Wannsee

For the 60th Anniversary of the Wannsee Meeting, Mark Roseman wrote The Villa, The Lake, The Meeting: Wannsee and the Final Solution [ available in the US in late May ] to explore the meeting in more depth than the HBO movie Conspiracy could possibly attempt to do. It is a very thought provoking book since Hitler has always been at the center of the blame but the author argues that the Wannsee meeting was merely a codification of a process that was already underway and not under the direct order of Hitler. He has done enough research to support this besides it being far easier to believe that mass genocide was more complex a proposition than one man ordering thousands of zombie-like Germans to murder millions.

My interest in WWII has rarely strayed from signals intelligence and crypto but the discovery of the Wannsee protocol is interesting because it has prompted historians to return to their material and take a much closer look at the mechanics of how the incomprehensible and the unthinkable actually happened. Somthing of this magnitude couldn't have happened overnight and there were social, emotional and economic factors that influenced the eventual decision. It is frightening and real once the idea manifests itself that it was a gradual rather than a decisive action stemming from a clear directive which makes it far more elusive to define how it happened and, more importantly, how to prevent it from ever happening again.

14 Apr 2002 at 21:35, Helsinki