Europe

Germany contemplates horror as it recalls Holocaust

Historians point to facts as some draw parallels between Donald Trump and Hitler

Visitors at the Sachsenhausen memorial of a former Nazi concentration camp in Oranienburg near Berlin, on International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Photograph: Maurizio Gambarini/AFP

Derek Scally's face
Derek Scally in Berlin
Fri Jan 27 2017 - 17:00

The winter sun casts long shadows over the villa’s squeaking parquet floor. But visitors ignore the noise, and the winking Wannsee lake outside, to study instead the minutes of a meeting held in this dining room 75 years ago.

“The meeting was conducted very quickly, with much courtesy . . . The waiters served cognac,” recalled Adolf Eichmann during his trial in Israel in 1960. “The Wannsee Conference was the beginning of the killing business.”

The killing business was the Holocaust, the Wannsee Conference of January 20th, 1942: the moment when the Nazis industrialised murder. And Eichmann kept the minutes of a meeting which agreed on the “evacuation of the Jews to the east”.

Asked in 1960 about his euphemistic Wannsee minutes, Eichmann said: “Of course it’s not a verbatim record. How shall I put this: certain overly plain talk and jargon had to be rendered into official language by me.”

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But the senior officials present, he insisted, “were aware of the facts”.

The facts of the plan on the table: to move beyond mass emigration of Jews to a mass killing programme, similar to the Nazi euthanasia programme that killed – or forcibly sterilised – up to 500,000 people deemed “unworthy” of life because of handicap, illness or hereditary disease.

On Friday, the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in 1945, Germany remembered the Nazis’ victims. Like 24-year-old Anna Lehnkering, diagnosed with “innate cretinism” and sent away to be sterilised in 1940. Instead she was murdered in a gas chamber disguised as a shower.

Euthanasia victims

“The consequence in the family was a vicious circle of silence, denial . . . combined with insecurity, shame and even guilt,” said her niece, Sigrid Falkenstein, to a special Bundestag sitting recalling euthanasia victims and more than six million subsequent Holocaust victims.

Adding to the shadows of this year’s memorial day: warnings by Pope Francis of worrying parallels between 1930s Germany and today’s US.

Asked by Spain's El Pais if he worried about the rise of populism in the United States, Pope Francis said it was too soon to judge Donald Trump.

But people should not repeat the mistakes of the 1930s, when people turned to “saviours” like Adolf Hitler, elected to resolve economic and political crises and give back a proud identity to Germany.

“Hitler did not steal power, he was elected by his people and then he destroyed his people,” said Pope Francis.

British historian and Third Reich expert Sir Richard Evans has dismissed as simplistic and flawed any Hitler-Trump comparisons, not least because Trump campaign punch-ups are nothing like the hundreds of deaths carried out by the Nazis that accompanied Hitler’s rise to power.

"Hitler was murderous from the start, he didn't just become murderous later on," said Evans to The Irish Times.

In the week when the Trump White House embraced “alternative facts”, Evans sees parallels not with the Goebbels propaganda machine but the post-modernist relativism of the late 1980s that swept US universities from which many in the Trump administration are drawn.

Problematic comparisons

Yale history professor Timothy Snyder agrees that straight comparisons are problematic because “history doesn’t repeat let alone rhyme”.

The Trump phenomenon is "radically new", he told Die Welt, making it essential to broaden one's historical horizons to see everything that is possible.

“Of course Trump hasn’t done anything of what the Nazi regime did,” said Snyder, “but Hitler hadn’t done it either in 1932 or 1933.”

A decade later, in January 1942, Adolf Eichmann recalled how Reinhard Heydrich, the SS man who had chaired the meeting, lit up a cigar afterwards. Satisfied he then held in his hands the power of life and death over 11 million European Jews, Heydrich was dead six months later after an attack by Czech partisans. But his Wannsee machine kept murdering for three more years.

It fell to Eichmann to organise the logistics of the Holocaust, and he remained unrepentant over his role until his execution in 1962 for war crimes.

The Wannsee meeting, he told his Israeli trial, left him with “something of the satisfaction of Pilate because I felt entirely innocent of any guilt”.

“The popes had given their orders,” he said. “It was up to me to obey.”