The Wannsee Conference and the Final Solution: A Reconsideration

This book is exceptional (which is also the same book as the paperback version which goes under the slightly different title of "The Villa, the Lake, the Meeting: Wannsee and the Final Solution). It succinctly explains how the "removal of the Jews from Germany" became the genocidal project known as the Holocaust. Indeed, the book explains this much more than the conference itself -- the conference being more like a presentation by one of the SS's top officials, Reinhard Heydrich, that genocide was now official policy, and that the job of the state ministers and other bureaucrats present was to facilitate the "evacuation" (i.e., murder) of the Jews.

I recently completed a college faculty study trip on the Holocaust and puchased this book at the Wannsee mansion. It is the best single summary of the evolution of Nazi policy toward the Jews up to 1942 out there. Browning's Origins of the Final Solution is much more detailed, but this work gets at the core issues of how the Nazis used anti-semitism as a political tool and the role it played in Hitler's bureaucratic politics. The work focuses on elite decision making among the perpetrators. If you want a recent book looking at the Holocaust more from the perspective of victims, Lawrence Rees' work is the way to go.

In just barely 125 pages, this short volume looks Hitler's final solution squarely in the eye to provide new perspectives. Roseman successfully, I think, argues that the concept of genocide developed much later in the war than one would believe and that such was not initally part of the Third Reich's master plan for the elimination of the Jews. Rather, official policy seems almost to have just "drifted" in the direction of genodice without it---of much of anything else---having been planned for.His premise is that all of Hitler's rhetoric, and even his actions, up to Wannsee were aimed at just getting the Jews completely out of Germany in any way possible, seeking to accomplish this not through mass murder but rather through combinations of the failed Madagascar and Jews-to-Palestine plans, making conditions so miserable for the Jews that they would leave on their own, and finally to begin shipping them further east as the Reich expanded. This resettlement would have continued toward harsh, unsurvivable Sibera, once he brought Stalin's armies to its knees. But his early military successes ultimately both smothered this plan and doomed the Jews.True, the elimination of "undesirables" began early in the war. But the scale was relatively small and was limited on the homefront to the short-lived euthanasia program which ended quickly enough from adverse public opinion, and in the newly conquered eastern territories to the overzealous actions of their Reich governors to whom Berlin gave virtual free rein to secure the area for precious lebensraum. While the number of deaths were considerable by any standard, it pales in comparison to the staggering final total.But the ever-expanding Greater Germany which was being created as Hitler successfully moved east took on not only the Jews already living there but also those continuously deported from the west---many more than could be eliminated or moved further along quickly enough under all previously assumed methodologies (which in the text are referred to by Reinhard Heydrich himself as "provisional, until something better came along", further supporting Roseman's "drift" proposition). Roseman points out that these deportees were literally dumped out in the open, left on the hands of the territorial governors who were provided with no comprehensive plan for dealing with a population increased by those banished from Berlin. Even with their unlimited authority, the governors could not keep up with elimination necessities. Obviously, something had to be done, and fast.All the previous vagaries of policy quickly coalesced to form the final solution. The inefficiently crude, hands-on methods of the early liquidations (firing squads, beatings, etc.) were replaced by impersonalized, production-line mass murder, providing the Nazis with a twisted means of separating, distancing themselves from personal blame or responsibility.The race to genocide thus began not merely in the ravings of the lunatic himse

This is a readable, thoughtful monograph on the origins and historical significance of the Wannsee conference, the notorious January 1942 meeting where Nazi officials finalized plans to exterminate European Jewry. Noting that the decision on genocide was probably taken by Hitler in late 1941, author Roseman concludes that Wannsee's real purpose was to assert Reinhard Heydrich's control over Jewish policy and to sort out bureaucratic disagreements about the treatment of half-Jews and Jews married to German gentiles. Roseman writes well, has a full command of the secondary literature, and understands the nuances and grotesqueries of bureaucratic politics (I'm a career State Department official). Highly recommended for readers interested in World War II or the Holocaust.

On the surface, this short, brilliant study deals primarily with the notorious Wannsee Conference of January 1942, at which top Nazi officials decided on crucial modalities of the Holocaust. But below the surface, the book does much more. The greatest of its many virtues is that it brings us up to date on the the most recent scholarship concerning the whole of the Nazi persecution of Jews, including the historical roots of the policy. But the devil, as always, is in the details. Roseman gives them to us: who did what and when and how. It is the details that tell us how the previously unthinkable -- the cold-blooded murder of six million Jews -- was accomplished by the highly educated elite of the Nazi state.In the past historians have argued about the precise personal responsibility of Hitler. Some have insisted that this responsibility was overwhelming, others have held that the main motive force came from the workings of the Nazi bureaucracy. Roseman shows that the most recent findings give credence to both factors: without Hitler's very personal involvement, there would have been no Holocaust; nor could it have been carried out without the enthusiastic complicity of hundreds of major Nazi officials. It is in the nature of this kind of book that it will perhaps be of greatest interest to those who have already read other, more general works, for instance Wistrich's equally brilliant but more introductory "Hitler and the Holocaust." Nevertheless, Roseman's volume can be recommended even to beginners in this area.Among the facts shown by Roseman that may be new to many readers are the the following: the greatest responsibility for the mass murder, after Hitler, belongs to Heinrich Himmler; the Nazis planned to kill eleven million European Jews, almost twice as many as they ultimatelymore than half of the Holocaust victims perished succeeded in reaching; more than half of the Holocaust victims perished between March 1942 and February 1943; and the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, the titular head of the Arab Palestinians at the time, visited Hitler in November of 1941 and was given assurance by Hitler that he would "solve" the problem of Jews.