Hell’s Project Kickoff

History is full of examples of the sort of evil that makes most people with living souls need to find a baby to look at to rouse their spirits.

Of course, evil on the dime-lot level surrounds us; everything from premeditated murder to child-abduction to terrorists blowing up innocent people to further political goals – when any person says “my ends justify my means”, and the “means” include depriving another of their liberty or their life, it’s evil.

There are greater, more spectacular evils; people crashing planes into buildings full of people, or blowing up buildings, or spree killings, or…the list is depressingly long.

Of course, most people know, or eventually learn, the great pinnacles of evil; when nations harness their governments’ entire political system and means to power to deprive people of their liberty, their property, their sanity and their lives.  The title “Greatest Murderer in History” has several contenders; Lenin and Stalin killed anywhere from 40-60 million, maybe more, between them.   Mao was probably not far off that pace.  Both operated over decades, of course; there were a few great surges in killing (the Ukrainian Holodomor, the Great Leap Forward, several surges in purging), but all three of the great Communists plied their bloody trade over the course of a miserable generation or two.  And they – and the other great mass-murderers, Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein, Kim Jong-Il, Robespierre, the Ottomans in Armenia and a grim list of others – as a rule did their killing the old-fashioned way; by various flavors of pseudo-judicial murder, with firing squads or destruction of food stocks or guillotines or pistols to the back of the head; with machine guns next to ditches; with mustard gas from the air; with government-induced mass-starvation.

All very slow, brutal and inefficient.

The fact is, killing people is difficult.  People want to stay alive.  They fight, hard, to stay that way.  And while people under dictatorships learn to be docile in order to survive (especially in the absence of any other hope), they will occasionally rise up and throw monkey-wrenches in the works.  And try as you may to indoctrinate your own followers to perform evil on your behalf, there will be some that will retain some innate good; they will interfere, or at least not participate in your plans with the enthusiasm needed to get the job done.

Any good engineer knows that, when you want an efficient process – an assembly line, a decision-making process, a nuclear power plant, the code for a Nintendo game, anything – you need to factor out as many variables as possible; to strip out the moving parts.

Germans are, stereotypically, great engineers.  They build things.  And when an engineer builds a complicated thing – a BMW or a camera or a system to eliminate a race of people – they’ll start with a prototype or two, to test out the theories and work out the bugs before going into mass production.

And so, with teutonic thoroughness, did the Germans.

In the eighteen months since they’d conquered Poland, the Germans had been testing out methods for killing people – Gypsies, gays, the mentally ill, dissidents and, of course, Jews.  They’d been through the “traditional” methods; roving units of SS troops tried go from village to village trying to herd Jews to mass graves and machine-gun them; it was slow, manpower-intensive, and left too many loose ends (including a few survivors – a precious few of whom, unbeknownst to the Germans, would survive the war to testify against their would-be murderers).  They settled on poison gas, of various varieties.

And like any good manufacturer, the Germans knew that the technical solution was only part of the job; the rest is logistics – in this case, the task of identifying, assembling and transporting all of those Jews.

The Germans, working with the sort of meticulousness we’d recognize in any good process engineer today, factored out the moving parts, and arrived at the solution for an industrial killing system; a series of centralized camps.

And to tie together all the pieces of this immense project, it was seventy years ago today that the Nazis held a conference at a villa at 56–58 Am Großen Wannsee, in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee.

The villa in Wannsee where the conference was held 70 years ago today.

At the conference, the senior leadership of the various bureaucracies in Nazi Germany were gotten up to speed, with the job at hand, given a mission statement and were directed to start planning.

The “Wannsee Conference” was the project kickoff meeting from Hell.

The goal of the conference – to take the “learnings” from eighteen months of “rehearsals” in the fields of Poland, and experiments at Chelmno and Treblinka, and start the actual execution of what the Germans called the “Endlösung”, or “Final Solution” to the “Jewish Problem”.

Adolf Eichmann's census of Jews. This list reflected the number of Jews already murdered. He was proud to note that Estonia was already "Judenfrei" - free of Jews.

