The Wannsee Conference and the Final Solution: A Reconsideration [Hardcover]

Mark Roseman (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 2702879098 | ISBN-13: 978-0805068108 | Publication Date: May 7, 2002 | Edition: 1st

A groundbreaking investigation into the mysterious gathering where the Nazi plan for genocide was reputedly decided.

In early 1947, American officials in Germany stumbled across a document. Entitled "Secret Reich matter," it summarized the results of a meeting of top Nazi officials that took place on January 20, 1942, in a grand villa on the shore of Berlin's Lake Wannsee.

On one level, this document offered clarity: known as the Wannsee Protocol (and included here in full), it tallied up the Jews in Europe, carefully classified half and quarter Jews, and above all laid the groundwork for a "final solution to the Jewish Question." Yet the Protocol, among the most shameful documents in history, remains deeply mysterious. How can we understand this businesslike discussion of genocide? And why was the meeting necessary? Hundreds of thousands of Jews had already been shot in Russia or gassed in the camp at Chelmno. Test murders had been carried out in Auschwitz. Indeed, the most remarkable thing about the Wannsee Conference, is that we do not know why it took place.

Mark Roseman, author of the acclaimed A Past in Hiding, seeks to unravel this double mystery and to explain how it was that on a snowy January day in 1942, a group of educated young men met to discuss the systematic slaughter of a people.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Although the publisher promises a "groundbreaking investigation," little if any new light is shed on the overture to the Holocaust by English historian Roseman (A Past in Hiding). The notorious 1942 meeting, in a villa in a posh Berlin suburb overlooking Lake Wannsee, reviewed, rather than approved, the "final solution of the Jewish question." Assent was a given. Heinrich Himmler's chief deputy, Reinhard Heydrich, chaired and dominated the conference, which dealt in coded euphemisms with the genocide already underway in occupied Poland and Russia. The protocol, or minutes, printed here as an appendix the most valuable part of this small book makes clear in a single sentence who bore authoritative responsibility: "Instead of emigration, the Fhrer has now given his approval for a new kind of solution, the evacuation of the Jews to the East." All 15 participants understood what "evacuation" meant, says Roseman. Working Jews to death would not eliminate "the most resistant elements" in the "final remnant," Heydrich coldly told those present, for by "natural selection" these would "form the germ cell of a new Jewish revival." That line more than any other, Roseman feels, mandated the murders without exception. Beyond that, he wanders, page after page and often repetitiously, through the bureaucratic Nazi pseudo-legal arguments about how many Jewish grandparents made one a Jew and how to deal with mixed marriages. Even the absolutist Himmler complained, "We tie our hands with all these stupid definitions." As ultimate Nazi racial policy, the Wannsee minutes, despite chilling ambiguities, were a "rhetorical canopy" behind which Roseman sees Hitler's "licensing." (May 7)Forecast: Because the Wannsee conference has attained iconic status since the protocol was discovered in 1947, a book with Wannsee as its focus may draw many curious readers beyond history specialists.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

In January 1942 a group of top Nazi officials met in a villa on the shore of Lake Wannsee, near Berlin, for the purpose of planning the "final solution" of the "Jewish question." This Wannsee Conference and the document emanating from it, the Wannsee Protocol, are usually regarded as the moment when German policy toward the Jews departed irretrievably from systematic persecution and deportation and turned toward a deliberate policy of genocide. Holocaust deniers and others sometimes contend that, because Hitler was not present at this meeting and because the genocidal nature of the Final Solution was not spelled out explicitly, somehow this means that there was no deliberate policy from the top of genocide against the Jews. In this short, well-reasoned book, Roseman (contemporary history, Univ. of Southampton; A Past in Hiding: Memory and Survival in Nazi Germany) presents a very clear exposition of the reasons behind the Wannsee meeting, what happened there, and its significance in the destruction of the Jews of Europe. Roseman's is the first thorough treatment in English devoted solely to this pivotal event. It should be in all four-year academic and larger public libraries. Libraries may also want to consider a chilling video reenactment, Heinz Schirk's The Wannsee Conference. Barbara Walden, Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 192 pages
• Publisher: Metropolitan Books; 1st edition (May 7, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 2702879098
• ISBN-13: 978-0805068108
• ASIN: 0805068104
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.6 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #234,341 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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23 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A brilliant précis of the Holocaust, May 1, 2002

By 

Werner Cohn (Brooklyn, NY USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Wannsee Conference and the Final Solution: A Reconsideration (Hardcover)

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.

13 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Interesting Essay, December 30, 2002

By 

R. Albin (Ann Arbor, Michigan United States) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Wannsee Conference and the Final Solution: A Reconsideration (Hardcover)

This is an interesting, thoughtful, and well written essay on the dynamics of the Holocaust. Roseman's preoccupation is with inferring the processes by which the Nazis ultimately reached the decision to exterminate the Jews of Europe, as opposed to removing Jews from Germany. To a considerable extent, this essay is about historiography as much as the events themselves because there has been considerable debate on this issue among historians of the Holocaust. Roseman analyzes and summarizes a good deal of recent scholarship. He discusses explicitly the role of the notorious Wannsee conference but this is not a detailed discussion of that event, which would be impossible given the scanty documentation available, but uses the Wannsee conference as a hook for his general discussion of the decisions to proceed with extermination. Roseman makes a number of important points. There was no plan for extermination of Jews prior to the War. The Nazis initially wanted to remove Jews from Germany but expulsion seems to have been the preferred method. Several factors seems to have propelled the Nazi decision makers along their murderous path. There is no question that Hitler himself came to prefer extermination. The War itself acted as a radicalizing element. Competition among different sectors of the Nazi state was common and there seems to have been a race to see who could achieve murder the fastest. Finally, Roseman is careful to point out the importance of ideology in the motivations of all the major actors. This was not a group of simple functionaries executing orders blindly. Racist ideologies permeated the Civil Service. An important aspect that Roseman may be overlooking in his discussion of the radicalizing effects of the war is the sense of triumphalism that infected the Nazis. In the winter of 1942, they were the masters of Europe, occupying most of France and the eastern Soviet Union, and controlling the major industrial assets of the continent. Perhaps they felt that anything was possible, including the extermination of the European Jews and other perceived racial enemies. This is a good book but really an extended essay rather than a regular monograph. Perhaps best read by individuals with some knowledge of the Holocaust and its historiography.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Monograph, March 10, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: The Wannsee Conference and the Final Solution: A Reconsideration (Paperback)

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.