Nazi Sites outside Central Berlin

Wannsee

Site of the Wannsee Conference, a meeting of senior Nazi officials of the Nazi German regime, held on January 20, 1942 to inform senior Nazis and senior Governmental administrators of plans for the "Final solution to the Jewish question." It was convened by the second-highest ranking ϟϟ leader, Reinhard Heydrich, in a luxurious villa taken over by the ϟϟ in the wealthy Berlin suburb of Wannsee. 

  Heydrich convened the conference to discuss “the Final Solution of  the Jewish  Question” on  20  January  1942  at  a  columned  official residence set amid gardens on the Wannsee, a popular public lake outside Berlin. Present, Gerlach says, summarising, “were five representatives from the Security Police and the SD, eight politicians and functionaries from the civil administration, and two representatives from the party, one from the party chancellery and one from the Race and Resettlement Office of the ϟϟ.” Eichmann and Müller, now fully informed, were among them. “We   called  it  the  Conference  of  State  Secretaries,” Eichmann  told Avner Less. It has come to be known as the Wannsee Conference.

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Inside the room where the meeting is assumed to have been held and as it appears on the promotional poster for the 2022 made-for-TV film Die Wannseekonferenz. Its purpose was to announce the launching of the “final solution” of the Jewish question in Europe to leading government and party bureaucrats and to secure their cooperation in this project. Historians have not been able to determine with absolute certainty just when Hitler made the decision for systematic genocide. On July 31, 1941, six weeks after the ϟϟ Einsatzgruppen began murdering Soviet Jews in coordination with “Operation Barbarossa,” Heydrich was delegated the task of drawing up plans for “a total solution of the Jewish question in the German sphere of influence in Europe”. It seems almost certain that he was given the green light to implement these plans by October 1941, when Jewish emigration was prohibited throughout Europe and preparations for the deportation of German Jews were put into place. Euthanasia “experts” had already been transferred to occupied Poland to set up the facilities for mass killings by poison gas. The ruthless racial and ideological war against the Soviet Union provided the conditions under which a systematic extermination program could be launched without generating wide publicity.

During my first visit in 2007

The Conference had originally been called for December 8, but the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour and the launching of the Soviet offensive against the German siege of Moscow forced a postponement. The minutes do not openly describe the killing programme, but none of the high-ranking participants from the various government ministries could have been in any doubt what Heydrich meant when he said that the remnant of Jews who survived forced labour would have to be “appropriately dealt with.” Adolf Eichmann, the specialist on the “Jewish question” in the Reich Security Main Office run by Heydrich, provided the population statistics, which overstated the number of Jews in Europe by some two million. Much of the conference was taken up by the question of whether Jews of mixed ancestry (Mischlinge) and Jews in mixed marriages were to be included in the “final solution.” The ϟϟ was forced by considerations of public morale to respect these distinctions in Germany itself. In the occupied areas, however, the Nazis made no exceptions for part-Jews or Jews in mixed marriages.

Stackelberg & Winkle The Nazi Germany Sourcebook: An Anthology of Texts (345-346)

In the rear, alongside the lake in 1922 and standing in front in 2013.

 

By the time of the conference, important preliminary decisions had been made on individual points discussed at the meeting. Hinrich Lohse had asked in a letter "Subject: Jewish executions" on November 15, 1941 from Berlin: 

Should this be done regardless of age and gender and economic interests [for example, the Wehrmacht in skilled workers in armaments factories]? It goes without saying that the purification of Jews from the East is an urgent task; but their solution must be brought into harmony with the needs of the war economy . So far, I have not been able to take such an instruction from the orders on the Jewish question in the 'brown folder' or from other decrees.

