Haus der Wannseekonferenz

The hardest aspect of any genocide is making sense out of what is senseless. It is the search for reason. As a premeditated genocide, the Holocaust is especially difficult to comprehend. The ability to kill six million people in a period of roughly four years can only be done through a well organized operation. More incredible is the fact that Germany was fighting a two front war. The Nazi party was still able to devote time, money, and resources to carry out the horrific genocide on their Jewish targets.

The Wannsee Conference, held on January 20, 1942, was the highest ranking military officers of the Nazi party of the special division in charge of the Jewish extermination. They met at 56-58 am Grossen Wannsee, a villa on the shore of lake Wann. This beautiful mansion was donated by a wealthy, energetic supporter of the Nazi party. It was here that officers crunched numbers and calculated exactly how to institute the Final Solution to the Jewish Question. For me to walk through that house  was eye-opening. The house and grounds were beautiful; it was just how it looked 71 years before, cold, elegant, and isolated. On display throughout the house were all the documents of the meeting, down to the minutes. I was expecting this to be a top secret plan, because the Final Solution, when implemented, seemed to be kept out of the world's eye until the end of the war. But this was instead like a corporate meeting, boring and mundane. The whole thing was weird. People being treated as numbers, more as of a commodity than humans.

Our group learned that the Final Solution did not explicitly discuss killing off the Jewish populations when it was first conceptualized. But Adolf Hitler's politics pitted leaders under him against one another to come up with a better plan. Someone would draft a plan, and then the next person would try to beat it, until the Final Solution was pushed to its extremities. I wonder if the officers at the conference saw the final results of their decisions at the camps.

I learned two lessons at Haus der Wannseekonferenz - First, it is easy to sit in comfort and treat people as numbers. Second, competition can bring out the most primitive evils.