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

UPI ^

[Dallas]

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."

[ArcLight]

Last year I read volume 2 of Ian Kershaw's bio of Hitler. According to that book, the Holocaust was actually a sort of "Plan B," launched after other methods for dealing with the Jews were found to be impractical.

At first, the Nazis merely wanted to round up all the Jews and exile them to the most inhospitable lands they could find. Madagascar was considered, as well as Siberia once the Soviet Union was conquered. In practical terms this would have been little different from gassing them outright; still, simply rounding up all the Jews and murdering them turns out to have been a last resort, embraced by people who truly felt a sincere belief that the elimination of Europe's Jews was a moral duty.

[Righty1]

The compromise was that "good" Germans/Prussians who had Jewish blood could be in the army (even a Field Marshall) but, they could not be in the SS. Since the German Jews were the best scientists in the world and Jews were proportionately the most decorated group of WWI German veterans one can only guess what might have happened if the Nazis had picked another target.

[tet68]

Keep in mind that the MAJORITY of those killed in the holocaust were killed in the last year or two of the war.

I'm looking for the quote but as I remember it,most were killed during a period of only 6 to 8 months.

Imagine the resources that could have been used for defense, ie; trains,personel,
only an insane hate could begin to explain it. The Islamists have it too.