Talk:Wannsee Conference
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Could the following paragraph be clarifed:
- Dr. Josef Buhler pushed Heydrich to take off the final solution in the General Government. As far as he was concerned, the main problem of General Government was an overdeveloped black market that deorganises the work of the authorities. He saw a remedy in solving the Jewish question in the country as fast as possible. An additional point in favour was that there were no transportation problems here.
What does "take off the final solution in the General Government" mean? I'm not totally clear on "black market that deorganises the work of the authorities". Then, how does genocide solve the deoraganisation? Finally, why are there "no transporation problems"?
EmRick 00:15, 9 Jun 2004 (UTC)
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[edit] General Government
If you check the link to the Wannsee Protocol translation, you will see this paragraph, which explains your questions:
"State Secretary Dr. Buehler stated that the General Government would welcome it if the final solution of this problem could be begun in the General Government, since on the one hand transportation does not play such a large role here nor would problems of labor supply hamper this action. Jews must be removed from the territory of the General Government as quickly as possible, since it is especially here that the Jew as an epidemic carrier represents an extreme danger and on the other hand he is causing permanent chaos in the economic structure of the country through continued black market dealings. Moreover, of the approximately 2 1/2 million Jews concerned, the majority is unfit for work."
--Space_Balls 19:12, 24 Jun 2004 (UTC)
I'd express some concern about using the transcript of the Wannsee meeting as some sort of ultimate truth on this matter; it should be clearly stated that what we know from the transcript may be unreliable. Let us not forget that Eichmann almost certainly edited the minutes, and may have also passed them on to Heydrich for further editing. The truth is, we have pretty near no certainties here. I've also noticed some related articles which apparently seem to be using Conspiracy as some sort of historical document on the matter. Vincent-D 21:49, 25 Oct 2004 (UTC)
[edit] Nuremberg
I'd like to see the Numerberg piece removed or edited. Anything said at the Nuremberg trials is, as far as I am concerned, completely contentious. It is known that false confessions were beaten out of SS officers and that some SS officers would have done and said anything the Allied told them to escape the hangman's noose... even though they were killed anyway, just so they couldn't recant or be cross examined.
- You'd think somebody might have said something at the time.Gzuckier 16:19, 29 November 2005 (UTC)
[edit] Transcription
According to Conspiracy, the attendants were told to distroy their copies of the transcription, but one survived to be discovered after the war. Is that so? --Error 00:44, 13 Jun 2005 (UTC)
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- Yes. The copy retained by Marin Luther survived, and was extensively quoted from at Nuremburg. Anthony.bradbury 17:30, 17 April 2006 (UTC)
Do you have a link to his original - in German? The translation in English is very politically correct ( too correct ). Has the original been analyzed by experts - the middle section seems to a dramatic shift in direction and tone , and then it returns. A textual critic is needed - and probably been done - links to experts? SORRY, I see you have the German - original?? - on the main page. On the German site I, however, see absolutely no discussion. Is this because Germans have no ideas or is it that discussing this is ilegal. A real analysis of course is impossible from an English copy. Do you have links to discussions by expert textual critics - and at least a photo copy of Luther's original - where is the original if it exists, who holds it. Where is Marin Luther, if alive? SORRY AGAIN - chasing this down I find that Yehuda Bauer - a big shot in this field - says that only idiots ( paraphrasing ) still think that the Wannasee Protocols are a smoking gun - enough for me - I doubt he came to this opinion unless the evidence was more than good. Why is this still being pushed - do you think Bauer is the idiot? SOORY ONCE MORE - it turns out there are several versions/cover letters to this one surviving copy. One version is an obvious forgery - others are interesting. This article is alot surer than the facts would allow - it must be pro-Hezbollah.
[edit] Holocaust denial
How do holocaust deniers react to the transcript of the Wannsee Conference?
They just laugh and laugh and laugh and.........
Yes, we laugh and laugh because it confirms that the Final Solution was a plan of evacuation, not mass murder.
[edit] re-writing history to suit your own means
The 5th paragraph used to say: "The protocol of the meeting was prepared by Adolf Eichmann aided by Reinhard Heydrich and does not explicitly mention mass murder; Eichmann later admitted at his trial that the actual language used during the conference was much more blunt and included terms such as "extermination" and "annihilation".
My edit read this way instead: The protocol of the meeting was prepared by Adolf Eichmann aided by Reinhard Heydrich, does not explicitly mention mass murder and according to the Wannsee Conference, Hitler wanted to legally move Jews outside of German borders as mentioned in the Wannsee Protocol in the 7th paragraph "The aim of all this was to cleanse German living space of Jews in a legal manner."
