Ninety Minutes: May 22nd Mini-Task
Their were fifteen participants at the Wannsee Conference, however, for the sake of this mini-task I shall name two.
Reinhard Heydrich, who was the Chief of the Reich Main Security Office, as well as being the Deputy Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia. Beyond this, due to Himmler's request, he was essentially in charge of the Wannsee Conference. Regulating and managing the meeting.
The second name I'll mention was Adolf Eichmann, head of the Referat IV B4 of the Gestapo. Furthermore, his most important role was the recording of the minutes of the meeting. However, it was how he recorded the minutes that was the most interesting. On Heydrich's orders, the minutes were phrased in a fashion that did not betray the true intentions of the Wannsee Conference, maintaining plausible deniability if they ever fell into the wrong hands. However, these minutes also made the true intentions clear to any reader from a non-legal standpoint.
I now would like to talk about something else. There are aspects of the Wannsee conference I'd like to discuss that I feel like the mini-task questions did not address. Things that stuck out to me and moved me emotionally. This is not a part of the assignment, that is the paragraph above, this is merely an attempt to incite discussion. So please, entertain me.
Ninety minutes. An hour and a half was all it took for 15 Nazi and German officials to plan the murder of eleven million people (nine million, if you account for the exaggerated numbers of Jews within the Soviet sphere). That was the first thing that struck out to me, it wasn't so much the history of it. In fact, the history of the Holocaust is fairly, for lack of a better term, fairly straight forward. We all know the story of the Holocaust, the murder of six million Jews, and countless millions of other groups deemed to be lesser by the Nazis. However, it's the prologue to that story that perhaps scared me the most, the planning of such an act. Ninety minutes, the same amount of time to eat a dinner with your family, or to watch two episodes of Breaking Bad; in that amount of time, men sat down and casually discussed the eradication of an entire race. I've never been one to believe in absolute 'evil' or 'good'. These were not monsters, or demons on Earth. These were men; people that had friends, families, people they cared about. They had dreams, nightmares, goals, ambitions, a favourite food, a favourite colour, fears, and so on. In that sense, they were men just like me, you, or anybody else. They were human. Yet, despite all of that, these people that were no different from the average person as far as human traits go, managed to sit down at a table and in ninety minutes completely planned out the Holocaust; the world's most terrifying form of industrialized murder. Beyond that, what struck me even more was a comment the tour guide made during the session; after the meeting, Heydrich and several others sat down with a glass of liquor, a cigar, and commented on how well put together the plan was and how efficient the Conference flowed.
That chilled me to the blood, the celebration of how 'easy' it was to orchestrate a genocide. It's simply so far from the usual horror stories of World War II that any history major has to endure. The stories of the Japanese massacre of the Chinese, the Russian's destruction of the Eastern European countryside, the stories of Allied soldiers assaulting/raping German soldiers/citizens; they all have one thing in common, up close and personal hatred. As a history major, we are no stranger to stories like these, they exist in every story of every war ever fought. However, the Wannsee Conference was something different. It was fifteen men in suits, sitting around a table, and with the simple stroke of a pen they condemned an entire ethnicity of people to death (and one that didn't even take up a huge portion of the German population, as the Jewish population in Germany in 1933 was less than 1%). It's that cold, emotionless disconnect from their victims that is truly terrifying; beyond that, their separation from reality with the phrasing of their Conference's minutes, either to avoid incrimination, or make it easier for themselves and the soldiers doing the killing (or both) is blood chilling.
That chilled me to the blood, the celebration of how 'easy' it was to orchestrate a genocide. It's simply so far from the usual horror stories of World War II that any history major has to endure. The stories of the Japanese massacre of the Chinese, the Russian's destruction of the Eastern European countryside, the stories of Allied soldiers assaulting/raping German soldiers/citizens; they all have one thing in common, up close and personal hatred. As a history major, we are no stranger to stories like these, they exist in every story of every war ever fought. However, the Wannsee Conference was something different. It was fifteen men in suits, sitting around a table, and with the simple stroke of a pen they condemned an entire ethnicity of people to death (and one that didn't even take up a huge portion of the German population, as the Jewish population in Germany in 1933 was less than 1%). It's that cold, emotionless disconnect from their victims that is truly terrifying; beyond that, their separation from reality with the phrasing of their Conference's minutes, either to avoid incrimination, or make it easier for themselves and the soldiers doing the killing (or both) is blood chilling.
