The idea behind the Holocaust wasn’t conceived at the infamous Wannsee Conference, but the meeting by mostly midlevel Nazi managers in suburban Berlin harnessed mass murder to a carefully organized plan.
While British historian Peter Longerich hasn’t written the first book on the 1942 conference, Wannsee is a sophisticated reexamination predicated by decades of scholarship. Longerich shows that while Hitler’s long-range goal had always been the elimination of the Jews, not just from Europe but the entire world, the means to that end continued to evolve along with world events. In 1940 and ’41, Hitler held Europe’s Jews as “hostages,” hoping that their coreligionists in the U.S. would somehow keep America out of World War II. Once America went to war, the path to total annihilation opened. Longerich also underscores the power struggles between contending Nazi agencies that played out at the Wannsee Conference.
