One Day: What does the date 20 January 1942 signify for you?

Auschwitz Image © Bill Hunt and © Sophie Harrison

In this blog written for Holocaust Memorial Day, OU Associate Lecturer Gillian Mawdsley reflects on the meaning and impact of the Wannsee conference on its 80th anniversary.

My guess would be for most of us nothing specific; some may venture to suggest that the Japanese Pearl Harbour attack had taken place in December 1941 and America had now entered the Second World War. That is correct and these circumstances are not totally disconnected with a conference taking place on that date in a villa on a lake in Berlin.

The location on 20 January 1942 of that conference was Wannsee.

With the Holocaust Memorial Day (HMD) held each year on 27 January, to remember the liberation of Auschwitz, it is timely to reflect on the meaning and impact of the Wannsee conference on what is its 80^th anniversary.

The HMD theme in 2022 is One Day, taken here to mean acknowledging a snapshot of that day in history. That reflects the polar opposite positions of those attending the conference and deciding the future of the Jewish people and elsewhere in Europe, for the Jewish people awaiting their fate. As Iby Knill, a survivor stated, “You didn’t think about yesterday, and tomorrow may not happen, it was only today that you had to cope with and you got through it as best you could.” (https://www.hmd.org.uk/what-is-holocaust-memorial-day/this-years-theme/)

The Wannsee Conference

That conference, postponed from 9 December 1941 by the occurrence of the events in late 1941, involved 15 high-ranking German officials. Of those attending, be aware that over half were lawyers, and two-thirds were university graduates. SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, the chief of the security service and the SS, chaired. The conference’s purpose was to determine the “final solution” to the Jewish question (Endlösung der Judenfrage) in co-ordination with other government departments and ministries. Frank-Walter Steinmeier, Germany’s President stated, “It is the ordinary, the familiar, that jumps out at us, horrifies us and unsettles us.” That conference was held involving civil servants, just like many held day in day out across the United Kingdom. It is the policy that abhors.

The systematic murder of the European Jewish people was by then well underway but according to Hitler, there was a need for the escalation of these policies already in place. The Jewish people had been subject to increasing isolation and discrimination with effect of a raft of legislation passed from 1933 onwards. That included restrictions as to their access and eligibility to jobs within the Civil Service through the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service of April 7, 1933.That determined that it was not religion that was decisive but descent, race and blood. The legal formula for defining a Jew was set out in paragraph 5 of the first supplementary decree to the Reich Citizenship law dating from the 14 November 1935. A definition provided the administration with a watertight method of applying the race laws which were to represent a compromise between demands of the party and an administrative workable solution to put into place.

The Jewish people went on to feel the effects of more than 400 decrees and regulations that were to restrict all aspects of their public and private lives. Though many were through national laws issued by the German administration, others were directed through and by the state, regional, and municipal officials, issuing decrees affecting their own municipal states. No area of German life was exempt. The conference was to continue that policy with determining a Final Solution.

The conference itself lasted a mere 90 minutes, not long to determine the fate of so many in Europe. What came was agreement to a number of organizational, logistical and material steps that were required in what was to become the final solution. The meeting concluded with cognac and networking .

It had opened with a presentation on the number of the Jewish people remaining in Europe to be affected by the policies. Then including Great Britain, it amounted to 11 million, now graphically reproduced in modern form (Statistics – Catastrophe Questioning  Eichmann’s  numbers (ghwk.de)

The concept behind the conference was clear that “we cannot keep storing them.”

Our knowledge of the conference can be found from one remaining copy of the Wannsee Protocol (headed 16th out of 30 produced) and marked Geheime Reichssache (top secret) which the Allies found at the end of the War. https://www.ghwk.de/fileadmin/Redaktion/PDF/Konferenz/Wannsee_Protocol_German_English_200214es.pdf It makes for chilling reading in its use of language. There was no differentiation as to age or gender of the victims or their geographical location in seeking to achieve the Final Solution.

The term “evacuation east” was clearly a euphemism for death. The Jewish people were to be relocated for appropriate labour in the East. Able-bodied Jews, separated according to sex, would be taken in large work columns to these areas for work on roads, in the course of which action, a large portion would be eliminated by natural causes. The final section would have to be treated accordingly, because they would as a product of natural selection, if released, germinate a new Jewish revival.

As Eichmann later said "How shall I put it – certain over-plain talk and jargon expressions had to be rendered into office language by me." They knew exactly what they were doing.

Wannsee Today

As time passes, it is becoming increasingly hard to find survivors to provide eyewitness testimony as to what happened during the Holocaust. The documentary production of the Wannsee Protocol speaks volumes as to its sheer normality; its horror is in the systemic policy implemented on the Jewish people and other victims of the Holocaust. Antisemitism is not dead and can be still seen today for example in the recent hostage situation at the synagogue in Texas.

We all have responsibilities in remembering and achieving justice. Wannsee itself is now a museum which took a generation for its importance to be recognised and for its place in history to be established.

Remember, legal government officials and judges all helped draft, implement and enforce the laws which were aimed at depriving Jews of their rights, livelihoods and assets. All were involved in the transition of Germany from a democracy to dictatorship by the use of many familiar legal mechanisms that implemented the Nazi policy agenda.

In conforming to the new laws, lawyers helped to oust Jewish colleagues from the courts, their professional associations and law firms.

Today we can best echo the early day motion recorded at the UK Parliament that noted “January 2022 marks the eightieth anniversary of the Wannsee Conference … expresses the hope that people from Nations across the world will take steps to ensure that current and future generations repudiate continuing anti-Semitic incidents and never forget the scale of atrocities which took place during that horrendous period of European history.” https://edm.parliament.uk/early-day-motion/59271/80th-anniversary-of-the-wannsee-conference-in-january-1942

Gillian Mawdsley