Historian tells of Nazis toasting Final Solution (not posted under philosophy)

HAY-ON-WYE, Wales, June 6 (Reuters) - For the Nazi hierarchy, it was a good meeting. They toasted the Final Solution with a glass of brandy.

"After agreeing that 11 million European Jews would be murdered, they retired for cognac," said historian Mark Roseman, reflecting on a historic encounter at a grand villa in the wooded suburbs of Berlin in 1942.

For 15 high-level civil servants, SS officers and Nazi party officials, the gathering on the shores of the Wannsee lake was a chance to put the unthinkable into practice.

Though many Jews had been rounded up and killed before, the historical significance of the meeting lies partly in the fact a record of it survived after the war as proof of a Nazi masterplan to exterminate all Europe's Jews in death camps.

Historians believe Wannsee was the moment where the Final Solution was formally organised. And although Hitler did not attend, most believe that the decisions were made at the Nazi leader's behest and knowledge. "It was a crucial and sinister step on the way to the Final Solution," said Roseman, talking to Reuters after laying out in chilling detail at Britain's leading literature festival his research on his book -- "The Villa, The Lake, The Meeting: Wannsee and the Final Solution".

"It was one of the most shocking meetings of the 20th century," he said of the notorious Wannsee Protocol, the minutes of a meeting that were only discovered by chance in 1947 by Robert Kempner, a Jewish civil servant who had fled to the United States before war broke out and the Holocaust began.

"Is such a thing possible?" asked his horrified American boss, General Telford Taylor.

It was and this is what appalled and fascinated Roseman: "What we have here is a cohort of young, ambitious racists looking for an Aryan-dominated Europe," he said.

The image of Adolf Eichmann and security chief Reinhard Heydrich toasting the success of the meeting afterwards is an image that haunted Roseman, who visited Wannsee when researching the book.

"I went back to the villa. The original lift is still there. This lift had carried Heydrich and Eichmann to the meeting. That to me was unbelievable," he told Reuters in an interview.

As historians reflect on the importance of that meeting on taking Nazi Germany down the road to genocide and infamy, Roseman has never lost sight of the enormity of the slaughter and the crisp and efficient way bureaucrats launched the logistics of murder. "At the very end, it eludes human understanding," he said.

And with the rise of the far right in Europe, he felt there was an added "Lest We Forget" urgency as today's children reflect on what their grandparents may have done.

The shocking immediacy of the wholesale slaughter may have faded but he said: "It is important in Germany and elsewhere that the horrors of the past should not be lost sight of."

And with the rise of the far right in Europe, he felt there was an added "Lest We Forget" urgency as today's children reflect on what their grandparents may have done.

Recently, I have been looking into the American Eugenics movement in the early part of the 20th century. For example, the first state to impose "mandatory sterilization" laws was Indiana in 1907. Interestly enough, it is my understanding that the Nazi's referred to their sterilization method as the "Indiana Method". By the mid-1930's, just about every state had a "mandatory sterilization" law.

The really interesting part is that it appears the American Eugenics movement was spearheaded by the leftist intellectual elite of the day - not the right.

Finally, it has been very interesting to learn how the Nazi "final solution" did not just come out of nothing. Similar ideas had been brewing for 40 years. The Nazi's just took it to horrible, unimaginable extremes.

If you want to learn more about the American Eugenics movement, go here. However, prepare yourself. Anyone who values individualism, a non-intrusive government and freedom will likely find, as I did, American Eugenics to be disturbing and extremely offensive.

The really interesting part is that it appears the American Eugenics movement was spearheaded by the leftist intellectual elite of the day - not the right.

You are perfectly correct. To further prove the point, consider that eugenics was practised in Sweden as late as the 1970s:

Eugenics in Socialist Sweden

Last week it was revealed that Sweden imposed forced sterilization for 40 years, a practice that ended only in 1976. During this period, some 62,000 Swedes were sterilized in an effort to improve the quality of the Swedish people. Those of mixed race, low intelligence or with physical defects underwent forced sterilization by the state in order to prevent such qualities from being passed on. However, there is evidence that sterilization extended even to those who were merely rebellious, promiscuous or did not fit in somehow.
The philosophy underlying the Swedish policy, which has raised a storm of condemnation, is known as eugenics. Eugenics grew out of scientific advances in the field of genetics in the 19th century. As it became clear that many physical qualities are inherited, advocates of eugenics favored efforts to ensure that positive human qualities were fostered and negative ones suppressed. This was to be done by encouraging men and women with positive qualities to intermarry, while those considered defective were to be segregated or sterilized.
The Nazis carried the practice of eugenics to its ultimate end. It could be argued that the entire Holocaust grew out of eugenic principles. Not only were 6 million Jews murdered in the process, but thousands of gypsies, homosexuals and others deemed to be inferior. At the same time, the Nazis encouraged selective breeding of those considered to be outstanding examples of the Aryan race.
When the facts about Nazi atrocities became known after World War II, there was a revulsion against eugenics for having given birth to such horrors. That is why the news that Sweden was still practicing eugenics as recently as 1976 has led to such an outcry. It also came as a shock that Sweden, long known as a liberal paradise rather than some fascistic state, should have behaved in such a patently illiberal manner. Since World War II it has been assumed that eugenics was part of the far right's philosophy, not the liberal left's.
But in fact, eugenics has always been part of the left's collectivist agenda.

In The Open Society and Its Enemies, philosopher Karl Popper pointed out that Plato believed strongly in eugenics and urged that humans be bred like dogs to develop superior qualities.

By the early 1900s eugenics was something of a fad among liberals in the United States, leading a number of states to pass laws requiring compulsory sterilization of those with hereditary defects.

In 1927 the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of such laws in the case of Buck vs. Bell. It was in this case that liberal Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. said, "Three generations of imbeciles are enough."

In his book Social Darwinism, liberal historian Richard Hofstadter conceded that eugenics was indeed part of the liberal reform agenda. "In spite of its fundamental conservatism," Hofstadter wrote, "the eugenics craze had about it the air of a 'reform.' Like the reform movements, it accepted the principle of state action toward a common end, and spoke in terms of the collective destiny of the group rather than individual success."
But as the Nazi and Swedish examples show, it is too easy to use eugenics not just to improve the physical quality of humans, but as a tool of social control. As Aldous Huxley wrote in the forward to his utopian horror Brave New World, eugenics can be used to control those with "dangerous thoughts about the social system" who "infect others with their discontents." After all, parents pass on not only their genes to their children, but also their knowledge, values and opinions. That is why eugenics and totalitarianism go together.
Source: Bruce Bartlett, senior fellow, National Center for Policy Analysis, September 3, 1997.

I have trouble any more believing historians about anything.

Believe this one. My maternal grandparents alone counted over 100 of their relatives who were murdered in the Nazi death factories. I even have an eyewitness report of the murder of my grandmother's uncle, of the conditions surrounding his murder, and of the fate of all of the Jews of his town (located 6 miles from the death factory at Treblinka). Suffice it to say that most of them failed to survive 1941, that none of them survived 1942, and that it was the deliberate policy of the German occupiers that this be so.

My wife's uncle was in Bergen-Belson as a young teenager, and saw his father and brother murdered by the SS. He escaped by faking death, and lying among dead bodies for many hours. He has numbers tattoed on his forearm, like many others that I've met over the years.

Don't tell me that this genocide didn't happen, that it was a figment of someone's imagination - I've spoken with too many actual victims of Hitler and his genocidal followers, all of whom were overwhelmingly credible. This historical event has not been distorted by most historians, unless you count those who deny that it ever took place.

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