Out of place indeed. The ensuing roundup and deportation of Berlin’s Jews set a new standard for brutality in a city that had seen its full share of inhumanity. On October 15, 1941, Gestapo men appeared at the homes of the families earmarked for the first “evacuation” and ordered each family to pack one suitcase. The families were held for three days in the partially ruined synagogue in the Levetzow-strasse, where they were cared for by members of the Jewish
That first transport, carrying about 1,000 Jews, was bound for the ghetto of Lodz in eastern Poland. In subsequent weeks trains carried thousands more to the ghettos and concentration camps being hastily established in the East. For the vast majority of the deportees, work ghettos like Lodz were simply way stations to the killing fields of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and other death camps. The loading ramp at Grunewald was the last patch of Berlin that these people would ever see.
Well after the first transports of Jews from Berlin and other German cities were underway, and well after the mass murder of Jews in the conquered eastern regions had begun, a group of Nazi officials met in the capital to systematize the killing process. The conference took place on January 20, 1942, in a Wannsee villa then serving as a guest house for the SS. The setting could hardly have been more ironic, for Wannsee was Berlin’s favorite playground, an idyllic stretch of beach and water invariably crowded on summer days with sunbathers, swimmers, and amateur sailors. Host for the meeting was Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the SD (Sicherheitsdienst— Security Service) of the SS. Participants included officials from Justice Ministry, Interior Ministry, Foreign Ministry, Ministry for Eastern Regions, and the Reich Chancellery. These men were not known to be fanatical anti-Semites; rather, they were “Technocrats of Death”—bureaucrats dutifully organizing the mechanics of murder as if they were discussing interagency cooperation in the building of a new highway system. The written protocol of the meeting, compiled by Adolf Eich-mann, is all the more chilling for its sober, bureaucratic tone. While avoiding reference to extermination or even to camps, it conveys clearly enough what the regime had in mind. One passage reads:
In the course of the final solution, the Jews will be put to work in appropriate fashion in the East. Large work groups, separated by sex, will be employed in road construction, whereby a significant component will of course fall aside in a natural culling process. Because the surviving elements will doubtless consist of the most resilient types, capable if released of forming the core of a Jewish revival, they will have to be dealt with accordingly. To effect the final solution, Europe will be combed [for Jews] from West to East. . . . The evacuated Jews will be conveyed first to so-called transit ghettos, then transported further into the East.
