Luther himself has scribbled over the top: ‘Pgfn4 Rademacher please [send] written notification that you are the specialist official and that you will participate.’ And after this he has initialled and dated the letter 28/II, indicating that the minutes and letter were sent by courier directly to Luther. Rademacher was head of Department D III, the Judenreferat section at the Foreign Office. The follow-up meeting took place on 6 March 1942, at Eichmann’s office in Berlin.
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In spring 1999 I return to the Wiener Library, hoping to find further details on the doctors of Wannsee. I’m more and more surprised that nothing substantive seems to have been published on these men, and this event. And then, one day, I come across a booklet published by the House of the Wannsee Conference – a memorial and museum institute based at the villa – and I start to piece together more biographical information about each of the participants. Over time I’ve been able to gain a clearer picture of why each of these men would have been invited to the meeting in Wannsee in January 1942 – what their particular expertise was in the field of solving the ‘Jewish question’.
This is Dr Georg Leibbrandt. He was born into a German émigré family near Odessa in 1899, and became skilled in several languages. In 1919, in the wake of the Russian Revolution, he fled to Germany, and this experience, together with later Stalinist purges which claimed several relatives still in Ukraine, contributed to his extreme anti-communist views. From 1920 he studied theology, philosophy, history and national economy in Tübingen and Leipzig. He gained his doctorate in 1927 (on the history of Swabian emigration to Russia), and then travelled widely to the USA, Canada, Switzerland, Britain and France on research trips. He began to publish work on how ethnic Germans had successfully settled in Russia and America, praising their colonising skills.
In 1933 he was introduced to the leading Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg, who appointed him head of the Eastern Division of the newly formed Office of Foreign Affairs, and Leibbrandt joined the Nazi Party. In this role he worked on the issue of Russian Germans, and how they could play a greater role in the Reich, creating the VDR (the ‘League of Germans from Russia’). He also began to co-ordinate a series of propaganda publications on Bolshevism, and the supposed linkage between Bolsheviks and the Jews. In 1941 he was promoted to become director of the political department for the Reich Ministry of Occupied Eastern Territories (RMO), serving under Rosenberg. In this position Leibbrandt was fully informed about the murderous activities of the Einsatzgruppen, and the beginnings of the Jewish genocide on the Eastern Front throughout autumn 1941. We also know that he and his more senior colleague, Alfred Meyer, met with Heydrich in October 1941, and Leibbrandt and Rosenberg travelled to meet Himmler the following month – both meetings to discuss how to maximise the numbers of Jews in the Eastern Territories who could be included in the ‘Final Solution’ – all this happening just weeks before the Wannsee Conference.
Dr Wilhelm Stuckart, born in 1902 in Wiesbaden, into a Protestant family. He joined the youth wing of the Nazi Party when he was still at school, and from 1922 he began to study law in Munich, where he participated in Hitler’s putsch the following year. He gained his doctorate (in commercial law) in 1928, and became a junior trial judge, but soon left to work full-time for the Nazi Party. When Hitler came to power in 1933 Stuckart was promoted to ministerial director at the Prussian Ministry of Education, and promoted again the following year to become state secretary at the Reich Ministry of Science, Education and Culture. In 1935 he moved to head the office for constitutional affairs at the Reich Interior Ministry, becoming state secretary, and it was in this role that he helped to draw up the infamous Nuremberg Race Laws, which created the supposed ‘legal’ framework for stripping German Jews of their rights, and defined how ‘purity’ of the Aryan race was to be measured. The following year he became chairman of the Reich Committee for the Protection of German Blood.
He would have known most of those who participated in the Wannsee Conference – he and Gerhard Klopfer were both involved in the publication of the journal Reich, Volksordnung, Lebensraum (‘Reich, Population Control, Living Space’), in autumn 1941; and Stuckart had also met Roland Freisler, Erich Neumann, Heydrich, Müller and Eichmann at an important meeting Goering instigated on 12 November 1938 at the Ministry of Aviation to discuss Hitler’s order that the ‘Jewish question’ be ‘resolved one way or another’. He was also one of a select group briefed by Hitler in October 1939 on extreme measures to deal with the Polish population following the invasion. His seniority in the Reich can be gauged by his activities in the immediate run-up to the Wannsee Conference – on 24 November 1941, we know that he had lunch with Himmler to discuss Jewish policy; the next day, a decree that had been drawn up by Stuckart became law – which stripped Jews who had fled or been deported of their German citizenship and assets; and on 1 December, we know that Stuckart also met with Heydrich to discuss the ‘Final Solution’. At Wannsee, with his legal expertise, he represented the most powerful link between the German state and the Nazi Party.
Dr Josef Bühler, born in Württemberg in 1904, came from a large Catholic family. In 1922 he went to Munich to study law (like Stuckart, participating in Hitler’s putsch of 1923), and gaining his doctorate in 1930 – the year he joined the law practice of Hans Frank. In 1933 he joined the Nazi Party, and when Frank was appointed Bavaria’s minister of justice, Bühler followed his boss, practising as a lawyer in the Civil Service of the justice department. In 1935, on Frank’s recommendation, he was promoted to senior prosecutor at the Munich Regional Court, also becoming a key member of Frank’s staff. This relationship continued when Frank was made governor general of occupied Poland towards the end of 1939, Bühler becoming his chief of staff in Krakow, and eventually deputy governor. In 1940 he was given the most senior rank of State Secretary of the Administration of the General Government that ran occupied Poland.
Here in Krakow, from their headquarters at Wawel Castle, these two lawyers began an almost unparalleled reign of terror over Poles and Jews alike. Bühler pushed for the enforced removal of Poles to Germany for slave labour, and helped to organise a ‘special pacification operation’ in May and June 1940 which resulted in the massacre of 3,500 Polish intellectuals. Governor Frank and Bühler also played key roles in the establishment of Jewish ghettoes in Polish cities and the subsequent implementation of the genocide. Frank described Bühler as one of his two ‘closest collaborators’ in Poland, and both would have been kept informed of all the details of the exterminations in their territory as the ‘Final Solution’ gathered momentum. Bühler had a close working relationship with Himmler (who had already made him an honorary SS Brigadeführer) – indeed Bühler met the Reichsführer on 13 January 1942, only a week before Wannsee, and declared himself ‘delighted’ at their discussion about division of responsibilities regarding the solution of the ‘Jewish question’. So, he was the obvious representative of the General Government to be invited to the pivotal meeting in Berlin.