Unfortunately, the "Wannsee Conference" was edited back to its original form and protected the article from me editing it again. I did not edit this in an ill manner. I gave concrete evidence of what Hitler really wanted. I thought it was unfair to list "extermination" and annihilation" since Eichmann said this during his Nuremberg testimony. Of course hes going to say whatever, he didnt want to die, so he made stuff up on trial. I dont think that it was factual or even relevant.
Apparently whomever re-edited this can't handle the truth. I presented factual proof on this topic in a responsible fashion and you couldn't stand to hear it. That simply proves what I've been saying all along. Jews are re-writing history to suit their own means.
Thanks for confirming my suspicions on this.
And people are getting smart to that "6 million" figure jews killed during WWII also. Auschwitz lowered its estimates almost 10 years ago from 4 million to 1 million killed there... a 3 million person difference, bringing the amount of jews killed to 3 million, not 6 million. A big difference!
A big difference. So 3 million is better than 6 million. Interesting. How many million is better than 2 million? 10 million? There are those who say (Jung chang) that Mao ze Dong killed 70 million. Would 60 million have been better? It's irrelevant! They killed huge numbers of people, that's enough to brand them as wicked. That they did it ultimately for their own self aggrandizement brands them as evil.
- Seriously, stop with the old "Auschwitz's numbers lie," which requires willful ignorance and a desire to manipulate data to state with a straight face. No historian has ever used the 4 million number on a plaque to calculate death totals, as Holocaust deniers well know. From the article on Auschwitz: For many years, a memorial plaque placed at the camp by the Soviet authorities and the Polish communist government stated that 4 million people had been murdered at Auschwitz. This number was never taken seriously by Western historians, and was never used in any of the calculations of the death toll at Auschwitz (which have generally remained consistantly around 1-1.5 million for the last sixty years) or for the total deaths in the Holocaust as a whole. After the collapse of the Communist government, the plaque was removed and the official death toll given as 1.1 million. Holocaust deniers have attempted to use this change as propaganda, in the words of Nizkor: "Deniers often use the "Four Million Variant" as a stepping stone to leap from an apparent contradiction to the idea that the Holocaust was a hoax, again perpetrated by a conspiracy. They hope to discredit historians by making them seem inconsistent. If they can't keep their numbers straight, their reasoning goes, how can we say that their evidence for the Holocaust is credible? One must wonder which historians they speak of, as most have been remarkably consistent in their estimates of a million or so dead. In short, all of the denier's blustering about the "Four Million Variant" is a specious attempt to envelope the reader into their web of deceit, and it can be discarded after the most rudimentary examination of published histories." --Goodoldpolonius2 20:02, 20 December 2005 (UTC)
"blustering" - once the numbers drop down to the level of natural mortality rates, then see who blusters.
This article is complete garbage, and needs to be either drastically re-written or deleted altogether. It does not state facts or quote sources (this is after all meant to be an encyclopedia) , but merely states opinions. In fact the only reference is the minutes of the Wannsee meeting itself, from which the following facts can be obtained - (i) the purpose of the meeting was to discuss the "Jewish question", ie. what to do with European Jews in order to achieve the Nazi goal of "the expulsion of the Jews from the living space of the German people". (ii) it was accepted that emigration to other countries (both voluntary and forced) had so far been only somewhat successful (537,000 people by October 1941). (iii) a new solution was "the evacuation of the Jews to the East", ie. to the large concentration camps in Poland and neighbouring countries.
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- Although there is talk of harsh treatment being applied to the Jews, nowhere does it mention "systematic execution" or "the extermination of the entire Jewish population of Europe" - claims like this are purely conjecture.
There is too much interpretation (reading between the lines) being made on the wording in the minutes, for instance the claim that "evacuation" is a euphemism for "execution". Why would a meeting like this need to resort to such cloak and dagger coded language? Unless someone can present evidence to the contrary, the wording should be taken literally. Also, great care must be made in the translation from German, particularly bearing in mind the era and the circumstances. Who has personally reviewed the translation? Finally, the comments by Israeli Holocaust historian Yehuda Bauer quoted below are important and relevant, and deserve mention in the article.Logicman1966 10:49, 11 December 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Wording
Dr. Josef Bühler pushed Heydrich to implement the final solution in the General Government. As far as he was concerned, the main problem within the General Government was an overdeveloped black market that disorganised the work of the authorities. He saw a remedy in solving the Jewish question in the country as fast as possible. An additional point in favour was that there were no transportation problems there.
