BERLINERS’ FIRST association with the Wannsee is the man-made beach on the shores of the city’s largest lake. For the rest of the world, however, the Wannsee is notorious for the austere villa on the opposite lake shore.
Exactly 70 years ago, in just two hours, Nazi officials sealed the fate of millions of people by agreeing here the “final solution to the Jewish question”.
Yesterday’s German politicians and Jewish leaders returned to remember the resulting mass murder that president Christian Wulff described as “the lowest point of German culture”.
The January 20th, 1942, meeting was chaired by Reinhard Heydrich, head of the SS secret police, and attended by state secretaries, here to sign off on the details of a plan to which their Nazi ministers had already agreed in principle. In his conference documents, Heydrich listed 11 million Jews living around Europe, half of them in countries under Nazi control, and a plan for these to be “allocated for appropriate labour in the east”.
“Doubtless a large portion will be eliminated by natural causes” due to forced labour. Those still alive would “have to be treated accordingly” to “prevent a Jewish revival”.
What followed were mass rail transports in cattle wagons, concentration and death camps, gas chambers and incinerators for six million Jews and millions of other victims: Sinti and Roma gypsies, homosexuals, communists and other political prisoners.
At Heydrich’s insistence, the minutes of the meeting were to be destroyed. But a foreign ministry undersecretary disobeyed the order and the document was discovered among his personal effects in 1947. President Wulff said the villa, now a museum with a “strange atmosphere”, would forever be a “place of German disgrace”.
“Wannsee has become synonymous with a bureaucratic sorting into those worthy and those unworthy of life, for state- sponsored annihilation,” he said. “Everyone who reads the meeting’s minutes is, to this day, left breathless.”
It was a disgrace too, he added, that an underground neo-Nazi blamed for 10 murders had operated under the nose of investigators for a decade until last November.
Israeli minister Yossi Peled, who survived the Holocaust as a child, told the ceremony that “neither 70 nor 700 years would make us forget”.