I was having tea with a group of writers and scholars on the veranda of a formidable white-stucco, red-tile-roof house looking out at Lake Wannsee on the western edge of Berlin. The lake was wrapped by stretches of beach and a marina, but mostly by woods, impressive late-Victorian houses, and sleek new ones of glass, metal, and wood.
The water was choppy, blue-gray under clouds and drizzle as a few sailboats drifted by. Because I had a gap in my afternoon schedule at the three-day symposium on literature and genocide that I was part of at the Protestant Academy of Berlin, I asked how many kilometers I was from the Wannsee villa where Nazi SS leaders made the plan to annihilate the Jews of Europe. Shortly I was in a cab traveling around the lake, on a road where the chestnuts, maples, and oaks—the same trees that surround my house in central New York—were green going to yellow. It was a mellow, wistful, picturesque, autumn afternoon.
Ten minutes later, I was walking through high wrought-iron gates to a Beaux-Arts neoclassical three-story villa built in 1914-15 by the industrialist Ernst Marlier. A sign read Haus der Wannsee-Konferenz, with more signs and historical plagues on the wire fencing around the circular entrance. I walked down the path to the front doors, past two putto-like statues—bunches of grapes dangling from their hands, their anatomy from penis to pectorals done in a Renaissance way.
Inside, I found a small museum and memorial—an educational site—in the genteel interior of this grand villa. The Conference House museum attempts to create a short narrative history of the genocide of the Jews of Europe, and while well meaning, it’s a little jumbled and fragmented, given the limitations of space.
The most important part of the exhibit focuses on what happened on January 20, 1942, in this place on the lake. The photographs of the 15 Nazi SS elite bureaucrats who met that day are a collage of head shots that bring the viewer closer to the event. Among them are Adolf Eichmann (Head of Referat IV B4 of the Gestapo), Rudolf Lange (commander of the Security Police and Security Service in Latvia), Otto Hofmann (head of the SS Race and Settlement Main Office), and Wilhelm Stuckart (state secretary, German Interior Ministry). Eight of the 15 had doctorates, and all of them came from respectable families.
The Wannsee Conference, held as Hitler’s war entered its third year, was to decide the major issues surrounding “the solution to the Jewish Question,” a Nazi euphemism that discloses how perpetrators of genocide falsified language to sanitize their mass-killing plans. “Amtssprache,” Eichmann once called such language. “Officialese.”
The Wannsee Conference, was held in January 1942 to decide a “solution to the Jewish Question.”
In the transcript of the conference, the words and phrases of bureaucrats read: “the only possible present solution,” “to cleanse German living space of Jews in a legal manner,” “the Jews are to be allocated for appropriate labor.” So-called racial identity was delineated into various categories to solve “the problem of mixed marriages and persons of mixed blood.”
The outcome was the plan to transport the Jewish population in German-occupied Europe—some 11 million people—to camps and other places to be killed as quickly as possible. On that January day in 1942, 75 percent of the six million Jews killed by the Nazis were still alive.
We know that years of foreground preceded the Wannsee meeting. But perhaps one comes here not only to learn the narrative of history, but also to experience the place and understand the relationship between the place and the deed.
To imagine the genocidal intent that day is to recall Hannah Arendt’s notion of “the banality of evil,” the idea spawned while she was observing the trial of Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961. But what happened at Wannsee also complicates Arendt’s view of bureaucracy and totalitarianism. In Eichmann the bureaucrat, Arendt found a shallow man who carried out orders because of adherence to the system in which he worked. But the men at Wannsee were an elite group. There was something strangely ordinary about this extraordinary meeting, as if in its ritual, it were no different from a meeting among the corporate upper echelon anywhere.
The Nazi elite had come together that day to refine policy, to give direction to Goering’s “total solution to the Jewish Question.” They enjoyed food and cognac as they talked. It was reported that Reinhard Heydrich, who convened the conference, even made a pass at the attractive secretary who was recording the minutes.
But the elegant Haus der Wannsee-Konferenz does not have the political imperium of the Reichstag or the impersonal quality of a bureaucratic building in the middle of a city. Many of the gorgeous homes on the streets winding around the lake were owned by Jews before they were evicted by the Nazis in the mid-1930s. The setting challenges one to take in the ironies, the intersections of Nazi bureaucracy ensconced in this affluent, cushy resort. Why here?
I left the center after an hour of trying to juggle the colliding sensations of wall panels, photographs, and tape recordings of survivors amid coffered ceilings, high arched windows, the patina of the wood moldings. I tried to imagine the chandeliers, the stuffed chairs, the marble colonnades and wall tapestries of the high German décor of the house in 1942.
As I walked across the pebbly tan stones of the driveway through the gates and out to the street, I was confronted by a large sign that read: Haus Sanssouci. It was the name of the restaurant that abutted the property of the Haus der Wannsee-Konferenz. Its red awnings and big windows evoked Central European charm, and inside people were buzzing over drinks and lunch. Why would anyone set a restaurant here and name it Sanssouci (Without a Care)? To any German, the words evoke the palace built by Frederick the Great, King of Prussia, in the 18th century: a German rococo version of Versailles.
Lake Wannsee has the longest inland beach in Europe; in summer it is scattered with kiosks selling bockwurst and ice cream, and with nudist bathers tanning. Dining along the lake is part of the resort scene, but weren’t there other spots along the shore to dine?
Germany has engaged in an unusually impressive task of self-scrutiny and soul-searching about its Nazi past. The recent Holocaust memorial in central Berlin is inventive, and the new Topography of Terror museum houses a monumental exhibit to teach Germans the extent of Nazi intentions. Few, if any, nations have been as exemplary in their confrontations with a criminal past. So it’s all the more bewildering to walk out of Haus der Wannsee-Konferenz and find Haus Sanssouci.
I thought of the Nazi passion for self-indulgence during Third Reich planning sessions; of Hitler’s Berghof retreat, in the Bavarian Alps, and his Eagle’s Nest, at Berchtesgaden, and of other romantic hideaways where the Nazi elite found refuge as they planned mass killing and conquest. Here at Haus der Wannsee-Konferenz was another of those places, which in the still-shimmering lines of its baronial elegance evokes the Nazi adoration of high culture—in all of its traditional German form and romantic splendor.
Peter Balakian is a professor of English and director of creative writing at Colgate University. His books include Black Dog of Fate: A Memoir (10th anniversary edition, Basic Books, 2009) and The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America’s Response (HarperCollins, 2003).