Apart from being hardly understandable without the context (black market, general government, etc.), the paragraph uses the Nazi term "Jewish question" without quotation marks and without explaining it. The term presupposes there is a problem with the Jews in Germany (or in general with Jews) and it is therefore completely inappropriate for an encyclopedia article to repeat it unthinkingly. Ben T/C 00:38, 20 January 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Rewrite
After spending an hour trying to edit what seemed unnecessarily confusing and opaque, I decided to start over. It’s not complete, certainly not perfect, but is better. I’ve tried to focus primarily upon the reason for the conference and secondarily upon the reason that historians of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust focus upon the conference.
Why was the conference necessary? That should be the starting point for explaining it. Doing anything on a mass scale—including deportations and killings—requires organization and subsequent bureaucratic coordination even in totalitarian states. Things don’t just happen and in the case of Germany in 1942 the systematic elimination of European Jewry was not happening as the Nazi state wished it to happen. Calling together the senior ministers and officials was a way to “cut thru the red tape.”
An equally important reason for the conference was the resistance of many of the main German civilian and quasi-civilian bureaucracies to making anti-Jewish measures a priority. This is not to say that these ministers sympathized with the Jews. On the contrary. They felt that they had competing priorities, however, and many of the civilian bureaucrats felt that the insistence by the SS to give pride of place to the “Jewish Question” was getting in the way of addressing these myriad other problems. It wasn’t “rational.” It is important to understand this aspect of the conference. Destruction was always at the heart of the Nazi ideology but for nearly a decade a lot of people, including some Nazis, believed that it was about creation. Wannsee is the turning point—where the SS made clear to those representing the Nazi German state that reason for Nazi Germany was not winning the war, reclaiming lost lands, providing work opportunities for Germans or any of the other supposed themes and impulses for the post-1933 era. It was all about destroying the Jews. If the rest was lost, so be it.Forthecommongood 17:03, 31 January 2006 (UTC)
- Excellently done. It would be great if you could add references as well. --Goodoldpolonius2 17:09, 31 January 2006 (UTC)
I will add references to the text. Also, I was not able to append the following to the above discussion:
The issue about whether or not the conference “explicitly” referred to systematic killing seems to me to be unimportant. You don’t need to look any further than the text itself to see that the authors recognized that mass deportations and the organization of the deportees into forced work brigades was a death sentence into itself for most of them. Although I append a comment seeking to place the term “suitable treatment” into the historic context of Nazi racial theory (which believed that those who survived hardship and deprivation were superior to those consumed by it) so to illustrate that the meaning of the phrase could be nothing other than systematic execution of the survivors, it is not necessary to the conclusion that the forced labor envisioned in the protocol was mass murder. Indeed twentieth century history is replete with examples of those presiding over such “work brigades” being tried and convicted for murder. Suffice it to say that there is a full evidentiary record describing mass executions of the Jews in the period after the Wannsee conference but, in my opinion, the text itself provides sufficient evidence of the proposition that the purpose of the Final Solution described at the Wannsee Conference was the physical elimination of European Jewry from the earth.Forthecommongood 17:33, 31 January 2006 (UTC)
- You are right, but I am always amazed at the number of Holocaust deniers who come to articles like this one and make statements like "they never said explicitly that they were going to kill the Jews." I keep hoping that nobody gets taken in by patent nonsense like this (for the reasons you state), but it is always best to be explicit in Wikipedia, and not give those who want to deny genocide any wiggle room. I have seen many less attacks on the victim counts of the Holocaust since I added 6+ references to different sources about the number of people killed in the main article, so I try to be as clear as possible in addressing these attacks up front. --Goodoldpolonius2 05:11, 1 February 2006 (UTC)
[edit] POV tag
It would be helpful to understand the reason for the insertion of the recent POV tag. Also, the comment that the article could benefit from a "Jewish [writer]" ought to be explained.Forthecommongood 14:10, 1 February 2006 (UTC)
- I should have provided a better explanation for the POV tag than what I wrote in the edit summary, sorry, here is one now:
- The language was discribing in technical and euphemistic terms (e.g. "eliminate," etc.) the plan to kill millions of people. If that's not POV, then what is? It sounded like somebody copied from the translation of the minutes, because that was exactly the language used at the time. I imagine a Jewish person with relatives who died in gas chambers could take offense at such expressions. By refering to Jewish contributors I wanted to say that the article could profit from another point of view, no insults intended, whatsoever.
