The Participants

The Men of the Wannsee Conference

Hans-Christian Jasch, Christoph Kreutzmüller, Hans-Christian Jasch, Christoph Kreutzmüller

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781785336348
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'Holocauste

Combining accessible prose with scholarly rigor, The Participants presents fascinating profiles of the all-too-human men who implemented some of the most inhuman acts in history.

On 20 January 1942, fifteen senior German government officials attended a short meeting in Berlin to discuss the deportation and murder of the Jews of Nazi-occupied Europe. Despite lasting less than two hours, the Wannsee Conference is today understood as a signal episode in the history of the Holocaust, exemplifying the labor division and bureaucratization that made the "Final Solution" possible. Yet while the conference itself has been exhaustively researched, many of its attendees remain relatively obscure.

From the introduction:
Ten of the fifteen participants had been to university. Eight of them had even been awarded doctorates, although it should be pointed out that it was considerably easier to gain a doctorate in law or philosophy in the 1920s than it is today. Eight of them had studied law, which, then as now, was not uncommon in the top positions of public administration. Many first turned to radical politics as members of Freikorps or student fraternities. Three of the participants (Freisler, Klopfer and Lange) had studied in Jena. In the 1920s, the University of Jena was a fertile breeding ground for nationalist thinking. With dedicated Nazi, race researcher and later SS-Hauptsturmbannführer Karl Astel as rector, it developed into a model Nazi university. Race researcher Hans Günther also taught there. Others, such as Reinhard Heydrich, joined the SS because they had failed to launch careers elsewhere, and only became radical once they were members of the self-acclaimed Nazi elite order.

1

BIOGRAPHICAL APPROACHES AND THE WANNSEE CONFERENCE

Mark Roseman

Ever since the summary minutes (“Protokoll”) of the meeting were discovered in 1947, the Wannsee Conference has been seen by the general public as the place where the decision to murder European Jewry was made. Specialists have long agreed that both the timing of the meeting and the invited personnel preclude it having quite this fundamental character. But the minutes continue to offer one of the most telling windows on a key phase of Nazi policymaking, when a Europe-wide murder program was taking concrete shape (and a global murder program being imagined).¹ The conference represented also a further gain for the SS, as part of an extended internal turf war for control of Jewish matters, underway since the 1930s. What remains most striking about the event is the juxtaposition of its genocidal agenda with elegant surroundings, diplomatic protocol and (so far as we can tell)² collegial niceties. In the two full-length docudramas produced about the Wannsee Conference, the most arresting feature is indeed the array of serious men, some prim and refined, others more vulgar and aggressive, batting their genocidal project back and forth around a conference table. It is quite surprising on one level, therefore, that the present collection represents the first consolidated biographical approach to the men at the table.³ On another level, however, it is the natural expression of a sea change in the wider historiography of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust that has occurred over the last decade or two. Much of this chapter navigates those historiographical waters, tracing historians’ evolving approach to the men who made the conference possible. It concludes with some reflections on the challenges of perpetrator biography.

Agents or Structures

It might seem odd that perpetrator biography has only fairly recently become a staple element of serious Holocaust historiography. After all, almost since the end of the war, German and international reading and viewing publics have been more fascinated by leading Nazis than by the protagonists of any other dictatorship. Biographies of evil henchmen, dashing but flawed generals, mad scientists, and of course, Hitler, Hitler, Hitler, have found a secure place on bookshop shelves for decades in a way that, say, the lives of the Dzerzhinksys and Berias of Stalin’s rule never have. Indeed, in the Soviet case almost no one below Stalin himself is a household name. Despite this public interest, professional historians of Nazi Germany have been slow to embrace the genre of biography. Apart from a few seminal scholarly biographies of Hitler himself, the lives of Nazis that caught the public imagination were until recently mostly written by outsiders to the field. Even many of the salient works that left their mark on scholarship and continue to be worth reading, despite their flaws—Arendt’s account of Eichmann, Haffner’s short but still telling biography of Hitler, or Sereny’s encounter with Franz Stangl, to name but a few examples—were penned by non-historians, or by historians who never gained access to the academy.⁴

