Fiction

Fact

The holocaust promoters today

The holocaust promoters yesterday

Arts & Culture TV film details Nazis’ calculations as they planned the ‘Final Solution’

By Tom Tugend

LOS ANGELES, May 10, 2001 (JTA) – Fifteen high officials of the Nazi regime gathered on Jan. 20, 1942, at a formerly Jewish-owned villa on the outskirts of Berlin for a meeting that lasted – including three breaks for refreshments – less than two hours.

At the conclusion of the meeting in Wannsee, the SS and civilian officials had laid out the blueprint for the "Final Solution." A "dramatic reconstruction" of the fateful Wannsee conference by HBO Films will air Saturday, May 19 at 9 p.m.

The meeting was chaired and dominated by Reinhard Heydrich (portrayed by Kenneth Branagh), known as "The Hangman" throughout occupied Europe and second only to Himmler in the SS hierarchy, and was coordinated by his deputy, Adolf Eichmann (Stanley Tucci).

Eichmann prepared 30 top-secret and heavily edited copies of the meeting’s minutes, or protocols, of which only one survived the war.

The minutes form the basis of "Conspiracy" – and, like most such documents, make for dry reading. More than half the participants were lawyers, among them top bureaucrats of the Foreign and Justice ministries, and the Nazi penchant for euphemisms further obscured the real purpose of the meeting.

For instance, the words "extermination" or "killing" are never mentioned, with "evacu-ation" serving as a stand-in.

Scriptwriter Loring Mandel and director Frank Pierson thus had their work cut out in recreating the characters and infusing life into the discussion, without straying too far from historical accuracy. ...

The Wannsee Conference laid out precisely how many Jews would have to be "evacu-ated" to make Europe Judenrein.

The number came to 11 million ...

Wannsee's importance rejected

	Prof. Y. Bauer:
	"Silly story that at Wannsee the extermination of the Jews was arrived at."

London (JTA) - An Israeli Holocaust scholar has de-bunked the Wannsee Con-ference, at which top Nazi officials are said to have gathered at a villa in a Berlin suburb in 1942 to draw the blueprints of the "Final Solution"

According to Prof. Yehuda Bauer of the Hebrew Uni-versity in Jerusalem, Wann-see was a meeting, "but hardly a conference", and "little of what was said there was executed in detail."

Bauer addressed the opening session of an international conference held here to mark the 50th annivasery of the decision to carry out the "Final Solution". "But it was not made at Wannsee", the Czech born scholar said.

"The public still repeats, time after time, the silly story that at Wannsee the extermina-tion of the Jews was arrived at, Wannsee was but a stage in the unfolding, of the process of mass murder," he said.

Bauer also maintained that fears that memories of the Holocaust are receding with time are unfounded.

"Whether presented authentically or inau-thentically, with empathy and understanding or as monumental kitsch, the Holocaust has become a ruling symbol of our culture. Hardly a month passes without a new TV production, a new film, a new drama, a number of new books of prose or poetry dealing with the subject. Dead Jews, as contrasted with live ones, have very often been a subject of commiseration, sympathy and soulsearching," the professor said.

"Himmler, who was responsible for the new racial order in Hitler’s conquered territories, showed signs of uncertainty about the development of events. In a report to Hitler of May 1940 he totally ruled out the 'bolshevistic method of physical annihilation of a people and that such a policy could not even be imagined, because it is completely un-Germanic'. Hitler noted on the document’s border: 'Absolutely right'."

Photo: Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler

Yehuda Bauer, Professor of Holocaust Studies and Director of the Holocaust Museum of Yad Vashem (Jerusalem) in his book "Buying Freedom for the Jews?
Jewish Publishing House, Frankfurt 1996, p. 95.

German government statement on the FALSE Wannsee-Conference story:

"An unbiased study of the minutes (of the Wannsee-Conference) establishes that those who met there had not concluded anything that could be evaluated as an intellectual or ordered initiation of the crime. Unfortunately historical science was not able to satisfy the need for a precise picture regarding the Wannsee matter, its representatives were unable to produce a logical alternative to the false Wannsee image. ... Eventually it seems that they have at least successfully shattered the popular erroneous picture [that the extermination of the Jews was mapped out at Wannsee]. However, altered versions, still quite remote from the truth, of this image could recently be found in the press again, stating that on January 20, 1942, the participants of the Wannsee-Conference had concluded 'coordinating measures for the murder of 11 million Jews from European countries'."

Politics and Contemporary History (supplement of "Das Parlament", the official German parliament magazine) B 1-2/92 - Jan. 3, 1992, page 18

Yehuda Bauer, Professor of Holocaust Studies and Director of the Holocaust Museum of Yad Vashem, proclaimed in the German "Bundestag" (parliament):
"The most dreadful fact is, the Nazis were humane like you and me."
(Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Jan. 28, 1998, p. 1)