Wannsee Conference

Thursday January 17 10:40 AM ET

By Erik Kirschbaum

BERLIN (Reuters) - Sixty years ago, in the leafy Berlin lakeside district of Wannsee, a group of Nazi ministers were gathering for a breakfast meeting that had one purpose -- to organize the extermination of Europe's Jews.

In a session with no recorded dissent that lasted just 90 minutes, 15 state secretaries and high Nazi party officials co-ordinated plans to efficiently deport and eliminate some 11 million Jews from countries that Germany occupied or expected to conquer.

Only one of the 30 copies of the meeting's ``top secret'' notes, as recorded by Adolf Eichmann, survived the war. It was found by American war crimes investigators in a Foreign Ministry file in Berlin in 1947.

The ``Wannsee Protocol,'' as it came to be known, provided prosecutors at the Nuremberg war crimes trials with a ``smoking gun,'' a tangible piece of evidence linking the Nazi leadership to the ``Final Solution'' and the death camps where six million Jews perished.

The 60th anniversary on Sunday, Jan. 20, of the ``Wannsee Conference'' in a villa overlooking the Wannsee lake will be marked by a ceremony and discussion forums.

Germany's reaction to the conference epitomizes the country's struggle to come to terms with the darkest chapter of its history. Over the decades a post-war ambivalence about the Nazi era has given way to a desire for a deeper exploration of the past.

The gray three-story building where the Wannsee Conference took place was turned into a public memorial and education center 10 years ago after a long campaign. Since then, it has attracted half a million visitors.

``There has definitely been more interest in recent years in Germany in what happened at Wannsee as well as in the Nazi era,'' said Gaby Mueller-Oelrichs, head of the Josef Wulf Library at the Wannsee Conference Memorial and Educational Center.

``There's been a growing acceptance to learn about it,'' she added. ``Before the late 1960s, there was a tendency to sweep things under the carpet. Many teachers avoided the Nazi period. For a lot of people German history began in 1945, at the zero hour. That changed in the late 1960s and 1970s.''

BERLIN WANTED NO WANNSEE MEMORIAL

Reluctant to acknowledge that the holocaust was formally organized by the government, many Germans chose to pay little attention to the Wannsee Conference in earlier post-war decades.

The city of West Berlin itself long resisted efforts to establish a memorial at the building, a telling indication of the widespread indifference to the Nazi past.

The grand villa was owned by an industrialist and bought by Nazi Reinhard Heydrich as a vacation resort for the SS, Adolf Hitler's elite troops.

After the war it was inhabited by Soviet soldiers and then by American troops. In 1947 the Berlin Social Democratic Party took over, turning it into an adult education center. From 1952 until 1988 it was used as a school hostel for inner city children.

As late as 1967, West Berlin mayor Klaus Schuetz opposed efforts led by Auschwitz survivor Joseph Wulf and backed by the World Jewish Congress to turn it into a memorial, saying he didn't want to set up ``a macabre cult site.''

German student protests in 1968 triggered a wave of interest in the country's Nazi past as the post-war generation demanded to know more about their parents' crimes. A decade later, the television broadcast in West Germany of the American film ``Holocaust'' fired younger Germans' interest again.

``German historians were extremely slow in turning their attention to the (Nazi) era because many of them were compromised by their own past,'' the Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper said in a recent article.

But since its opening 10 years ago on the 50th anniversary of the conference, the number of visitors to the documentation center has climbed steadily over the years, reaching nearly 67,000 in 2000.

CHILLING CONTRASTS

The visitors, including thousands of German school children each year, are confronted by chilling contrasts: a magnificent stately building on the banks of a beautiful lake where genocide was organized.

Inside, a turn-of-the-century splendor and impeccable orderliness clash with copies of the documents on the walls relating the decisions taken to implement the Holocaust.

Hosted by Heydrich, head of the Reich's security office, the meeting aimed to co-ordinate the ``Final Solution of the Jewish Question.'' Historians say Heydrich's objective was to include and brief important state ministries and party offices.

``There has never been a bleaker rendition of the orderly governance of murder,'' writes British historian Mark Roseman in a new book ``The Villa, The Lake, The Meeting: Wannsee and the Final Solution.'' ``To this day the Wannsee Protocol remains the most emblematic and programmatic statement of the Nazi way of doing genocide.''

Many Jews had been killed before January 1942 -- including half a million shot in the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941 after the German army invaded the country. The first death camp, at Chelmno, was also operating before 1942.

But historians believe Wannsee was the moment where the Final Solution was formally organized. And although Hitler did not attend, most believe that the decisions were made at the Nazi leader's behest and knowledge.

``Wannsee emerges as an important act of closure in the process of turning mass murder into genocide,'' writes Roseman.

``On the face of it, it captures the moment when the Nazis decided to eliminate the Jews.'' He added that Hitler must ``at some point have taken the ultimate decision.''

In the protocol, Heydrich says Hitler gave him prior approval for a new kind of solution to the Jewish question, euphemistically called the ``evacuation'' of Jews to the east.

The notes describe that about 11 million Jews in Europe would be affected and include a table listing European countries and their Jewish populations. The protocol says that some half- and quarter-Jews would be allowed to stay in the Reich provided they accepted sterilization.

Historians say Heydrich revealed the regime's true intentions when describing the Jews deemed fit for work.

``In the course of the final solution ... the Jews should be put to work in the east,'' the document says.

``Jews fit to work will work their way eastwards constructing roads. Doubtless the majority will be eliminated by natural causes. Any final remnants that survive will consist of the most resistant elements. They will have to be dealt with appropriately because otherwise, by natural selection, they would form the germ cell of a new Jewish revival.''

Aside from the one 15-page copy of the minutes found in 1947, historians have the testimony of Eichmann at his trial in Israel in 1961 before he was convicted and executed.

Eichmann said the meeting was ``conducted quietly and with much courtesy, with much friendliness. There was not much speaking and it did not last a long time. The waiters served cognac, and in this way it ended.''