During my 2020 senior class trip

The Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories replied on December 18, 1941 that in the meantime, oral discussions had clarified and that economic issues should be "fundamentally disregarded in the settlement of the problem". On December 16, 1941, at a government meeting, Hans Frank spoke of the intention to make the General Government "free of Jews" and referred to the upcoming "big meeting in Berlin" at Heydrich's. It is not clear why the conference was postponed by about six weeks. The historian Christian Gerlach in his book Krieg, Ernährung, Völkermord… interprets Hitler's declaration of December 12, 1941, that the extermination of the Jews must be a necessary consequence of the world war that has now begun, as a decision on the Holocaust resulting in a new situation that required fundamental changes to the plans proposed by Heydrich. Such an interpretation however is shared only by a few specialist historians. 

At the memorial and educational site "House of the Wannsee Conference" my students conduct self-guided tours to their peers over roughly two hours where, in small groups, they  gather information on the topic of a chosen room, supervised and supported by the site's educators before presenting their findings to the whole cohort. The main theme they are presented with involves the widespread assumption that the Europe-wide genocide was decided as an "almost irreversible error in historiography and journalism" although the conference itself remains of great historical importance: Here the ongoing genocide was coordinated and brought to the attention of the highest officials of all important ministries, in which numerous people subsequently provided organisational support as “desk perpetrators."

 Through the site's programme they address the persecution and murder of European Jews, the history of National Socialism, the events that led up to this history and its aftermath. A number of my students managed to use the experience to write successful research papers for the IBDP's Extended Essay and Internal Assessment in History.

On the ground floor of the house, the permanent exhibition "The Wannsee Conference and the Genocide of European Jews" provides information about the process of exclusion, persecution, expulsion, ghettoisation and extermination of Jews in the German sphere of influence between 1933 and 1945. When we visited in October 2020 the permanent exhibition was revised again and now bears the heading “The meeting at Wannsee and the murder of European Jews”.

It was here at the conference that the responsibilities for the deportation and extermination campaigns started were clarified with the measures for their implementation coordinated and their timings determined. Finally, the groups of those Jews who were destined for deportation and thus for extermination were defined here. This required the cooperation of a multitude of  institutions that had not previously been informed about the “final solution”.

The contents recorded in the minutes of the Wannsee Conference include Heydrich's announcement that he had been appointed by Göring as “Commissioner for the preparation of the final solution to the European Jewish question” and that the Reichsführer ϟϟ and Chief of the German Police- Himmler- was responsible who wanted to use the conference to coordinate with the central authorities directly involved. Heydrich reported on the emigration of around 537,000 Jews from the "Altreich",  Austria, as well as Bohemia and Moravia, which were to be replaced by "the evacuation of the Jews to the East" after "prior approval by the Führer". Around eleven million Jews would be considered for the “final solution to the European Jewish question”. This number also included "religious Jews" from the unoccupied part of France, England, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey and other neutral or opposing states outside the German sphere of influence. 

The protocol further stated that 

In large labour columns, with separation of the sexes, the able-bodied Jews are being led into these areas to build roads, although a large part will undoubtedly be lost through natural reduction. Any remaining stock will have to be treated accordingly, since this is undoubtedly the most resilient part, since this, representing a natural selection, is to be addressed as the nucleus of a new Jewish construction when released. 

In the process, "Europe from west to east" would be combed through because of “socio-political necessities” and to free up living space in the Reich territory. First, the German Jews were to be transported to transit ghettos and from there further to the east.  Jews over the age of 65 and Jews with war invalidity or bearers of the Iron Cross I would be sent to the Theresienstadt ghetto which would "turn off the many interventions in one fell swoop". After possible difficulties in the “evacuation operation” in the “occupied or influenced European territories” had been addressed and discussed, the question of how to deal with “Jewish mixed race” and “mixed marriages” was addressed. 

