Commissioning Mass Murder: Conspiracy and History at the Wannsee Conference

Abstract

These words, signifying a shift from the conditional survival of the Jews to their physical death, were pronounced by an exasperated Kenneth Branagh in Conspiracy, the 2001 HBO dramatisation of the Wannsee Conference of 20 January 1942. It was this performance, as Reinhard Heydrich, that gave the thespian Branagh the most difficult acting experience of his 20-year career. He remarked that ‘in 20 years of acting, I’ve never been involved with a character so disturbing to my own peace of mind’.1 This disturbance of mind was, presumably, absent for Reinhard Heydrich, the head of the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA), when he invited 15 men representing the civil service, the SS and the Party to an imposing villa in a Berlin suburb of Wannsee. They were summoned to discuss, in the words of the Protocol, the only surviving transcript of the meeting at Wannsee, the ‘organizational, policy and technical prerequisites for the Final Solution of the European Jewish Question’ and to ‘ensure in advance that the central organizations involved be brought together and their policies properly coordinated’.2 This meeting has been recently characterised as the ‘most infamous in history’.3