And Eichmann later recalled, with breathless excitement, this memorable moment of being able to socialise with his bosses for the first time – you get the sense of the little man from the provinces so desperate to impress his Berlin superiors, the stars of the Reich, and to be accepted:
For the first time I saw Heydrich smoke a cigar or a cigarette, and I was thinking: today Heydrich is smoking, something I have not seen before. And he drinks cognac – since I had not seen Heydrich take any alcoholic drink in years. After this Wannsee conference we were sitting together peacefully, and not in order to talk shop, but in order to relax after the long hours of strain.
Presumably this last sentence is a reference to the weeks of preparation leading up to Wannsee, not the ninety minutes of this murderous meeting.
8. The Villa and the Lake Today
30 December 2003, Berlin
J. and I are still on Grunewald station waiting for our train. It arrives with ‘Wannsee’ on the front. Even today train and metro destinations in Berlin can make you shudder – ‘Oranienburg’fn9 in one direction, ‘Wannsee’ in another. There’s only about half an hour of light left today. Streams of traffic run alongside us trying to beat the rush hour, between the train tracks and the beech woods. The lake of Wannsee comes into view. Bobbing boats and wooden jetties. At Wannsee station we get a taxi and within minutes are following the southern shore of the lake, dipping down a tree-lined street, with large detached houses on each side. For the last five years this place has been intensively in my thoughts, ever since seeing that single sheet of paper in Washington. We’re at the gates now. They’re locked. Momentary worry, but then I see a bell and we’re buzzed in. And now the villa is in front of us – that infamous view. As so often with buildings, it seems smaller in reality than in photographs.
The dusk is almost here so we skirt the villa, taking a path between rhododendron bushes, and go down towards the lake to try and take pictures before it’s too dark. Cedar trees, wooden benches. The clinking of masts from the boats on the lake. An extraordinarily peaceful scene. Even during the war years it would have been an oasis of calm here. I can almost hear the laughter of officers on leave, the richochet of balls from the billiard table. And on that bench, two comrades gazing out over the water and talking of what they will do when the war is over.
Inside the villa, the whole of the downstairs has been turned into a museum, the fourteen rooms each concentrating on a different aspect of the Holocaust. A relief to see such a clear, almost stark, exhibition. Just black-and-white photographs, informative texts and diagrams. No interactive distractions here. But after the intensity of the last days, J. and I only have the energy to take in limited amounts of this. After a while we come into the grandest room, the place where the conference took place. High windows on one side looking down to the lake, a glass-topped table in the middle of the room with the minutes of the meeting, a diagram and photographs showing the fifteen participants on the wall behind.
But I sense here the limitation of information. This room should be quite different from the others. This room should not be about texts and diagrams and the transferral of information. It needs a different level of imagination. J. and I talk about this – it is a room designed to fit conventionally into a museum, when here you need an utterly different experience. We wonder what it would be like if there were names by each place around the table, with headphones, and you could listen in to the process of the meeting. You could hear Dr Stuckart proposing forced sterilisation or Dr Bühler requesting that the ‘final solution’ begins in Poland. And for the silent voices of the conference you could have the participants describing their backgrounds, how they came to be involved and what happened to them after the war.
We’ve learnt from Gilbert that there is an educational centre and archive here as well. We ask whether it’s possible to visit this, and are soon invited upstairs. There’s a large library where we’re greeted by two very energetic young historians, a man and a woman, who immediately make us feel welcome and ask about our interest. We discuss the term ‘Schreibtischtaeter’ (desk killer) and they confirm that this term first became widely used in Germany after the Eichmann trial in 1961. We wonder why the concept, which surely is not limited to Nazi Germany, has never become an established phrase in English. Then I ask about material on the doctors of Wannsee and I’m extremely surprised that, even in German, there is very little information available. We talk about Mark Roseman’s book which was published the previous year – very useful in many ways, but again limited on the backgrounds of the bureaucrats. After a while they find a book which has more detailed biographies but they are still only summaries.
While these pages are being photocopied for us, we discuss the educational work that’s organised here. The man explains that in addition to the hundreds of guided tours each year, they organise around 500 seminars for groups in three categories – vocationally orientated for adults, for teachers and teacher trainees, and for young people. The focus of the first of these is to explore ‘why nearly all professional groups and institutions … and professional associations participated in the systematic segregation, discrimination, deprivation of rights of the Jews’ and to investigate the psychology and behaviour which enabled this to come about. The groups that participate in these seminars come from branches of the Civil Service, the judiciary, accountancy, health and social services, psychology, trade unionism, the military and the police. So, by being confronted about the structures and ways of thinking and behaving which resulted in genocide, all these groups in contemporary German society can learn and carry the lessons into their work today. We’re then shown pictures of soldiers from the German army participating in such a session in the room of the Wannsee Conference. We’re fascinated by this and extremely impressed. It is an outstanding example of how history should be used actively to shape the present, and over the next days we continue to think about the implications of this for our society. How remarkable it would be if all those working at the Tate galleries in Britain, those working at Lloyd’s insurance, at Barclays, Royal Bank of Scotland and HSBC, were invited to seminars on Britain’s pivotal role in the slave trade and the opium wars, and how all of their institutions were founded upon such barbarism.
We’re the last to leave. Our discussions have carried us well past closing time. We thank the historians and soon we’re walking out of the gates and back towards Wannsee station, inspired by what we’ve just learnt. It’s past six o’clock now and we realise we haven’t had any lunch so we go into the little bar outside the station. Another world completely. A group of men are gambling with dice at the bar. An elderly couple take minutes to shuffle across the bar to their table, where they then drink in silence. We order bratwurst and beer; the man behind the seriously unfriendly, but in such situations I take a perverse pleasure in being even more amiable, so I order another couple of beers with a grin.
9. Judging the Desk Killers
So what became of our eight doctors of Wannsee?
One – Dr Freisler – was killed in a Berlin air raid (3 February 1945).