Hitler's Orcs Do Lunch: Ler's go to McDonalds and plan genocide! What do you know about the Wansee Conference?

WARNING!! THE FOLLOWING ENTRY DETAILS HORRIFIC EVENTS.  I will be writing in my usual irreverent style, so if you're offended by my treatment of one of the worst events of WW2, THEN PLEASE DON'T READ ANY FURTHER.

ABSOLUTELY NO OFFENSE TO THOSE LIVING OR DEAD IS INTENDED.

Proceed at your own risk then, Dear Reader.

Okie dokie then...shall we begin?

So, Dear Reader, what do you know about the brunch/lunch, where high ranking officials in the Nazi regime planned the extinction of an entire race?

First, I'm gonna give you some links to a couple of films that replicate this nightmare meeting:

"Conspiracy" with Kenneth Brannaugh, and Stanley Tucci:

https://prmovies.town/conspiracy-2001-Watch-online-full-movie/  

or, you could watch this one--a German language version of the same conference (it's even scarier than Kenneth's movie):

In our last episode, (https://penelopeloom.blogspot.com/2024/04/into-minds-of-moria-hitlers-good-little.html) we left the Morlock Heydrich deeply in the midst of the Nazi power structure.  This week, we're gonna take a look at his abominable actions as a high-ranking officials of Adolf's (gag, hiss, wheeze) political party.

The course of World War Two changed, after 1941, with the entrance of the U.S. into the conflict, and Hitler's absolutely insane plan to invade Russia (a.k.a. 'Operation Barbarossa').  As I've said before, Dear Reader, Adolf must have been asleep when they taught about Napoleon's own invasion a century earlier.

Who knows? Maybe he felt an intrinsic need to visit Napoleon's favorite vacation spot.  'Oh! My modern mechanized army can get through anything Mother Nature throws at it!

Yeah.  Snow Chains would've done it.

Germany now entered on to a path that would lead to its' own destruction (not to mention the brutal murder of millions of innocents), as it waged a war on two fronts.

No, Adolph, you f&*king didn't.

And, thus we reach January 20th, 1942.  A gathering of senior party officials, as well as high ranking members of the SS was initiated by our old buddy, Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, (you remember him from last week, Dear Reader, the director of the Reich Security Main Office).   This meeting was supposed to engineer a way to engender an operational agreement between the various leaders of key departments, in order to carry out what Herman Goering obliquely referred to as "the final solution to the Jewish Question." What a dastardly and banal way to refer to the systematic murder of millions.

Our old 'blossoming' wanna-be Reinhard Heydrich would be in charge of the meeting.

I just can't seem to leave the new AI photo generators alone.  

But, who else was supposed to be there? 

Now, I'm gonna be a bad historian, Dear Reader, and I'm gonna copy something from Wikipedia:

List of attendees

Name	Photo	Title	Organization	Superior
SS-Obergruppenführer (Lieutenant-General) Reinhard Heydrich		Chief of the RSHA Deputy Protector of Bohemia and Moravia Deputy Reichsführer-SS Presiding	Schutzstaffel (SS)	Reichsführer-SS (SS-Leader) Heinrich Himmler
SS-Gruppenführer (Major-General) Otto Hofmann		Head of the SS Race and Settlement Main Office (RuSHA)	Schutzstaffel (SS)	Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler
SS-Gruppenführer (Major-General) Heinrich Müller		Chief of Amt IV (Gestapo)	Reich Security Main Office (RSHA), Schutzstaffel	Chief of the RSHA SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich
SS-Oberführer (Senior Colonel) Karl Eberhard Schöngarth		Commander of the SiPo and the SD in the General Government	SiPo and SD, RSHA, Schutzstaffel	Chief of the RSHA SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich
SS-Oberführer (Senior Colonel) Gerhard Klopfer		Permanent Secretary	Nazi Party Chancellery	Chief of the Party Chancellery Martin Bormann
SS-Obersturmbannführer (Lieutenant Colonel) Adolf Eichmann		Head of Referat IV B4 of the Gestapo Recording secretary	Gestapo, RSHA, Schutzstaffel	Chief of Amt IV SS-Gruppenführer Heinrich Müller
SS-Sturmbannführer (Major) Rudolf Lange		Commander of the SiPo and the SD for Latvia; Deputy Commander of the SiPo and the SD for the RKO Head of Einsatzkommando 2	SiPo and SD, RSHA, Schutzstaffel	SS-Brigadeführer (Brigadier General) and Generalmajor der Polizei (Brigadier-General of Police) Franz Walter Stahlecker
Georg Leibbrandt		Undersecretary	Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories	Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories Alfred Rosenberg
Alfred Meyer		Gauleiter (Regional Party Leader) State Secretary and Deputy Minister	Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories	Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories Alfred Rosenberg
Josef Bühler		State Secretary	General Government (Polish Occupation Authority)	Governor-General Hans Frank
Roland Freisler		State Secretary	Ministry of Justice	Minister of Justice Franz Schlegelberger
SS-Brigadeführer (Brigadier General) Wilhelm Stuckart		State Secretary	Interior Ministry	Minister of the Interior Wilhelm Frick
SS-Oberführer (Senior Colonel) Erich Neumann		State Secretary	Office of the Plenipotentiary for the Four Year Plan	Plenipotentiary of the Four Year Plan Hermann Göring
Friedrich Wilhelm Kritzinger		Permanent Secretary	Reich Chancellery	Minister and head of the Reich Chancellery SS-Obergruppenführer Hans Lammers
Martin Luther		Under-Secretary	Foreign Office	Ernst von Weizsäcker, State Secretary to Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop

