Historians or the media? Anne Frank, Wannsee and the Holocaust
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Today is Holocaust Memorial Day and last Thursday (20 January) was the 80th anniversary of the Wannsee Conference, a key moment in the Nazi genocide of European Jews. There were academic conferences and events to mark it, but the anniversary was somewhat overshadowed by a bit of media flimflam about Anne Frank. A new book by Rosemary Sullivan, The Betrayal of Anne Frank, claims to have discovered the identity of the Dutch Jew who betrayed her family’s. The British media got very excited. There were interviews with Professor Sullivan on Newsnight and the Today programme and on the BBC News Channel. All of these accepted her assertions at face value and treated this as a big news story.
Compare these programmes with an article here by Matt Lebovic in the Times of Israel, who actually did some research of his own and spoke to a number of leading Dutch Holocaust historians. They were devastating. “The book is full of terms such as ‘most likely’, ‘most certainly’ and ‘it is plausible that’, yet in the end the findings are presented as some kind of truth,” said Laurien Vastenhout, a researcher and lecturer at the National Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies.
“According to Bart van der Boom of Leiden University,” writes Lebovic, “the premise of Amsterdam’s Jewish Council having lists of hiding places ‘makes no sense and is not supported by any serious evidence’.” ‘“My students would not get away with this,’ said Van der Boom, whose book about the Amsterdam Jewish Council will be published in April.” Overall, Van der Boom said he found the conclusions at the heart of The Betrayal of Anne Frank to be “downright ridiculous and reprehensible”.
The inadequacy of British media coverage confirms what the late Professor David Cesarani wrote at the beginning of his monumental work, Final Solution (2016): “There is a yawning gulf between popular understanding of this history [of the Holocaust] and current scholarship on the subject. ”
Anne Frank is a good example. She remains the most famous victim of the Holocaust. But as Cesarani writes later in his book, the experience of the Frank family was not typical: “ Anne Frank ’ s father was untypical in terms of the accommodation and resources at his disposal as well as the network of loyal helpers he enjoyed. Few Jews could find a place to hide, let alone people they could rely on to supply them with food and other necessaries. Even if they had the money for all that. ” Most victims of the Holocaust were shot ( “ the Shoah by Bullets ” ) or gassed ( “ the Shoah by Gas ”) . Anne Frank died of typhus. Most victims were not from western cities like Amsterdam, but from cities and small villages in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.
This is what makes the new history of the Wannsee Conference so interesting. Until recently, the standard view was that Wannsee mattered because it came to symbolise the bureaucratic nature of the Nazi state and the Final Solution. The men invited by Eichmann and Heydrich represented the Foreign Office, the Reich Ministries of the Interior and Justice, the State Chancellery and the Reich Chancellery, the civil occupation authorities in Poland and the Soviet Union, and of course the SS.
Secondly, the Wannsee Conference mattered because there was a paper trail proving that these men were involved in planning the murder of Europe ’ s Jews. What has frustrated historians for more than 75 years is the lack of key documentation. Crucial papers had been destroyed. The staff of the US prosecutor found the only surviving copy of the minutes of the Wannsee Conference. These few typescript pages from Wannsee, Eichmann ’ s minutes, matter so much because here is a direct link between the Nazi hierarchy and the Holocaust.
Third, there is the timing. The Wannsee Conference was due to be held in November 1941 but because of Pearl Harbor was delayed util late January 1942. There is widespread agreement that the crucial decisions that led to the Holocaust were taken between the summer and autumn of 1941, after the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, and early 1942, when the deportations to Belzec and Treblinka began. The Wannsee Conference in January 1942 seemed to fit this timetable perfectly.
But the best recent books on the Holocaust barely mention Wannsee. In his acclaimed three-volume history of The Third Reich (2003-8), Richard J. Evans dedicated just seven pages to the Wannsee Conference. Christopher Browning ’ s The Origins of the Final Solution (2004) manages only ten pages on the conference. In his 750-page book, Hitler’s Empire (2008), Mark Mazower makes just six passing references to Wannsee. In Timothy Snyder ’ s books, Bloodlands (2010) and Black Earth (2015) there is just one reference to Wannsee. In his 1,000-page book, Final Solution (2016), David Cesarani devotes only five pages to Wannsee. If Wannsee mattered so much, why have historians apparently lost interest?
Recent books by Mark Roseman ( The Villa, The Lake, The Meeting: Wannsee and the Final Solution , 2002) and Peter Longerich ( Wannsee: The Road to the Final Solution , 2016, translated 2021) present a more nuanced and complicated picture.
Historians are now agreed that Wannsee was not the starting-point for the Holocaust. It was one stage among many. As Longerich writes, “it is clear that no ‘decision’ to murder the European Jews was made at the Wannsee Conference”. This was not the decisive moment that led to the Final Solution. The men at Wannsee were there to implement plans that had already been decided on.
Did Wannsee symbolise the bureaucratic nature of the Nazi state? Yes and no. Far from being a smooth, well-oiled machine, Wannsee shows that decision-making in Nazi Germany was improvised, often chaotic, made on the spot rather than simply following orders laid down in Berlin.
Wannsee was largely about the struggle for power between individuals and different groups within the Nazi hierarchy. Heydrich wanted to use Wannsee to assert once and for all the authority of the SS over its rivals within the Nazi state. He used the meeting to establish his authority over the civilian representatives and make it clear that he would be in charge of the “final solution ” of the “ Jewish question ” .
As Longerich points out in his new book, “ It is particularly striking that none of the Higher SS and Police Leaders were summoned to attend; yet these were Himmler ’ s representatives on the ground in the various regions, who … had played a decisive role in the preceding months in the mass murders in the Soviet Union, the first deportations and the measures to extend the ‘ final solution ’ to Polish territory. These were the actual organisers of the deportations and mass murders .” So why weren ’ t they there?
The chronology turns out to be complicated too. Heydrich, writes Cesarani, did not connect the plans announced at Wannsee with mass killing in vans that was “ already under way in Chelmno ” or the extermination camp at Belzec, already “ under construction ”. “ In actuality, ” he goes on, “ none of the killing sites that took shape over the following months was suited to the purposes laid out by the man directing the ‘ final solution ’. Nor were many resources devoted to preparing for such a gargantuan enterprise. ”
Does this suggest, he asks, that the Final Solution “ was ill-planned, under-funded, and carried through haphazardly at breakneck speed ” ? In October 1941, three months before Wannsee, there were discussions about building a larger crematorium complex at Auschwitz. At the beginning of November 1941, work started on the construction of a camp at Belzec and from 6 December 1941 Jews were being gassed at Chelmno. More intriguing still, the Shoah by Bullets was well under way before Heydrich called his meeting. Hundreds of thousands of Jews had already been killed before the Wannsee Conference took place.
Wannsee mattered, but new scholarship shows that it mattered less than we previously thought and for different reasons, just as it shows that Anne Frank ’ s family were less representative than we thought. Trust the historians, not the media, might be one lesson we should learn from the past week.
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