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  • Day 17

    House of the Wannsee Conference

    July 11, 2018 in Germany ⋅ 🌧 18 °C

    We finished our exploring of Potsdam and headed back to Berlin, stopping at Wannsee House. The house and grounds are situated on Wannsee lake, and are beautiful. The house was built in 1915 and was owned by an industrialist. It was used by the SS from 1941 to 1945 as a conference centre and guest house. On the 20th of January 1942, fifteen high-ranking representatives of the SS, the NSDAP, and various ministries met to discuss their cooperation in the planned deportation and murder of the European Jews.

    The SS representatives reported to the state secretaries on the murder campaign which had been carried out by special units in the Soviet Union since August 1941, and on the killing methods already in use. What is now referred to as the “Wannsee Conference” was chaired by Reinhard Heydrich, Head of the Reich Security Main Office. His deportation expert, Adolph Eichmann, drew up a protocol of the meeting, which was found in 1947 in the foreign ministry files.

    The Wannsee Protocol documents with disturbing clarity the plan to murder European Jews, and the active participation of Germany’s public administration in this genocide.

    The exhibition documents the prehistory of the National Socialist persecution of Jews, the process of social exclusion, deprivation of rights and expulsion between 1933 and 1939, and the deportations, confinement to ghettos and the murder of the European Jews in German-controlled territories. It was a sad and difficult exhibition to walk through, and reading the accounts of victims and survivors was very emotional, and we left with a heavy heart.

    Many prisoners used art to maintain their personal dignity in a nameless prisoner society where they were branded and reduced to a number. They wanted to capture their experience of trying to cope with circumstances in the camps from day to day. There were only a few places in the camp where prisoners had the chance to produce art, unobserved by the SS. It was often difficult to get the materials and prisoners risked death if their drawings were discovered.
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