When a group of high-ranking Nazi bureaucrats sat down 70 years ago
today (Jan. 20, 1942), they didn't plot the death of 6 million Jews;
they aimed at 11 million.
Dubbed the Wannsee Conference, after its location, it was chaired by SS
Obergruppenfuhrer Reinhard Heydrich, who brought together some of the
most efficient managers of mass murder history has ever seen.
The 90-minute agenda was direct, having been transmitted by Hitler to
his deputy, Reich Marshal Herman Goering, and then onto Heydrich: "Make
all necessary preparations" for a "total solution of the Jewish
question" in all territories under German influence, coordinate the role
of all government organizations in accomplishing that goal — and then
submit a "comprehensive draft" for the "final solution of the Jewish
question."
In other words, for the first time, the administrative, industrial and
transportation resources of an entire nation would be deployed for the
purpose of genocide.
While history records that a staggering 6 million Jews would ultimately
be destroyed as a result, one of the more chilling documents retrieved
from the massive archives of the Nazi regime is a simple list of all
European nations with Jewish populations as small as 200. Prepared for
the Wannsee meeting by Heydrich's notorious SS assistant, Adolf
Eichmann, it assumed that at some point soon the Nazis would control
countries from Ireland to Turkey.
The genocidal census was designed to anticipate the organizational
structure required to retrieve and ship those 11 million Jews to the
Nazi murder factories, regardless of how distant they were from
Auschwitz or Treblinka. The Wannsee conferees met to ensure that all
participants would meet their quotas (under Heydrich's centralized
authority) to complete "the final solution."
It would take untold blood, treasure and sacrifice from the United
States, Britain and the Soviet Union to bring the Third Reich to an end.
Seventy years later, the ruthless, brutal and unrelenting struggle
against one of the darkest regimes ever to plague mankind serves as an
eternal reminder that there remain forces that would destroy humanity.
Much the way the Nazis assigned their strategic national assets to the
destruction of a people, the rulers of Iran are focusing their
considerable national resources on creating and fielding nuclear
weapons. They do so while publicly embracing time and again a foreign
policy that calls for literally wiping Israel off the map.
Elsewhere, the racial hatred practiced by the Third Reich is echoed in
the Taliban revulsion of our Western democracies — and in policies in
areas it controls that include burning to death young girls for the high
crime of attending school.
On this grim 70th anniversary of Wannsee, let us contemplate how a
disbelieving world can stand idly by as evil regimes coolly harness
their bureaucracies to methodically achieve horrendous goals. Whatever
the double speak (as the Wannsee crowd used the phrase "final solution"
to mask its program of mass extermination), the outcome is clear to all
who wish to see it. Had they been invited, the Iranian regime and the
Taliban would have been enthusiastic participants in the Wannsee
Conference.
This Third Reich milestone should serve as a cautionary tale for every
21st-century democracy. Middle East expert Bernard Lewis has observed
that Islamist leaders like Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad are
little concerned with the mutual-destruction strategies that kept the
Cold War from becoming hot. Instead, they welcome the martyrdom of their
subjects.
History consistently reminds us that indifference in the face of an
implacable enemy invariably leads to disaster. Further, more often than
not, our enemies tell us exactly what they mean to do before they do it.
Acting on their warning requires our collective insight, personal
courage and national will.
Lawrence Kadish is chairman of the advisory board of the American
Airpower Museum in Farmingdale, L.I. Originally published bY the New
York Post, January 20, 2012, and reprinted by gracious permission of the
author.
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