World

Germany Marks A Dark Anniversary

By CBSNews.com staff CBSNews.com staff

January 18, 2002 / 12:44 PM EST / CBS

As snow fell around the splendid villa, a small group of men sat down in a room overlooking Lake Wannsee, just outside of Berlin, for a meeting on Jan. 20, 1942.

In a session with no recorded dissent that lasted just 90 minutes, 15 state secretaries and high Nazi party officials made plans to 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.

It has been 60 years since the Wannsee Conference, a watershed in Nazi policy against Europe's Jews. As Germany marks the notorious date, scholars are examining how the Holocaust has been memorialized in some of the countries most changed by the events, from Poland's preservation of the death camps to Germany's struggle to overcome its past.

At the same time, aided by documents discovered since the fall of the Iron Curtain, historians are taking a new look at how crucial the meeting was to the Nazi scheme for mass murder.

The conference at the lake on the edge of Berlin was once thought to be the point at which the Nazis decided to stop deporting and randomly killing Jews and instead to industrialize their murder.

Debate continues, but most historians now agree that the decision was made some months earlier by Hitler himself, even though no written order from him has ever been found.

Hundreds of thousands of Jews had already been murdered by the time the 15 civil servants, Nazi party leaders and officials of Schutzstaffel, the SS, or security squadron met at Wannsee. It is now believed by many that Reinhard Heydrich, the Nazi Security Service and Security Police head, called the meeting to make sure everybody knew what Hitler wanted done and to establish SS oversight of the process.

"It was not a decision-making conference, but that does not diminish the meaning," said Norbert Kampe, director of the House of the Wannsee-Conference Memorial and Education Site. "From that point on, the whole of the German state apparatus, even people who were there before the Nazis, became involved in the process of organized killing of European Jews."

Kampe bases his opinion partially on documents newly uncovered in former Soviet bloc archives.

In Latvian records, for example, researchers found a message sent by Heydrich five days after the conference headed "Final Solution of the Jewish Question." It told all SS and Security Service officers in occupied territories that "all the preparatory work is completed" suggesting the conference was what made the killing program official.
"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."

For a long time, historians assumed Nazi ideology mattered only to Hitler and a few others, while lower officials acted mainly to win Hitler's favor or because they were carrying out orders.

"In the last few years we've come to see that, whereas genocide may not have been on people's agenda, and perhaps not everybody amongst the key elite shared all of Hitler's anti-Semitism, there was nevertheless a broad group of highly intellectual, highly educated individuals who had already come through right-wing student movements of the 1920s and shared a lot of the racial intellectual framework of Hitler," Roseman said in a telephone interview from his home in Southampton.

German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, in a statement Friday, urged the country never to forget the Nazis' crimes and "to accept this dark part of our history, even though it may be difficult in our minds to accept what happened."

An exhibit at the German Historical Museum in Berlin, opening for the anniversary of the Wannsee Conference, looks at the radicalization of anti-Semitism and the beginnings of Nazi policies of discrimination.

The museum worked closely with Poland's State Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau, Israel's Yad Vashem and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum to put together representations of how they present Holocaust research so that it resonates in their countries.

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."

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 grand villa was owned by an industrialist and bought by Heydrich as a vacation resort fr SS 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.

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