We Must Not Be Complicit

On January 20, 1942, high-ranking members of the Nazi party met at Wannsee, right out side of Berlin, to begin the implementation of the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question.” Reinhard Heydrich tasked Adolf Eichmann with organizing the conference, since Eichmann was a director of Jewish Affairs. Hannah Arendt, in Eichmann in Jerusalem, describes the discussion of the Wannsee Conference as focusing “first on ‘complicated legal questions,’ such as the treatment of half-and quarter-Jews — should they be killed or only sterilized?” Following this, the discussion moved to various methods of killing; “the Final Solution,” Arendt writes, “was greeted with ‘extraordinary enthusiasm’ by all present.” The Wannsee Conference ushered in this mass, industrial-scale murder we typically think about with the Holocaust at sites such as Auschwitz, Treblinka, Majdanek, and elsewhere. However, it did not start there. It started long before January 1942. It started in 1933, expanded in 1935, expanded in 1938, and expanded even more with the mobile death-squads (Einsatzgruppen) who mass murdered individuals on the Eastern Front with the start of the war in 1939.

While Rolf Hochhuth’s The Deputy, A Christian Tragedy (1963) does not focus on the Wannsee Conference, there are a couple of moments in the play that dive into the thinking of Eichmann and others as they formulated the “Final Solution.” As they party at a…