The protocol further states that the Nuremberg Laws should "to a certain extent" form the basis for discussions. In fact, Heydrich's suggestions went far beyond that: As a rule, "mixed race 1st degree" ("half-Jews") were to be treated like "full Jews" regardless of their religious affiliation. Exceptions were only made for those “half-breeds” who were married to a “ German-blooded ” partner and who had not remained childless. Other exemptions could only be granted by the highest party authorities. Every "1st degree hybrid" who was allowed to remain in the German Reich was to be sterilised . "Mixed race 2nd degree" ("quarter Jews ") were as a rule to be put on an equal footing with the "German-blooded", unless they were classified as Jews due to their conspicuous Jewish appearance or poor police and political record. In the case of existing "mixed marriages" between "full Jews" and "German-blooded" people, the Jewish part should either be "evacuated" or sent to Theresienstadt if resistance from German relatives was to be expected. Further regulations were addressed for “mixed marriages” in which one or both spouses were “mixed race”. These detailed proposals were rejected as impractical by State Secretary Stuckart, who had been involved in drafting the Nuremberg Laws in 1935. He suggested that the compulsory divorce of "mixed marriages" be made mandatory and that all "first-degree mixed race" be sterilised. Since no agreement could be reached on these points, these detailed questions were postponed to the follow-up conferences. Josef Bühler, Hans Frank's State Secretary in the Office of the Governor General, urged Heydrich at the conference to start the measures on Polish territory in the so-called "General Government" because he saw no transport problems there and "to solve the Jewish question in this area as quickly as possible." In any case, the majority of these Jews were considered unable to work and "as carriers of the disease are an eminent danger."

The conference room at the time and as during our 2016 class trip. Students are standing around a table with copies of the minutes of the meeting, drawn up by Eichmann which were based on shorthand notes and revised several times by Müller and Heydrich. A total of thirty copies of the final version were issued, stamped as “Geheime Reichssache” and then sent to the participants or their offices. Only the 16th copy, that of the Martin Luther, has been found so far, apparently only escaping the destruction of the other files because Luther had been imprisoned in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp for an intrigue against Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop , which is why his department had been dissolved and the files had been relocated. Parts of the archive were initially imported by Americans to Marburg Castle and in February 1946 in the Telefunken factory in Berlin-Lichterfelde microfilmed for the first time. In the summer of 1948 the entire inventory was brought to safety in Whaddon Hall in Buckinghamshire, filmed again and returned to the Political Archives of the Foreign Office in Bonn at the end of the 1950s; the document has been in Berlin since the Political Archives moved. Robert Kempner, the deputy of the American chief prosecutor Robert H. Jackson, stated that the discovery of the minutes of the Wannsee Conference was reported to him in March 1947 during the preparations for the " Wilhelmstrasse Trial " by which time the invitation letter for Otto Hofmann had already been found in August 1945 and he therefore knew that a conference on the “final solution to the Jewish question” had been planned.

 

Standing in front of a display containing the minutes of the conference in 2017, and the room recreated for the outstanding BBC documentary series Auschwitz: The Nazis and the 'Final Solution' (2005).  Of the fourteen participants invited and sat around a table in this room discussing the logistics of mass murder, eight held doctorates or comparable university degrees. The minutes of the Wannsee Conference, copies of which were displayed within the glass of the table I'm standing over (since changed after a recent refurbishment post-Wuhan 'flu) were used in the opening speech in the trial against the Race and Settlement Main Office and quoted a few weeks later in the indictment for the Wilhelmstrasse trial. Although there was not yet an implementable overall plan for the “final solution”, the protocol is considered to be the key source for the organisation of genocide which Holocaust deniers therefore claim is fake, usually by referring to a book by Robert Kempner in which he mixed images of facsimiles with copies despite nevertheless correctly reproducing the text itself. Historians Norbert Kampe and Christian Mentel have refuted these false allegations.

How the room appears today, 2020. On August 7 and 13, 1941, Eichmann requested that the Reich Association of Jews in Germany to provide statistical information on Jews in Europe. His Unit IV B 4 compared these figures with information from the occupation authorities and subtracted the numbers of victims of the Holocaust in Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, which were referred to as "Jew-free". The obviously excessive figure for the unoccupied part of France, which led to speculation about the inclusion of the Jews of North Africa in the extermination plans, is explained by Dan Michman as a typo; Ahlrich Meyer traces it back to an estimate by Theodor Dannecker. According to Eichmann in his trial in Jerusalem in 1961, the minutes of the conference are "an accurate reproduction of the content of the conference". Heydrich made it important that all the essential details were recorded so that the participants could later adhere to them. Only the shorthand discussion after the conference had not been recorded. At his trial Eichmann recalled

that at the end of this Wannsee Conference, Heydrich, Muller and my humble self, settled down comfortably by the fireplace, and that then for the first time I saw Heydrich smoke a cigar or cigarette, and I was thinking: today Heydrich is smoking, something I have not seen before. And he drinks cognac - since I had not seen Heydrich take any alcoholic drink in years. After this Wannsee Conference we were sitting together peacefully, and not in order to talk shop, but in order to relax after the long hours of strain.

