65th Anniversary of Wannsee
On January 20th, 1942 a meeting was held by senior Nazi officers in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee. The purpose: to inform participants of plans for the "Final Solution of the Jewish problem." That solution being the extermination of the 11 million Jews living in Europe.
By the time the Wannsee meeting was held, hundreds of thousands of Jews had already been killed, mostly in Russia. Deportation of Jews from occupied territories, beginning with Germany and Austria, to labor camps in Poland and Russia was well under way. Quoting from the Wannsee meeting minutes:
"In the course of the practical execution of the final solution, Europe will be combed through from west to east. Germany proper, including the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, will have to be handled first due to the housing problem and additional social and political necessities.
The evacuated Jews will first be sent, group by group, to so-called transit ghettos, from which they will be transported to the East. "
Discussion was held on how to determine who was Jewish, specifically the fate of those from mixed backgrounds. "Persons of mixed blood of the first degree will, as regards the final solution of the Jewish question, be treated as Jews."
The meeting records show a discussion of forced deportation and forced labor. But once the official part of the meeting ended and cognac was served, the tone changed. According to Adolf Eichmann, "The gentlemen were standing together, or sitting together", he said, "and were discussing the subject quite bluntly, quite differently from the language which I had to use later in the record. During the conversation they minced no words about it at all... they spoke about methods of killing, about liquidation, about extermination."
Approximately half the Jews of Europe would be killed over the next three years. Recently, a disturbing trend has emerged of revising the number of Jews killed in the camps downward. Was it really 6 million or "only" 5 million? Do you count persons of mixed heritage as Jews, as the Nazis did, or group them with "other" to make the effect on the Jewish community seem less severe? How do you assess the numbers found in mass graves or in ashes from the crematoria? Such debates are, to me, offensive in the extreme.
If you have any questions about what really happened after Wannsee, here is a link for pictures of the Holocaust: Link
A recent comment that I found about the verifiability of the Holocaust is particularly poignant and deserves quotation. "There is grisly film of the atrocities; the shootings and the gassings and the sheer horror were all meticulously filmed and clerically processed by the Nazis. They manufactured soap from the corpses; they made lampshades of tattooed human skins. The ash heaps at Auschwitz are 12 feet high today and extend miles. The evidence of what occurred is abundant."
NEVER FORGET.