Of course the historical profession was slow to engage with the Holocaust in general. In Germany scholarship of the Nazi era as a whole took a while to take off. But beyond that, for biography to make sense, two things were required. Historians had to believe, first, that particular individuals made a difference. It goes without saying that most agreed that Hitler himself had left his disastrous stamp on Germany, Europe, and the world. But what of the men below him? Secondly, it was worth engaging in biography only if scholars believed that the protagonists were more than the offices they held; for example, that they brought essential and distinctive things to the table from their previous lives. Neither of these assumptions carried much weight in historical analysis of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust until recently.

In the postwar decades, the growing influence of social science methods in the postwar period led historians to reject the traditional emphasis on “great men of history” and to foreground social structures. Biography went out of fashion in the academy. As far as the history of the “Third Reich” is concerned, it is true that social forces alone never seemed likely to be the full explanation for the irrationality and destructiveness of the Nazi regime. Moreover, as noted, however suspicious of “great men” theories, few historians challenged Hitler’s central function in shaping Germany’s fate. But when they looked below Hitler, there was little inclination to believe that the ideas or biographies of his subordinates had much to offer. Nazi policies seemed, after all, so horrifically irrational that to most historians, accustomed to think in terms of recognizable societal interests, it did not make sense to assume that a large body of intelligent men had actively embraced them.

Historians explained involvement in Nazism’s murderous and ultimately suicidal project by reference to warped political structures and processes. For the so-called intentionalists, it was all about Hitler, whose megalomaniac ideas were disseminated to functionaries held in thrall by the elixir of totalitarianism—three parts adulation, two parts terror, and one part routine. The so-called structuralists accorded greater significance to energy and competition among the second and third tier of Nazi leaders, jostling and conniving their way upward by radicalizing Hitler’s agenda.⁵ To that extent, it was no longer just about Hitler. Yet as both labels for this latter school of interpretation (“structuralists” or “functionalists”) make clear, what was at stake was less the distinctive contribution or individual ideas of particular figures than the fateful dynamics of an unbalanced system. It was a system kept in place to the bitter end by the centripetal force of Hitler’s unassailable status. At the same time, the centrifugal energy of his subordinates’ untrammeled competition caused it to spin in ever wilder and more destructive circles. In historical debates in the late 1960s and 1970s, historians narrowed in on increasingly fine-grained accounts of the decision-making process for genocide, and disagreed over whether Hitler sent metaphorical telegrams of murder, or just waved metaphorical flags. Ulrich Herbert has pointed out that this focus on the decision-making process actually represented a loss of an earlier recognition of the importance of the intellectual and mental world of the elites who made Nazism possible.⁶ It left the protagonists as pale ciphers, or rooks, knights and pawns in a lethal chess game.

The Wannsee Participants in German Historiography until the 1990s

Within the evolution of the historiography up to 1990 or so, the challenge of making sense of the Wannsee Conference—as it came to be called—was that of relating it to the sequence of decisions that historians were piecing together to explain the origins of the “Final Solution.”⁷ The problem was that the Protocol suggested that the meeting was being called because some fundamental decisions needed to be taken for a developing program of genocide, but historians found this declaration hard to align with the other evidence they had about the decision-making process. Hitler was, after all, not at the meeting (nor were Himmler or Göring) and the participants’ rank did not seem to be that of the decision-making level. The more historians became convinced that some kind of Hitler decision was made in the summer of 1941, the less the claim in the Protocol made sense that a meeting of permanent secretaries taking place on 20 January 1942 had the task of laying the provisional foundations for a fundamental program still in the making. Accordingly, until the 1990s historians saw the meeting as a particular puzzle within the wider mystery of the Holocaust. That is why, as late as 1995, Eberhard Jäckel could write that “the most remarkable thing about the Wannsee Conference is that we do not know why it took place.”⁸

