The Wannsee Conference
A superb German film from 1984, it is a stark warning for our times.
Given the current state of US leadership, it is well worth revisiting this excellent film. It has much to teach us.
It is too easy, when revisiting the Holocaust, to focus on the extreme final stages of horror. This, in turn, makes it easy to reassure ourselves that these images have nothing to do with our own reality. But what the film underscores is that the extermination camps were the culmination of a long process, not the stated goal from the beginning.
On the 20th of January 1942, leading government figures were invited to a secret briefing, in a luxurious villa on the outskirts of Berlin. The agenda, set by Reinhard Heidrich, was to organize the “final solution to the Jewish problem”. A transcript of the discussions was produced, and one copy was found after the war. The film uses those notes to reproduce the meeting in real time.
What transpires before our eyes looks much like any other board meeting. Polite greetings are exchanged. There are jokes and laughter. There is light flirting with the secretary. Cognac is sipped. Everything is orderly and matter-of-fact, and that is precisely what is so chilling.
It reminds me of what CS Lewis wrote in a preface to The Screwtape Letters, some twenty years before this film was made. In explaining his vision of hell, he said that demons and goblins had been effective in reaching the medieval imagination, but were no longer adapted to our times. The events of the twentieth century had convinced him that the true face of evil was a smiling man in a manicured suit. The Devil wears Hugo Boss.
What the film makes clear is that a meeting such as this can only happen after years of preparatory groundwork. Years of coarsening discourse and rising brutality. A constant barrage of lies. Millions of people who have been made, some willingly, some not, to cross one moral line after another, till the old order is a fading memory.
That is why norms, laws, ethics, and civility matter. They are all that stand between us and barbarism. And the people who tear them down know that perfectly well.