Eichmann contradicted the protocol on some points at the time, especially with regard to the importance of his own position at the conference. The total duration of this conference recorded in the minutes of about one and an half hours, as stated by him is, however, undisputed. Eichmann, “the chief architect of the Final Solution,” eventually was convicted of War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity and hanged in Jerusalem in 1962. He had been actively involved at Wannsee, writing Heydrich’s speech and overseeing the stenographer's record of the meeting, which Eichmann then edited. Wannsee’s spirit, not reflected in the protocol, is revealed by Eichmann’s first-hand description of “an atmosphere of agreement” and even “boundless enthusiasm” despite the “usually hesitating” Bühler and Stuckart. However, his reliability is questionable, considering he sought to “portray himself as dutiful errand boy, with neither initiative nor knowledge” and focussing on supposed enthusiasm of the law-abiding state secretaries helps build Eichmann’s case of conformity and obedience. A further limitation is the testimony’s erratic organisation and incoherent answers as when he related the discussion of the means of killing at Wannsee, making it difficult to follow. Taking place almost two decades after the Holocaust, his specific recollections of Wannsee are sometimes lacking or flawed, as when he supposes that Kreuger, not even present, spoke about technical details of genocide. Nonetheless, Eichmann does give crucial insight into Wannsee’s significance in ensuring widespread state complicity to genocide: “nail down the Secretaries of State, to commit them most bindingly, to catch them by their words.”

2020 Bavarian International School class trip

When Robert Kempner, in charge of prosecuting the German ministries at Nuremberg, unearthed the last copy of the Minutes in 1947, he deemed it “perhaps the most shameful document of modern history.” As the only available record of the Conference, the protocol is valuable in revealing the meeting’s occurrences, its significance to the final solution and widespread state complicity in the bureaucratic planning of genocide. It originated as notes, written by a stenotypist and was heavily edited by Eichmann and Heydrich to produce a document written in euphemisms and camouflage language. It is “deliberately opaque,” seen for example through the word “evacuation” a euphemism for elimination, serving the purpose of informing those with contextual knowledge and not shocking the unintended who could have come across this widely distributed Protocol. Such intentionally ambiguous terminology limits understanding of the meeting’s precise purpose and role in the Final Solution, creating controversy on whether genocide was even discussed. Considering the purpose of the conference was to establish clarity on fundamental questions, the purpose of the protocol was to record what Heydrich wanted of the meeting which, whilst valuable in reflecting Heydrich’s agenda for the implementation of the Solution, is limited by not specifying the individual roles of attendees.  

 The text of the protocol documents the intention to murder all European Jews, the agreement in principle and the effective participation of the Nazi state apparatus in the genocide. The phrase “treated accordingly” in Eichmann's rendering of Heydrich's introductory speech is seen by some historians as a typical cloak for the murder of Jews who survived forced labour, as the context does not allow any other conclusion. Hans Mommsen does contradict this by asserting that it was by no means a blank phrase; Heydrich actually planned to exterminate a large part of the Jews through labour, but the final solution to the Jewish question was only a long-term goal, before which the surviving Jews would still be transported further east. Here the settlement or reservation solution was renewed, as in the Nisko and Madagascar plans considered from 1939 to 1941 which "can hardly be viewed as a more humane alternative." According to Eichmann's own testimony in his trial, the actual language was unmistakable: "It was spoken of killing and eliminating and exterminating."

