Germany Marks the Site Where Holocaust Began

Amid growing concern about the treatment of racial minorities in modern, democratic Germany, about 200 prominent Germans and Jews on Sunday inaugurated a Holocaust memorial at the villa where Nazi bureaucrats 50 years ago today gathered to work out the technicalities of how to exterminate Europe’s Jews.

The memorial, in the shape of a permanent exhibition about the Holocaust, includes a collection of books, photographs, tape recordings and original documents relating to the fate of the estimated 6 million Jews who were killed by the Nazis.

Financed jointly by the city of Berlin and the federal government, the memorial in the tranquil Berlin suburb of Wannsee, known as the “House of the Wannsee Conference,” will also sponsor talks by concentration camp survivors and cultural exchanges with the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, the Yad Vashem.

“This house must and shall remain a warning,” Heinz Galinski, a Jewish community leader here, told the assembled guests.

Noting a disturbing spate of anti-Semitic incidents that have occurred in Germany since unification, Galinski urged hefty government financing for the memorial to increase awareness in Germany of what occurred under the Nazis.

Germany’s parliamentary president, Rita Suessmuth, referred to the sharp influx of foreigners and asylum-seekers into the country since the collapse of the Berlin Wall more than two years ago, the sporadic attacks against them and the attempts to stop those attacks.

“This (issue) will show whether we’ve learned from history,” she said.

More than any other single event related to the Holocaust, the infamous Wannsee Conference that took place Jan. 20, 1942, carries the most chilling of messages, because it was mostly ordinary government bureaucrats, not the pinnacles of Nazism, who gathered at Wannsee that morning.

Neither Adolf Hitler nor his two senior-most accomplices--the Luftwaffe chief Hermann Goering and Heinrich Himmler, head of the elite SS praetorian guard--were present.

Hitler had long before decided that Europe’s Jews should die. The Wannsee Conference was held to decide how to go about doing it.

Records show that the conference was chaired by Hitler’s security chief Reinhard Heydrich with the help of an SS lieutenant colonel named Adolf Eichmann. It was attended by a group of government undersecretaries and department heads who sat at the table and, apparently without resistance or questioning, worked out the logistics of transporting and murdering an entire people.

“As no other date, the 20th of January 1942 brings the darkest chapter of our history before our eyes,” Chancellor Helmut Kohl said in a statement marking the meeting’s 50th anniversary.

Minutes of the meeting show that Heydrich, apparently relieved at the lack of resistance, passed around cognac to participants, once business had been completed.

However, writing in the current issue of the news weekly Die Zeit, German historian Eberhard Jaeckel claimed that Heydrich had other grounds for relief. Jaeckel argued that Heydrich called the conference for only one purpose--to establish that he, and not Himmler, had the main responsibility for overseeing the Holocaust.

The cognac, Jaeckel maintained, was to celebrate the acceptance of this new authority.

“It is under these circumstances . . . that not Himmler but Heydrich was the true architect of the ‘Final Solution,’ ” Jaeckel wrote.