I just liked the clean way they formatted this list of charmless evil.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wannsee_Conference   These men were nearly all mid-level bureaucrats, but not all of them, particularly those representing the eastern conquered territories.  All righty then, let's get back to it.  We know that Goering (and Adolph) wanted their 'final solution.'  But, how was it going to get done efficiently (OMFG)? And, most importantly, how were they gonna get away with it? Let's face it:  no conqueror wants the rest of the world to have proof about his or her crimes against humanity.

Remember this asshole?

"Uncle Joe" Stalin:  psychopath.

When I was younger (OMG how young), I didn't know the truth about Stalin.  What truth? Well, for years outside of Russia, the rest of the world assumed that Stalin was a ruthless dictator, but not precisely a mass murderer.  It was only in the last years of the 20th century that we all learned it wasn't a healthy thing to have ole Joe as an uncle.  How bad did it get? We'll never really know.  However, estimates place the number of Stalin's victims in excess of 20 million.

If your jaw is dropping open, that's a good sign:  it means that you're shocked to find that Stalin was Hitler's equal in maniacal slaughter. What, might you ask, does Stalin have to do with the Wannsee Conference? Simply this:  the Nazis weren't the only ones to try out genocide.

In any discussion, we have to start with this asshole:  Martin Luther....

Why? Just because.  No, I'll tell you, don't worry Dear Reader:  it was from his stash of documents that we have a record of the conference's agenda, as well as an approximation of what was said.  Are you wondering what I am? If it was supposed to be a secret, why was there a written records of anything?  Sigh.  On the one hand, you're glad that we know just how evil these villainous assholes were.  On the other hand, it's shocking how stupid these little men were in thinking that their murderous secrets wouldn't ever be known by the rest of us.  Or, maybe it was just arrogance, and the Nazis generally felt that they had to document their actions for a grateful posterity.

Yes, indeed.  Gag.  But, Dear Reader that is how the Nazis thought, in terms of their future history--they would be the 'warriors' for some kind of fantastic future world where their efforts would be lauded rather than abhorred.

This was how guys like Martin Luther thought of himself:  a warrior fighting for the Aryan race, etc. etc. etc., and he was excited to participate in the future conference.

They were wrong, and they were psychos because we know and we remember.

One of the more important participants of the Wannsee Conference, was Adolf Eichmann, Heydrich's sort-of secretary.

He never looked so good.  Seriously though, here is what the bastard actually looked like:

It was Eichmann who literally counted the number of Jewish people (as well as intellectuals, Roma, and others) living in occupied territories--lists of human beings bound for extinction.  Once compiled, they would then be put on trains to their final destination.  I mean, can you imagine the horror of that? The complete utter dehumanization of his action?  

Eichmann's work distilled facts, making genocide into a bureaucratic exercise.  Here is an excerpt from the meeting's protocol:

First, the purpose of the meeting:

"a) the expulsion of the Jews from every sphere of life of the German people,

b) the expulsion of the Jews from the living space of the German people.

In carrying out these efforts, an increased and planned acceleration of the emigration of the Jews from Reich territory was started, as the only possible present solution.

