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Wannsee House and the Holocaust

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Although Hitler's extermination of the Jews was well under way by the end of 1941, it was at the Wannsee Conference, January 20, 1942, that Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the Reich Security Service, officially announced the Nazi party's pursuit of Hitler's infamous "final solution." This conference was held at a luxurious villa known as the Wannsee House, and both the house and the conference have a complicated and fascinating history, which unfolded as economic and political events drew together wealthy German businessmen and powerful political figures in sometimes surprising ways. This book traces that history from 1914-the year that saw the foundations laid for both the house and the Holocaust-to the present. Appendices provide a wealth of historical documents including the Reich's rules "defining" Jews, letters from Reich Security Service officials providing early documentary evidence of the Holocaust, and a transcript of Adolf Eichmann's 1961 court testimony regarding the Wannsee Conference.

Hadassah Magazine Review-January 2002

Wannsee House and the Holocaust
by Steven Lehrer (McFarland, 196 pp. $32.50)

For most of the years after January 20, 1942, the three-story villa at Am Grossen Wannsee 56-58, on the shore of Berlin's popular recreation lake, was a footnote in the accounts of the Holocaust. Finally it merits its own book.

Steven Lehrer, a radiation therapist, has documented the history of the infamous site where the Third Reich officially implemented the Final Solution. His book is a companion piece to his forthcoming Hitler Sites (McFarland), which is a historical guide to 150 places in Germany, Austria and France associated with the life of Adolf Hitler.

Wannsee House traces the villa's background from its construction in 1914 by a prosperous Berlin merchant and its sale in 1921 to a right-wing industrialist to its purchase by Gestapo chief Reinhard Heydrich with plundered Jewish money as a vacation spa for Nazi security police. Ultimately, it was the location for the conference at which genocide was plotted.

"'God will give him blood to drink!' was the curse of a man hanged for witchcraft that fell upon the inhabitants of Nathaniel Hawthorne's House of The Seven Gables," Dr. Lehrer writes in his introduction. "The Wannsee Villa bears a certain eerie resemblance to Hawthorne's fictional creation, its inhabitants cursed by the evil period of German history to which the house stood witness."

The book, organized as a series of tightly written vignettes, emphasizes that the Wannsee Conference was not the administrative genesis of the Nazis' plans to annihilate European Jewry. Rather, it coordinated and consolidated what was already under way. "By the time of the Wannsee Conference...the Einsatz groups, operating behind the army frontlines, had murdered more than half a million people. Thus there was no need of a decision at the conference to commit mass murder. The Wannsee Conference facilitated the killing."

After World War II, the house became a center for political seminars, then a youth hostel. Fifty years later the building was inaugurated as a historical memorial. In its halls are photographs of Nazi persecution; one room is dedicated to Auschwitz.
The German decision to make the Wannsee house a shrine to victims is another part of the society's effort to remember its past. This book ensures that Wannsee will not be forgotten. --Steve Lipman.

by Steve Lipman The New York Jewish Week July 27, 2001. The language brought Dr. Steven Lehrer to Germany nearly 30 years ago. A radiologist, he had studied German in school, had become fluent, and wanted to see the country.

"I just had a fascination with it because of what happened there," says Lehrer. It means the Holocaust.

The Upper West Side resident kept going back because of curiosity. And because of his books.

"Wannsee House and the Holocaust," which describes the background of the villa on a Berlin lake where the Final Solution was plotted by a small group of Nazi leaders in early 1942, was published recently by McFarland & Co., a small firm in North Carolina. "Hitler Sites," a historical guide to some 150 places in Germany, Austria and France associated with Adolf Hitler's life and career, will appear later this year. It's also being published by McFarland.

Lehrer, 56, who works at the VA Hospital in the Bronx and teaches at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan, calls both books the first in English on their topics.

His name on the Wannsee book identifies him only as Steven Lehrer - no Dr. "My medical degree didn't exactly relate to this [subject]," he says.

Working first at a typewriter, then later at a computer, Lehrer has written six books since 1979 on such topics as great medical discoveries, cancer treatments, and examining patients by their heart and lung sounds. He also wrote an introduction to a reissued collection of stories by American adventurer-hunter Frank Buck.

"I guess I'm interested in different things," Lehrer, a Los Angeles native, explains.

His interest in the Holocaust, in how a society where Jews apparently were fully integrated could produce the most-systematic genocide in history, sent him back to Germany some 15 times.

How? One answer, the doctor says, is the people. As a Jew - with a German-sounding name - Lehrer says he felt anti-Semitism, in Germans' eyes and in their words, wherever he traveled. "It hasn't changed at all" since World War II, he says.

First Lehrer did the "Hitler Sites" book. He visited the houses and the schools and the homeless shelters and the infamous Munich beer hall and the Berlin bunker where The Fuehrer supposedly died.

"It's difficult for people to understand how he did what he did," Lehrer says. "If you actually go and see these places" - many of them places of poverty - "you see what made him so angry and bitter. You see the level of anti-Semitism that still exists in these places."

The Wannsee book grew out of his research for the sites book. Lehrer toured Wannsee, a government-administered Holocaust memorial since 1992, five times. "Everything there was in German," discouraging foreign visitors. He couldn't find a book in English about the building and its history. So he decided to write one.

