The Villa, the Lake, the Meeting by Mark Roseman

Author:Mark Roseman
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141928319
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2009-05-22T00:00:00+00:00

Controlling the boundaries

The Wannsee conference is thus a kind of keyhole, through which we can glimpse the emerging Final Solution. It took place at a time when the idea of a reservation had been abandoned, labour scarcities were pressing, and when the Nazis may or may not have decided exactly how to eliminate all the Jews. But it is evident that Wannsee is not the place at which the murder decisions themselves were taken. For the most part, Heydrich was disseminating conclusions drawn elsewhere. On some issues the participants had something to say; for the most part their role was to listen and to nod.

Why then had he called them together? One of the few areas where there were still clear differences of principle, particularly between the ministries and the RSHA, was the question of how to deal with the borderline cases of half-Jews and mixed marriages.68 The Interior Ministry felt in advance of the meeting that this was likely to be the key item on the agenda. Even after the war, State Secretary Stuckart still claimed that Heydrich had called the meeting primarily to remove obstacles to deporting half-Jews and Jews in mixed marriages.69

The problem of defining who was a Jew had faced the Nazis ever since they came to power. Early measures, such as the forced retirement of civil servants in 1933, used a broad definition, targeting those with even one Jewish grandparent. Party members had to prove the absence of Jewish forebears back to 1800, SS officials back to 1750. With the reintroduction of conscription in 1935, however, the army was allowed to make ‘exceptions’ and recruit half- and quarter-Jewish recruits – which it seems to have done with alacrity. Party radicals were worried that precedents were being set that might lead to civil rights for half- and quarter-Jews. Their pressure for a definitive and far-reaching ruling helps explain Hitler’s decision to announce citizenship and blood laws, the so-called Nuremberg Laws, at the Party rally in Nuremberg in September 193 5.70

The history of the Nuremberg Laws, and particularly of the subsequent decrees establishing their precise scope, revealed that unlike ‘full Jews’, half- and quarter-Jews had institutional champions, above all Stuckart’s department in the Ministry of the Interior, with assistance from the Reich Chancellery. Why the Interior Ministry should have played this role is not clear. It may well have reflected a particular commitment on the part of Bernhard Lösener, Stuckart’s expert on Jewish questions. Whatever the original motivation, once the Interior Ministry took on the half-Jewish cause, ministerial prestige was at stake. Even Lösener’s own post-war testimony, in which he was at pains to underline his anti-Nazi credentials, makes evident that the issue became as much a question of departmental amour propre as of moral principle.71

The other factor helping the Mischlinge was Hitler’s sensitivity to public morale. There were so many full-German relatives to consider. Ideologically, Hitler favoured the hard line of the Party radicals, but tactically he was very hesitant.72 A classic example is his behaviour in relation to the Nuremberg Laws.

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