By order of the Reich Marshal, a Reich Central Office for Jewish Emigration was set up in January 1939 and the Chief of the Security Police and SD was entrusted with the management. Its most important tasks were

a) to make all necessary arrangements for the preparation for an increased emigration of the Jews,

b) to direct the flow of emigration,

c) to speed the procedure of emigration in each individual case.

The aim of all this was to cleanse German living space of Jews in a legal manner."

https://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/wannsee.asp

(A 'legal manner'? And here I am shaking my head, absolutely horrified.)

Here is an example of how Eichmann 'broke down' numbers in just a few of the Nazi-controlled regions:

approximately 360,000 were in Germany proper on 30 January 1933

approximately 147,000 were in Austria (Ostmark) on 15 March 1939

approximately 30,000 were in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia on 15 March 1939.

https://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/wannsee.asp

But, check out this list, from the meeting minutes...it will stand your hair on end:

Country	Number
A.
Germany proper	131,800
Austria	43,700
Eastern territories	420,000
General Government	2,284,000
Bialystok	400,000
Protectorate Bohemia and Moravia	74,200
Estonia	- free of Jews -
Latvia	3,500
Lithuania	34,000
Belgium	43,000
Denmark	5,600
France / occupied territory	165,000
France / unoccupied territory	700,000
Greece	69,600
Netherlands	160,800
Norway	1,300
B.
Bulgaria	48,000
England	330,000
Finland	2,300
Ireland	4,000
Italy including Sardinia	58,000
Albania	200
Croatia	40,000
Portugal	3,000
Rumania including Bessarabia	342,000
Sweden	8,000
Switzerland	18,000
Serbia	10,000
Slovakia	88,000
Spain	6,000
Turkey (European portion)	55,500
Hungary	742,800
USSR	5,000,000
Ukraine	2,994,684
White Russia excluding Bialystok	446,484
Total	over 11,000,000

https://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/wannsee.asp

OMG.

Sometimes life is worse than a slasher-movie.

Once Heydrich arrived, all the banal boys (yes, I enjoy Arendt's use of that term so much, I can't let it go) dutifully filed in to supplicate at his feet.  He began the 'discussion' by talking about the 'need' for the 'evacuation' of all Jewish people from German-occupied territories.  And we all know what that word meant, right? 

OK, so the orcs figured out their 'mission' as well as the means of 'transportation.'  But, how would they "evacuate" their so-called 'undesirables'?  Alright, enough bullsh&t--what Goering and Heydrich weren't overtly asking other Nazi bureaucrats was how were these bastards gonna slaughter men, women, and children in the most 'efficient' way possible? 

Ye Olympian Gods.

Another unspeakable point purportedly under consideration at the Conference, was the method of execution.  To put it plainly, Dear Reader, how could they kill the maximum amount of people in the shortest period of time? (Note:  while it is clear from existing documentation that direct conversation regarding the "final solution" was not part of the official record, informal evidence, i.e. written descriptions about verbal encounters of the participants suggest that gas vans, i.e. carbon monoxide poisoning, weren't feasible as a systematic, efficient means of murder.  It turned out that a more expedient manner, was to trick the prisoners into taking a shower, and instead of water, Zyklon B (a cyanide-based pesticide) would flow through the overhead shower heads instead of water.  Death by cyanide poisoning is beyond horrible:  "according to Dr Sven Anders (University Clinic of Hamburg-Eppendorf) the gas causes a stinging in the chest, then spasmodic pain (like epilepsy) and finally attacks the brain and heart causing death. Due to the weak and inconsistent concentration in the gas chambers this could have lasted up to half an hour for the victims. Half an hour of agonizing pain whilst those people around you clawed, tore and trampled each other in their fear, pain and horror." https://www.quora.com/What-is-death-from-Zyklon-B-like

As I said, beyond horrible.

But, the Nazi bastards found this method to be hunky dory, and began to employ it in most of the larger concentration camps.

But, what to do with the bodies? The Nazi high command thought that combustion would be sufficient.  What a collection of idiots--just how does one burn millions of bodies into ash in a short period of time? 

You can't.  That is why, when the various camps were liberated by Allied Forces, huge numbers of partially burned bodies were found.

It was shortly after this, that the meeting ended.  

And, what happened to Heydrich? Not long after he returned to his duty station, Heydrich was assassinated by two resistance fighters.  I can tell you that he didn't die right away:  his death was prolonged and painful (i.e. infection).  Some small justice, eh?

Until next week....