Promised New Zealand by Freya Klier

Author:Freya Klier
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Otago University Press

The Wannsee Conference

On 20 January 1942 probably one of the most fateful conferences in world history takes place: fifteen Nazi regime officials – high-ranking SS officers, representatives from various ministries and party leaders – are welcomed by Richard Heydrich, the head of the Reich Main Security Office. The strictly secret meeting lasts only about one-and-a-half hours; its central theme is the ‘overall solution’ for the Jewish question. Heydrich’s vision: the coming ‘final solution of the Jewish question’ is to include at least 11 million Jewish Europeans including those from neutral countries like Switzerland and Sweden and also Great Britain, which will be conquered soon according to their reckoning. Heydrich’s expert for Jewish affairs, Adolf Eichmann, drafts the protocol: Eichmann skirts around the question of mass annihilation – bureaucratic responsibilities are clarified and the co-operation of all ministries is secured in principle in 1942. A succeeding conference for an ‘elaboration’ of the subject is planned. This does not eventuate because on 27 May 1942, in the Prague suburb of Liben, Czech resistance fighters carry out an assassination attempt on Heydrich, who dies a few days later as a result of the injuries he sustains.

Even without a second conference, mass murder has long been underway: when Hitler attacked the Soviet Union in April 1941 and the Red Army fled from Eastern Poland, Ukrainians, Poles and Lithuanians attacked their Jewish neighbours first, sometimes even before the arrival of the Wehrmacht. Within days, the SS began shooting Jewish males but they did not stop at men only. Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing squads that include a large proportion of Waffen-SS and police personnel), supported by the Wehrmacht, murdered a large proportion of the Jews living in the Baltic states, Belarus and the Ukraine. The Lithuanian and Ukrainian militias joined in with them. There were massacres, pogroms and mass shootings in Kiev and Lemberg and in Bialystok, Odessa and Rostov as well as parts of Romania and Lithuania. As 1941 moves into 1942, there is scarcely a Jewish man alive in Serbia.

‘Employment placement’, ‘resettlement’ and ‘evacuation’ are euphemisms, which disguise the planned genocide and make it seem like an everyday occurrence. Thus the ‘evacuation’ of the Riga ghetto by police units and the Einsatzgruppen on 30 November and 8 December 1941 allegedly began in order to make room for deportation trains coming from the ‘Greater German Reich’. ‘Evacuation’ is the name for the meticulously organised massacres of approximately 26,800 Latvian Jews from the ghetto, who were shot in the small forest of Rumbula or en route. On 30 November, the same day that thousands of Latvian Jews were murdered, the first transport of 942 German Jews from Berlin arrived in Riga. They were taken straight from the platform to the forest and shot there.

In 1942 the Nazis’ annihilation machinery is made even more ‘efficient’; while bureaucratic co-operation is being co-ordinated in the villa on the Wannsee lakeside, nineteen more transports arrive from the Greater German Reich – from Nuremberg, Stuttgart, Hamburg and Vienna, from Düsseldorf, Cologne, Leipzig and Osnabrück.

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