- Goodoldpolonius2 already changed some phrases after I inserted the tag. What I still don't like is the phrase historically German lands, because it is again POV. First, what does it mean? What does it refer to? When were those lands supposed to be German? What kind of German people was that? and so on, and so on, please see, German history and ask yourself what German lands could have possibly meant before 1871. It needs a certain interpretation of history to say historically German lands' (compare e.g. German romanticism and Nazi mysticism). Second: German lands implies the Nazi claim they should be German "again." Please be careful with terminology and please change the German lands to something else. I also don't like the following sentence:
- The Wannsee Conference was called to reiterate the preeminence of this goal for the Nazi state and to obtain the necessary high-level "buy in" from the most senior level of the relevant organizations so that the myriad implementing steps required to effectively carry out the "Final Solution" could be taken without delay or bureaucratic squabbling.
- It sounds euphemistic IMO, e.g. "without [] bureaucratic squabbling", "myriad implementing steps", "reiterate the preeminence [..]". I would also advise against using effectively too much. Ben T/C 19:00, 1 February 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Evolution reference
What's with the evolution bashing? Consistent with Nazi racial theories which were explicitly evolutionary in their approach (my emphasis). This sentence doesn't fit with the flow of the article, and IMO it just looks like some creationist attempt to make a spurious link between evolution and the Nazis. I'm removing it. Dancing Meerkat 12:44, 21 February 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Minutes
Here is the page of the Wannsee Conference minutes in which the number of Jews in each country was enumerated. I doubt this was done for the purpose of sending them Christmas cards. Adam 13:06, 2 June 2006 (UTC)
On this, see Cesarini, Eichmann, 114; Browning, Origins of the Final Solution, 412; Rees, Auschwitz, 117. Breitmann, Architect of Genocide, 231-233, deals directly with the doctoring of the minutes. Adam 13:20, 2 June 2006 (UTC)
[edit] protocol section is hard to follow
I'm confused by the protocol section. The first thing it says makes sense: The minutes of the meeting discussed a change from getting rid of Jews by encouraging their emigration to instead forcibly deporting them, organizing them into work gangs, and outright killing them. But then it says something confusing:
- Deportation was not an end in itself. Forcibly transportating the Jews out of the territories held or conquered by Germany and its allies was a measure taken not simply to remove Jews from Nazi controlled territory but to better facilitate organizing those deported into work brigades.
If we're speaking of people deported "out of the territories held or conquered by Germany and its allies", how could the people thus deported possibly be organized by the Nazis into work brigades? Presumably the work brigades were organized on territory held or conquered by Germany or its allies? --Delirium 13:17, 26 June 2006 (UTC)
This article still needs a lot of work. When I have time I will attempt a rewrite. In the meantime, however, attempts by Holocaust-deniers to tamper with it or stick spurious tags on it will be reverted. Adam 07:11, 1 July 2006 (UTC)
I recommend not tampering or whatever spurious tagging means - straight above board discussion of the attempt to turn this article and the Wannasee into somthing it isn't and never was is more than enough to satisfy any denier - thanks for the help.
[edit] Jewish Historian With Different Opinion
This is from a review on Amazon of Arthur R. Butz's book, "Hoax of the Twentieth Centrury: by Michael Santomauro: <<<Is someone a "Holocaust denier" if he does not accept that the January 1942 "Wannsee conference" of German bureaucrats was held to set or coordinate a program of systematic mass murder of Europe's Jews? If so, Israeli Holocaust historian Yehuda Bauer must be wrong -- and a "Holocaust denier" -- because he recently declared: "The public still repeats, time after time, the silly story that at Wannsee the extermination of the Jews was arrived at." In Bauer's opinion, Wannsee was a meeting but "hardly a conference" and "little of what was said there was executed in detail." [5]>>> Footnote [5] is <<<Canadian Jewish News (Toronto), Jan. 30, 1992. >>> Why is such a different view being expressed by a Jewish historian?
- Well, if you were interested in an answer, you could read Yehuda Bauer instead of regaling us with fourth hand questions sourced from some egoboost spammed over a dozen reviews in Amazon who repeats the Denier Litany, freely available word for word on a simple Web search. Gzuckier 17:07, 12 November 2006 (UTC)
regal away - Jewish historians are gradually abandoning much of the holocaust foolishness. But we can hope that wikipedia sticks to its guns. Foolishness needs a home too. ( By the way, reading Bauer is mostly a waste of time - he has abandoned the the most stupid foolishness but he bravely hangs on to the rest)
