing academics from around the world and Holocaust survivors. In the German parliament, there will be prayers for the dead, while a gala concert is performed in the evening in the Berlin Philharmonic Hall. Video messages from Israeli president Shimon Peres and prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu will be sent to the conference.

The conference was initiated by Hermann Goering, the corpulent Luftwaffe chief, founder of the Gestapo and a virulent Jew-hater. His letter to Heydrich, chief of the Reich Security Main Office, read: “Carry out all preparations with regard to a Final Solution to the Jewish question in those territories of Europe which are under German influence.”

The final solution was code for mass murder. A policy that began at the start of the Third Reich with the isolation of the Jews, then forced emigration followed by deportation, ended at extermination.

One set of minutes of the conference survived. Jews would be transported eastward and organised into labour gangs. Work and living conditions would be extremely harsh so as to kill large numbers by “natural reduction”, with survivors being “treated accordingly”– extermination.

The final protocol of the Wannsee Conference never explicitly mentioned extermination, but within months of the meeting, the first gas chambers were installed in some of the extermination camps in Poland.

The first four camps of what was called Operation Reinhard – in memory of Heydrich after his assassination in the summer of 1942 by British-trained Czech commandos in Prague – exterminated 2.5 million people in a little over a year.

By the end of the war, 4.5 million Jews had perished in the death camps: 1.5 million were shot by SS squads in the Soviet Union prior to the conference.