The meeting was attended by a who’s who of Nazi leadership, and for an assembly focused on one of the greatest single acts of evil in human history, the proceedings were remarkably banal.  From the Wikipedia entry on the subject – which, for Wkipedia, is pretty useful and concise:

Heydrich spoke for nearly an hour. Then followed about thirty minutes of questions and comments, followed by some less formal conversation.[33] Luther from the Foreign Office urged caution in Scandinavia, “Nordic” countries where public opinion was not hostile to the small Jewish populations and would react badly to unpleasant scenes. Hofmann and Stuckart pointed out the legalistic and administrative difficulties over mixed marriages, arguing for compulsory dissolution of marriages to prevent legal disputes and for the wider use of sterilisation as an alternative to deportation. Neumann from the Four Year Plan argued for the exemption of Jews who were working in industries vital to the war effort and for whom no replacements are available. Heydrich (keen not to offend Neumann’s boss Hermann Göring) assured him that these Jews would not be “evacuated”.[34] There were questions about the mischlings [mixed-race people of quarter-to-half Jewish anscestry] and those in mixed marriages: the details of these complex questions were put off until a later meeting.[35]

Finally Bühler of the General Government in occupied Poland [the German term for the administration of Poland] stated that:

“the General Government would welcome it if the final solution of this problem could be begun in the General Government, since on the one hand transportation does not play such a large role here nor would problems of labor supply hamper this action. Jews must be removed from the territory of the General Government as quickly as possible, since it is especially here that the Jew as an epidemic carrier represents an extreme danger and on the other hand he is causing permanent chaos in the economic structure of the country through continued black market dealings.”[36]

The meeting itself was of little note in the schedules of the men involved – it lasted less than two hours, one of many such meetings on the schedules of busy bureaucrats in a nation at war.  No great decisions were made; the decision was in fact Hitler’s, and had been made years earlier.  There was no “go/no-go” moment; the leadership, Hitler and Göring, Himmler and the rest, were already fully on board.   There was no question of stopping the “Final Solution” – which was, in a sense, already well underway.  The idea of killing Jews was well-enough known. but fairly oblique at the meeting; the actual killing was an internal matter for the SS.

In a sense, the meeting was a set-up; Heydrich’s way of making sure the civilian and petty-military leadership of the entire German bureaucracy was linked to the Solution, as accomplices.  In a larger sense, it was to get the German bureaucracy’s buy-in to the idea of finding and deporting 11 million Jews from around the occupied world (Eichmann still planned on getting his hands on Jews in England and Ireland) to extermination camps in Poland.

Not a whole lot different than kicking of the adoption of an Oracle database, if you leave out the subject matter.

Which is, really, the point; evil is boring and banal.  If evil came strutting onto the stage in a red cape with horns sticking out of its head and blood soaking its beard, it’d be easy to pick out and deal with.

Real evil walks among us, wearing a suit or a petty uniform or a Mao jacket, and speaks the same language you do.

And evil has meetings.  Probably catered.

19 thoughts on “Hell’s Project Kickoff

  1. Your post appears to disregard the role of individual moral culpability–and mass antisemitism–in the Holocaust, as if the 100,000 or more who actively participated in the extermination of Jews were mere cogs in a robotic mechanism. In fact, virulent antisemitism had been stoked over centuries, in Germany and eastern Europe, often by the church. As Goldhagen has written, one was quite free to refuse to participate in the humilation, torture and killing of Jews, but quite few did refuse–and large numbers gave their all to the project. The Catholic Church to this day muddles and misrepresents its disgrace in the catastrophe.

  2. Goldhagen’s thesis is that the Germans have been a nation obsessed with Jew killing for centuries. The War merely gave them cover to do what they had always wanted to do.
    This thesis is not without its critics.

  3. Gavin,

    Your post appears to disregard

    Let’s stop right there.

    With all due respect, Gavin, “your post doesn’t cover every possible angle of this story” is one of the more tendentious criticisms of blog postings.

    This post doesn’t “disregard” anything; this post isn’t a complete dissection of the sociology of German anti-semitism. Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners was, of course – and I’ve written about that book frequently and at some length earlier in this blog’s history.

    But Goldhagen wrote a book. I wrote a blog post. This post – and this entire series – is a series of 70th anniversary observances. Trying to post a comprehensive dissertation on the entire subject would defeat the purpose; each post covers, generally, a single, frequently-underreported theme. Trying to tackle more than that in a blog post doesn’t play to the strengths of the blog format, or to the goal of this series.

    (And on looking through my drafts, I see that there is a post referencing Goldhagen’s theses, and the sociological roots behind them, on another anniversary in the not-too-distant future).

    Now – perhaps it’s your own worldview talking, Gavin, but you’re reading some conclusions into Goldhagen, who noted that eliminationist anti-Semitism’s roots in German culture long predated Christianity; they were rooted in the Volk tradition (a concept that Americans have a hard time understanding; I minored in German, so I at least know what we don’t know; Goldhagen explained it adequately).

