The Villa, The Lake, The Meeting

Footnotes to myself

I’ve kept reading notes for years - quotes, ideas, etc. Some make it into my writing, but most don’t. This series is a way to use the leftovers; not quite reviews, not quite summaries - just what I underlined, and why. Enjoy.

The Villa, The Lake, The Meeting, by Mark Roseman

A very short and intensive history of the Wannsee Conference, which I picked up after a We Have Ways of Making You Talk finished their series on Auschwitz. If you haven’t the time to read it, I highly recommend this made-for-TV film from Germany, which tried to stay as true to the historical record as possible.

At Wannsee fifteen men from a variety of different institutions and agencies met to talk about murder. The relationships between them, and their involvement in anti-Jewish action, were decisively formed in the 1930s. More than any specific goals laid down in that decade, it was the emerging 'syndrome' of eager subordination, shared racist values and competitive cooperation in pursuit of those values that provided the most disastrous omen for the future.

As a paragraph laying out the focus of a book, I’ve rarely come across better.

Some historians, as we know, have seen in the competition between Hitler's satraps the driving force that eventually led to genocide.

Anti-Semitic measures, so the argument runs, swept forward with neither a coherent vision nor a master hand to guide them. Hitler, a late riser, slow diner, rambling speaker and political dilettante, did not give Jewish measures particularly close attention. Never a man to create clarity where confusion might keep his subordinates on the hop, he also did not nominate any one person to take charge of Jewish affairs. In Nazi Germany in general, the lack of clear responsibilities and the overlap between inherited state institutions, new Party agencies and the hybrid bodies in between, encouraged competition for power. Jewish policy provided the perfect arena for ambitious men to assert their ideological credentials. It was known to enjoy Hitler's particular regard and there was never going to be serious opposition: there was no Jewish 'bloc' enfranchised within the power-system to counter initiatives. Since the regime also lacked democratic institutions to absorb grievances and demands for change, the Jewish arena was the perfect playpen in which grassroots radicals, frustrated at their lack of influence in the new system, could be allowed to kick and shout.

I have never maintained much interest in Hitler’s exact role as driving force behind the Holocaust; his governing style of competing interests who could then be played against each other until a clear favourite emerged seems as true in this case as in any other. Rose argues that, in this absence of authority, Wannsee was as much about asserting Heydrich and Himmler’s position as planning the Final Solution itself. He does not, however, pretend Hitler was not a guiding hand.