Remembering to Remember

Fifty years ago this week, in an elegant room of a comfortable villa in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee, a small group of bureaucrats gathered to discuss the mechanics of murdering Europe’s 11 million Jews.

What history would later come to know as the Holocaust had, in fact, already begun, though not yet in the programmatic way the Wannsee Conference was convened to plan. Its first victims had been the Jews of Germany and Austria who had been unable to flee or find refuge abroad after Nazism’s triumph in 1933 and the Anschluss in 1938. Poland’s Jews were next, after Germany’s invasion in 1939. In Russia and the Ukraine, execution squads attached to the invading Nazi army had for more than a year been killing every Jew they could find. The Wannsee Conference lasted for less than two hours, but it was to seal the fate of 6 million Jews.

A half-century after that infamous event the house in Wannsee has been dedicated as Germany’s first permanent memorial to the victims of the Holocaust. Visitors can now tour the site and study the photographs and biographies of the 15 men who plotted the logistic details of what the Nazis euphemistically called the Final Solution, examine the 15-page protocol written by SS Lt. Col. Adolph Eichmann, observe the stark documentary evidence in both photos and text of what preceded the Wannsee Conference and the horror that was to follow it.

In recent years the Holocaust has evoked new interest in Germany, with younger people especially wanting to learn more about what Chancellor Helmut Kohl has called “a crime whose immensity overwhelms the capacity of human comprehension.” This interest is encouraging, not least at a time when the reunification so long sought has given rise to a spate of ugly incidents against minorities. The Wannsee memorial is a stark and necessary reminder of what hatred and intolerance can produce. A reminder not just for Germany, but for the world.