"I felt this was a place American Jews should know about," he says.

Based on research from more than a dozen German books and the on-line archives of German newspapers, he relates the history of the villa, the fates of the 15 participants in the Jan. 20, 1942 conference, and the largely unknown story of a Holocaust survivor who lobbied for the site's designation as a national monument.

The book reads like fiction.

"I like to tell a story," Lehrer says. "I've always been a great admirer of Barbara Tuchman," the late Pulitzer Prize-winning historian who related historical events through the eyes of their participants. "I've tried to use her approach."

Lehrer's next project is a study of "Jewish entertainers in the Holocaust." That means more trips back to Germany. "I have a reason," he says.

Lehrer doesn't encourage his readers to visit the places he has visited. "I think reading about it is enough."

In "Wannsee House and the Holocaust," Steven Lehrer takes an unusual - some might even think odd - approach to the extermination of the Jews, a social history of the Nazi policy. We have plenty of political, ideological or bureaucratic versions.

Perhaps putting it in homely perspective will offer some insights. The home at the focus was enormous, a 15,000-square-foot villa on a lake in the suburbs of Berlin. Lehrer, using almost entirely German sources, writes discursively, the way social historians tend to do, although this slender volume does not lay it on as thick as in most social histories.

One of the temptations of 21st century styles in social history comes from noting the unlikely coincidence; social histories, at least of elites, are about small worlds. This was true of the German Jew-haters. It is odd, if not significant, that three of the "owners" of the Wannsee mansion died violently.

In the early '20s, Friedrich Minoux used his home to try to organize a dictatorship to overthrow the Weimar republic. A businessman and crook, he ended up in a concentration camp. The next owner, effectively though not legally, "Hangman" Heydrich, used the building for the conference that is often said to have "started" the extermination campaign.

As Lehrer emphasizes, the extermination campaign had already begun. The "Wannsee Conference" in January 1942 was meant to make it more effective, which it did.

In the '50s, a Holocaust survivor, Joseph Wulf, campaigned to make the house into an archive and museum and research center on murder. Never a legal owner of the house, he staked a moral claim to its disposition. Germany was not prepared for that then, and in despair Wulf defenestrated himself. From the '80s, though, Wulf's plan has been realized.

In a hundred pages (the rest of the book reproduces translated documents of the Nazi program), Lehrer cannot go into great depth, but he does a more than merely adequate job of looking at the whole sweep of the crime, from the origins of antisemitism, and the influence of Martin Luther, to the role of the Roman Catholics and Pope Pius XII.

His judgment of the church and the pope is harsh, although not nearly harsh enough. He leaves open the question of what practical effect it would have had if Pacelli had spoken out against the killings. Lehrer tends to agree with those who think it would have created a crisis for Hitler and even have saved millions of lives. That is an undecidable proposition, and there are those who say it would have made things worse, although it is hard to imagine how.

What is undeniable is that there would have been a political cost to the Vatican. What is also undeniable is that Pacelli could have intervened with the Croats (who accomplished 5% of the Holocaust, with far less than 5% of the resources the Germans devoted to it), and he could have done it at no political cost. He could have done it for the price of a postage stamp.

Given Lehrer's idiosyncratic approach, it is a mere cavil to point out all the things that are not in the book, except for one: Although he mentions, several times, that the murders started not with Jews but with the mentally or physically disabled; he never mentions that once the Wannsee apparatus got rolling, it was not only Jews who were killed. Jews were the obsession, but Gypsies, homosexuals, commissars, even - ironically, enough - Catholic priests were murdered en masse, too.

Acknowledgments; List of Illustrations; Introduction;

I. The Wannsee Villa and Fritz Haber

II. Friedrich Minoux Buys the Wannsee Villa and Enters Politics

III. Aryanization, Friedrich Minoux, and the Plundering of the German Jews

IV. Friedrich Minoux Defrauds the Berlin Gas Company

V. Reinhard Heydrich and the Nordhav Foundation

VI. Planning to Murder the Jews of Europe

VII. Ordinary Germans, the Catholic Church, and the Holocaust

VIII. The Wannsee Villa After the Wannsee Conference

Appendix A. A Jew Defined; Appendix B. Letters; Appendix C. The Wannsee Protocol; Appendix D. Biographies of Wannsee Conference Participants; Appendix E. Eichmann's Testimony in Jerusalem About the Conference; Appendix F. Notes on the Film "The Wannsee Conference";

Chapter Notes

Bibliography

Index

This book about Wannsee is a welcome surprise. It begins in the 1800s, with the financial machinations of those who would ultimately build it, the skullduggery of at least one man who inhabited it (and paid the ultimate price), this appears to be a conglomeration of writings by the author...and cleverly assembled into a single tale of people, their frailties, and the Jewish home that became the ultimate scene of the so-called Wannseee Conference (20 Jan 1942) where the Final Solution was announced by SS-Obergrueppenfuehrer Reinhard Heydrich to others of the government functionaries, the Old Guard, and senior officials of the Wehrmacht. While others have focused on that event, this book provides and illuminating context (written by a man named Lehrer, "teacher" in German, ironically). Any individual interested in the Holocaust, the development of the Third Reich from the decimation of Germany following the Treaty of Versailles, will find deep earth to uncover in this beguiling and deceptively short volume. Most highly recommended!