    There was a chicken and egg issue; did the German churches push the German people to be anti-semitic, or did German Volk cutlure (as co-opted by the Nazis as part of their Kultur, which is another fairly grimly fascinating concept well-explained by Paul Johnson) push the churches to it? Blaming one without the other is at worst intelelctually dishonest, and at least betrays a fairly shallow understanding of pre-WWII German culture. That the church (and the Catholic Church in Poland) shared blame is undoubted; that they shared some credit is shown by the fact that even in spite of the Volk roots and anti-semitic background, Hitler needed to liquidate a fair swath of both the Lutheran and Caltholic hierarchy to co-opt the rest of the churches; the various churches were far from alone in German society in succumbing to co-option after having large swathes of their leadership disappeared (see the unions, industry, the military, and even dissendent elements in the Nazi Party itself).

  4. Terry,

    Goldhagen’s theses have their critics, although taken in context, I think they have merit. It’s the “context” that counts. Goldhagen has critics who bring different takes on the influence pre-pagan Volk culture on German soceity in the 1930’s; it’s a worthwhile debate. He also has supporters who tease his thesis out of, or ignore key pieces of, context; the fact that the German Lutheran and Catholic churches were conflicted over the issue, and the conflict got settled in many cases with clergymen being carted off to Buchenwald, gets ignored in some agendas.

  5. C’mon Mitch — you should know by now that you are required to write the post that Gavin wants you to write, not the one you want to write.

  6. I don’t know what’s more freightening, the utter callousness the Nazi’s used in their Final Solution or the complete bastardization of its real history since then.

  7. “adoption of an Oracle database”

    I consider this an evil act (though little league, sure), considering the price and terms typically attached to Oracle databases. And don’t even mention Oracle application servers. Ick!

  8. My problem with Goldhagen’s thesis is that it shifts the responsibility away from “man” to certain men, eg Germans.
    All of the genocides and mass murders committed by political states in the 20th century were utopian in origin. “If we eliminate these people the way to paradise on Earth will be open to us”. This phenomenon is rooted in modernism, not monotheistic religion (outside of the OT).

  9. “The Catholic Church to this day muddles and misrepresents its disgrace in the catastrophe.”

    The Catholic church thing has been a lie told by anti-Catholic bigots for years.
    Related……take Von Stauffenberg. His Catholic beliefs, including natural law and God given rights, are what lead him to try to kill Hitler. While the Athiests were still stoking the death camp furnaces.

  10. Chuck et al:

    Both sides muddle things; there were Lutherans and Catholics that worked at the camps, and others that were inmates, and others still among the Righteous Among The Nations. Some Polish Catholics hated the Jews; others died trying to rescue them.

    Terry,

    I’ve heard two theses, and I don’t think they’re mutually exclusive; Goldhagen’s (eliminationist anti-semitism was part of the German culture) and the one you cite (that the Nazis had rejected Western “Civilzation” – with all of its “individual worth” and such – with eastern “Culture” with a glob of modernism thrown in. I don’t believe they exclude each other.

  11. Both sides muddle things; there were Lutherans and Catholics that worked at the camps, and others that were inmates, and others still among the Righteous Among The Nations. Some Polish Catholics hated the Jews; others died trying to rescue them.

    Yep. It’s easy to sit in judgment from the distance of 70 years.

  12. All I know is one of the most frightening movies I’ve ever watched was about the Wannsee Conference. It starred Kenneth Branagh and Stanley Tucci, and was cold-blooded. The part where they tried to agree just how Jewish a person had to be before the Final Solution was applicable was particularly disgusting. It was like they were trying to decide between UPS and USPS.

    Then they went home to their families.

  13. The reason that the source of the Holocaust is so contentious is because it may — or may not — say something about the great project of modernism. If the Holocaust was a uniquely German bit of pre-industrial savagery brought to fruition by the machinery of modernism, that’s one thing. If the Holocaust had its origins in modernism itself (rather than in the German people), that is quite another.
    Of course, it doesn’t have to be an either/or proposition.

  14. Troy, I share your sentiments on evil Oracle. I have been in the IT business for over 25 years and I have never heard of an Oracle implementation that went well.

  15. There were Christians who spoke up against Hitler. Bonhoeffer and Niemoller would be the examples I know about. It took incredible courage to stand against the Nazis. You ended up in the camps if you did.

    Christians certainly knew that something was going on. In When a Nation Forgets God (a short but very eye opening book) German Christians sing louder when the trains loaded with Jews went past so they wouldn’t hear the screams.

    It is debatable weather Hitler was Christian, or if the Pope or others were complicit. What isn’t in question is that far to many people did nothing to stop him.

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