I'll end this here, and I hope this does provoke discussion, as I found this to be the most emotionally moving museum of the trip, even beyond the Karlshorst museum, which I throughly loved. After all, I can't get beyond the fact that the Jewish population has dealt with persecution since the Dark Ages, and survived/thrived through all of that. Yet, men would plan an event in the 1940s that would push their race (and others) to the absolute limit in a fight for survival.
And all it took to plan it was a simple ninety minutes.
And all it took to plan it was a simple ninety minutes.
5 comments:
All I can say is wow Trey, this is good, and that I also thought that thier celebration after was rather shocking. I just cannot understand how they thought that what they were doing was right. I wonder how this would have played out if Hitler was actually there. Would they have still come to the same conclusion?
This is what I expected the task to be for today; Instead of just a simple identification and biography of a couple men involved, I too felt that it should have been about the results of the conference. As the saying goes, remember the victims, not the crimes. We shouldn't care about the criminals, we should care about the crime and the victims of the crime. As as you said, it took 90 minutes to kill 11 Million people.
Amanda, any response to this is walking on thin ice; but I'll attempt to try, as I feel it leads to interesting discussion.
Let me start with a tangent, I said in the post that I don't believe that absolute evil or absolute good is a reality of our world. These are normal human beings with loves, dreams, goals, ambitions, families, etc. For example, Hitler, despite his terrible actions and ambitions, was a man who was reported to have been very kind to his serving staff, very charming and polite to the people around him, and had a renowned love for dogs. That may seem off topic, but as I said, there is no such thing as absolute evil; it's a fantasy designed to help us distance ourselves from terrible people. Visualizing them as evil, as less than human, helps us feel as if we are somehow better than them and not capable of the same atrocities. Even though, keep in mind, the Allies were capable of atrocities as well, (The American fire-bombings of Japanese huts, resulting in countless civilian deaths is a good example).
So, with that in mind, I have a couple theories as to why they went along with it, but I'll just throw out one because this is just a blog comment and I've already written far too much for this blog post.
The Versailles Treaty had devastated the country, leaving it economically shattered, in ruins, and suffering from a broken, angry population. Then Hitler comes along, a charming, assertive man that promises a solution to these problems. Regardless of his extremism, it provided the people with two options: Go along with it and see what happens, or don't and have nothing change at all. Naturally, the idea of change provided hope. Beyond that, Hitler gave them a target for their hatred and their blame, the Jewish and other minority groups that were viewed as lesser or leeches to society. As such, these men suffered from a radically different worldview from ours, and because of these reasons the removal of what was perceived as a Jewish problem became an admirable goal. It isn't even that uncommon of an idea either, it exists in modern day society, as Middle Easterners are definitely viewed with a particular bias due to current events on that side of the world, its more severe in the U.S., and it's a byproduct of foolish racism, but alas, the point still stands, it's easy for people to hate, and sometimes it's something that people actively search for, a group to hate.
That was a ramble, I know, but it's a complex question; it's impossible to explain why somebody could condemn an ethnicity to death so easily and feel like they were right with brevity, but I hope that works.
I thought the visit to the Wannsee Conference was also the most moving visit of our Field Trip in Berlin. Like you mentioned, I found it really interesting that the exclusion of Jews began much earlier than the Holocaust. I found the timeline this that this exhibit outlined really helpful for me since it pertains to my topic, and I don't have a ton of background knowledge on the topic. Another thing that stuck out for me was that only 11 or 12 out of 500 people admitted that they did not want to carry out the murder of the Jews. In addition, the fact that there were no negative repercussion to their actions shocked me. This puts out the question that maybe if more people had refused to carry out the murders, their could have been a lot less victims of the Holocaust. These facts outright shocked me.
Brooklyn commented precisely what I was going to say: the facts and figures with some of these situations (like the 12 out of 500 men who refused to shoot to kill); these were quite surprising to me. Trey, I also appreciate the fact that you were moved by the timeline of these events and how long it took for them to occur. By including these facts and figures, do you think that this gives the visitor to the museum a greater understanding of the development of these types of atrocities?
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