Looking at the way historians wrote about the conference in the 1970s and 1980s reminds us that historians’ focus on structures and processes did not preclude their examining the role of particular individuals. When historians argued about the balance between Hitler orders on the one hand, and a competitive dynamic among his subordinates on the other, the evidence they adduced often involved the actions of particular figures. In the case of the conference the more historians found it difficult to understand the meeting’s function, the more they turned to individual initiative to explain it. The obvious candidate to provide the key was Heydrich, who called and hosted the meeting in a building that belonged to his organization, and whose staff drafted and disseminated the minutes.

In the early postwar period, Heydrich was seen as the evil genius who carried his weak-willed boss, Himmler, on his shoulders. As Robert Gerwarth has recently pointed out, this overestimation of Heydrich’s significance (because of an underestimation of Himmler) was already apparent during the war when the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) invested considerable energy and hopes in Heydrich’s assassination. In reality, as we know, Heydrich’s assassination in May 1942 led merely to a series of Himmler decisions that horribly accelerated the pace of murder.⁹ Later historians may have been less likely to underestimate his boss, Himmler, but they still sought to explain the conference in terms of Heydrich’s own objectives. In the description of the conference that appears in Helmut Krausnick’s influential account of the origins of the “Final Solution,” appearing in 1965, no other protagonists really figured, indeed the others were barely mentioned.¹⁰ The less the meeting came to be seen as part of the core decision-making process, the more it was viewed as a move in Heydrich’s power-game. Thus the historian Wolfgang Scheffler believed Heydrich’s position was under threat at the end of 1941. Himmler was rapidly expanding the role of SS figures not under RSHA (Reich Main Security Office) control, notably the regional Higher SS and Police Leaders and the Concentration Camp empire under Oswald Pohl’s management.¹¹ For Scheffler, Wannsee was a way for Heydrich to demonstrate his relevance by pushing around the civilian representatives. By contrast, Eberhard Jäckel saw Heydrich in the ascendant. Given Heydrich’s new-found role as acting protector of Bohemia and Moravia, in addition to his responsibilities in the Himmler empire, he could at last come out from under Himmler’s shadow and demonstrate his standing.¹² Both these interpretations discounted what the Protocol said was the meeting’s mission, and foregrounded the ambitions of this power-hungry subaltern.

It is understandable that no one else was seen as key to explaining the conference, since whatever brief from above Heydrich may or may not have received, it is clear that this was his event. In the popular mind, it is true; the conference came to be indelibly associated also with Adolf Eichmann. It was, after all, Eichmann’s Jerusalem testimony in 1961 that helped to bring the conference to the forefront of popular consciousness. The exaggeration of Eichmann’s significance at the conference was an ironic outcome of his trial. Eichmann had highlighted the meeting to downplay his own role. He wanted to demonstrate that senior civilian officials, well above Eichmann’s pay grade, had endorsed the murder program at Wannsee in a way that had surprised and delighted Heydrich. Eichmann’s aim here was to present himself as merely the dogsbody in a program enjoying high-level consensus. But in 1961 the global notoriety Eichmann had earned through the trial, coupled with misleading accounts like Robert Kempner’s Eichmann und Komplizen, which made him the lynchpin of the event, meant that Eichmann’s testimony produced the opposite of what he had hoped.¹³ For most historians, however, it remained clear that Eichmann was by far the most junior person present, bringing organizational support but no institutional or personal firepower.

It was not easy to parse the role of other participants, not least because of the limited sources. After all, we do not have the original stenographic minutes of the meeting. All we can say of the summary account produced by Eichmann for Heydrich is that while it may have been tendentious and selective, it was not sufficiently inaccurate to engender protest strong enough to have been recorded in the files (some later bureaucratic interventions from other participants notwith...