BERLIN — On Jan. 20, 1942, 15 high-ranking officials of the Nazi bureaucracy met in a villa on Lake Wannsee on the western edge of Berlin. Nibbles were served and washed down with cognac. There was only one point on the agenda: “The organizational, logistical and material steps for a final solution of the Jewish question in Europe.”
Planning the Holocaust took all of 90 minutes.
Eighty years after the infamous Wannsee Conference that meticulously mapped it out, the bureaucratic efficiency of it remains as unnerving as ever.
The minutes taken that day and typed up on 15 pages do not explicitly refer to murder. They use phrases like “evacuation” and “reduction” and “treatment” — and divide up the task among different government departments and their “pertinent specialists.”
“You read that protocol, and it’s chilling,” said Deborah E. Lipstadt, a renowned Holocaust scholar. “It’s all very camouflaged language. But then you look at the list of countries and the number of Jews they planned to kill. Eleven million people they were going to go after. They had very big plans.”
The anniversary of that fateful meeting has a special resonance at a time when survivors of the Holocaust are dwindling and antisemitism and the ideology of white supremacy are resurgent in Europe and the United States, along with attacks targeting Jewish people and ethnic minorities. Just last Saturday a man took a rabbi and three members of his congregation hostage in a synagogue in Texas. » | Katrin Bennhold | Thursday, January 20, 2022
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Hace 80 años, los nazis planificaron la ‘solución final’ en solo 90 minutos : Mientras Alemania recuerda el aniversario de la Conferencia de Wannsee, los testigos de la era nazi están muriendo y el antisemitismo vuelve a resurgir en Europa y Estados Unidos. »
