In the plot of Fatherland, Nazi dignitaries are being murdered; with the help of a female American journalist (in Germany to cover Kennedy’s visit), the SS inspector played by Rutger Hauer discovers the link between these murders. Bühler, Stuckart, Luther, Neumann, Lange … all were present at a mysterious meeting that took place twenty years before—at Wannsee, in January 1942, organized by Heydrich himself. In the 1960s Heydrich has taken Göring’s place as Reichsmarshall, and is more or less the regime’s number two. Afraid that the agreement with Kennedy might be compromised if the truth ever comes out, Hitler intends to make everyone who attended the meeting permanently disappear. Because it was at this meeting, on January 20, 1942, that the Final Solution was officially ratified by all the relevant ministers. Here, led by Heydrich, the Nazis planned the extermination by gas of eleven million Jews.
However, one of the participants does not want to die. Franz Luther, who represented Ribbentrop on behalf of the Foreign Ministry, has irrefutable proof of the genocide of the Jews and he intends to offer it to the Americans in exchange for political asylum. Because the world is unaware of the genocide: officially, Europe’s Jews have been deported—to Ukraine, where the proximity of the Russian front makes it impossible for any international observer to go and verify their presence. Just before being murdered, Luther contacts the American journalist, who manages in extremis—as Hitler is about to welcome Kennedy amid great pomp—to deliver the precious documents to the American president. The meeting between Kennedy and Hitler is canceled, the United States goes back to war against Germany, and the Third Reich ends up collapsing, twenty years late.
In this fiction, the Wannsee Conference is in some way the crucial moment of the Final Solution. Now, it’s true that the decision wasn’t made at Wannsee. And it’s also true that Heydrich’s Einsatzgruppen had already killed hundreds of thousands of Jews on the Eastern Front. But it was at Wannsee that the genocide was rubber-stamped. No longer need the task be given, more or less on the quiet (if you can really talk of killing millions of people “on the quiet”), to a few death squads; now the entire political and economic infrastructure of the regime is at their disposal.
The meeting lasted barely two hours. Two hours to settle what were essentially legal questions: What should be done with half-Jews? And with quarter-Jews? With Jews who’d been decorated in the First World War? With Jews married to German women? Should these men’s Aryan widows be compensated by giving them a pension? As in all meetings, the only decisions that are really made are those decided beforehand. In fact, for Heydrich, it was just a question of informing all the Reich ministries that they were going to have to work together with one objective in mind: the physical elimination of all Europe’s Jews.
I have in front of me a list distributed by Heydrich to all the participants at the conference that details the number of Jews to be “evacuated,” country by country. The list is divided in two parts. The first includes all the countries of the Reich, among which we notice that Estonia is already judenfrei, while the Government General (that is, Poland) still has more than two million Jews. The second part, giving an idea of how optimistic the Nazis still were in early 1942, brings together the satellite countries (Slovakia: 88,000 Jews; Croatia: 40,000 Jews) and allied countries (Italy, including Sardinia: 58,000 Jews), but also neutral countries (Switzerland: 18,000; Sweden: 8,000; Turkey: 55,500; Spain: 6,000) or even enemies (the only two remaining in Europe at this time: the USSR—already invaded to a great extent—with five million Jews, more than half of them in occupied Ukraine; and Britain, with 330,000 Jews, which was a long way from being invaded). So the plan was that every country in Europe would be forced or persuaded to deport its Jews. The total was written at the bottom of the page: more than eleven million. The mission would be half accomplished.
Eichmann has described what happened after the conference. The ministerial representatives having left, he and Heydrich were alone with “Gestapo” Müller. They moved through to an elegant wood-paneled drawing room. Heydrich poured himself a brandy, which he sipped while listening to classical music (Schubert, I believe), and the three men each smoked a cigar. According to Eichmann, Heydrich was in an excellent mood.
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Raul Hilberg died yesterday. He was the leader of the “functionalists,” those historians who believe the extermination of the Jews was not premeditated but dictated by circumstances. This school of thought is in direct opposition to the “intentionalists,” who maintain it was all clearly and definitely planned from the beginning—that is, from the writing of Mein Kampf in 1924.
