Abstract
These words, signifying a shift from the conditional survival of the Jews to their physical death, were pronounced by an exasperated Kenneth Branagh in Conspiracy, the 2001 HBO dramatisation of the Wannsee Conference of 20 January 1942. It was this performance, as Reinhard Heydrich, that gave the thespian Branagh the most difficult acting experience of his 20-year career. He remarked that ‘in 20 years of acting, I’ve never been involved with a character so disturbing to my own peace of mind’.1 This disturbance of mind was, presumably, absent for Reinhard Heydrich, the head of the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA), when he invited 15 men representing the civil service, the SS and the Party to an imposing villa in a Berlin suburb of Wannsee. They were summoned to discuss, in the words of the Protocol, the only surviving transcript of the meeting at Wannsee, the ‘organizational, policy and technical prerequisites for the Final Solution of the European Jewish Question’ and to ‘ensure in advance that the central organizations involved be brought together and their policies properly coordinated’.2 This meeting has been recently characterised as the ‘most infamous in history’.3
We will not sterilize every Jew and wait for the race to die. We will not sterilize every Jew and then exterminate them, that’s farcical. Dead men don’t hump, dead women don’t get pregnant; death is the most reliable form of sterilisation …
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Notes and References
All quotes from the Protocol are from ‘Appendix A: Translation of the Protocol’, Mark Roseman, The Villa, The Lake, The Meeting: Wannsee and the ‘Final Solution’ (Allen Lane: Penguin Press, 2002): p. 109.
Mark Roseman, ‘Next on the Agenda: Genocide. Then Drinks’, The Times Higher Education Supplement, 25 January 2002, p. 20.
Christian Gerlach, ‘The Wannsee Conference, the Fate of German Jews, and Hitler’s Decision in Principle to Exterminate All European Jews’, The Journal of Modern History, 70 (December 1998): p. 760.
Peter Longerich, The Unwritten Order: Hitler’s Role in the Final Solution (London: Tempus Publishing, 2003).
Naomi Pfefferman, ‘“Conspiracy” Theory’, Los Angeles Jewish Journal, 14 May 2001.
David Gritten, ‘When the Job is Odious’, Los Angeles Times, 13 May 2001.
Christopher Browning, The Origin of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939—March 1942 (London: Heinemann, 2004): pp. 411–412.
Alan E. Steinweis, ‘Review of Conspiracy’, The American Historical Review, 107: 2 (April 2002): p. 674.
Steinweis, ‘Review of Conspiracy’, AHR, 107: 2 (April 2002): p. 674.
David Gritten, ‘And the Motion before us is Genocide’, Radio Times, 19–25 January 2002.
Pfefferman, ‘“Conspiracy” Theory’, Los Angeles Jewish Journal, 14 May 2001.
No author, ‘HBO Depicts Nazi Meeting that Changed History’, Orlando Sentinel, 9 May 2001.
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© 2007 Simone Gigliotti
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Gigliotti, S. (2007). Commissioning Mass Murder: Conspiracy and History at the Wannsee Conference. In: Paris, M. (eds) Repicturing the Second World War. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230592582_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230592582_10
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