 Among specialist historians, most deduce from the extermination campaigns that had already started and the minutes of the conference itself that it had previously been decided by the highest authorities to expand the murder campaigns into a systematic genocide, to which all European Jews without distinction should fall victim. The figures for the overall planning included the Jews from England and Spain: their inclusion was unrealistic in view of the unfavourable development of the war for the Nazis at the time. Peter Longerich comes to the conclusion that, even after the conference, there was no fixed plan as to how long and by what means the genocide should be carried out. However, it can be proven that afterwards “the deportations were extended to the entire German area” and a “comprehensive forced labour programme” began to take effect.

Thomas Sandkühler points out that the decisive effect was that up to the conference in Eastern Galicia, Jews classified as “unable to work” were murdered; only then did the murder order apply to all Jews except for the very few Jews who had been declared indispensable in the oil industry. The Wannsee Conference was thus a bureaucratic clarification of the responsibilities of the agencies involved and the group of people to be murdered. Such a decision could in no case be made by subordinate persons, but only at the very highest level and only then could the leadership of the Reich Security Main Office be established and cooperation and coordination between the agencies involved ensured. 

When it was over, Heydrich was relieved and satisfied. “Happily,” he would write a month later, “[the conference] has settled the basic outlines for the practical implementation of the Final Solution of the Jewish question.” His intention had been to establish his ultimate authority over the Final Solution. His colleagues in the government and the party had been more than willing to accede responsibility for the mass murder of eleven million people to the ϟϟ. “After the conference,” Eichmann says in his memoir, “as I recall, Heydrich, Müller and your humble servant sat cozily around a fireplace. I noticed for the first time that Heydrich was smoking. Not only that, but he had a cognac. Normally he touched nothing alcoholic. The only other time I had seen him drinking was at an office party years before…. [So] we sat around peacefully after our Wannsee Conference, not just talking shop but giving ourselves a rest after so many taxing hours.”

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Accounts such as that leave the site symbolising not only the extermination of six million Jews but also the chilling administrative precision with which it was orchestrated. This bureaucratic coldness continues to serve as a reference point in Germany’s legal and public discourse, particularly when addressing modern manifestations of anti-Semitism. Germany’s strict laws against Holocaust denial and neo-Nazi activities underscore the importance of confronting the ideologies that led to the Final Solution, as initiated at Wannsee. These legal measures also illustrate the continued relevance of the conference’s legacy in shaping modern Germany’s approach to civil rights and freedoms, ensuring that the atrocities discussed at Wannsee are neither forgotten nor repeated.

2016 class trip

A third of the conference participants ended up not surviving the war. Heydrich died on June 4, 1942 as a result of an assassination attempt in Prague as related on my page about Nazi-era Prague. Roland Freisler was killed in a British bombing attack. Both Rudolf Lange and Alfred Meyer committed suicide. Martin Luther died in the spring of 1945 as a result of his imprisonment in Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Heinrich Müller was considered dead by  the post-war authorities. Before the minutes of the Wannsee Conference were discovered, two participants were already executed for war crimes committed- Eberhard Schöngarth was sentenced to death and executed by a British military tribunal in 1946 for personally ordering the shooting of a prisoner of war. Josef Bühler was sentenced to death in Kraków in 1946. Wilhelm Kritzinger died in 1947 before the opening of the Wilhelmstrasse Trial; Erich Neumann died in 1948. Georg Leibbrandt and Gerhard Klopfer were both released from custody in 1949. Otto Hofmann was sentenced to 25 years in prison in the follow-up trial of the ϟϟ Race and Settlement Main Office in Nuremberg in 1948, but was released from Landsberg correctional facility in 1954. Wilhelm Stuckart was sentenced to a sentence of three years and ten months in the Wilhelmstrasse Trial, but was released in 1949 as internment detention was taken into account. After the war as already related above, Eichmann fled to Argentina, but was kidnapped by the Israeli secret service Mossad, brought to Israel and executed in Jerusalem in 1962 after his sensational trial. 

  The Wannsee Conference is often regarded as the determining factor for the development of the Final Solution, reflected in Longerich’s argument that the scope of deportation, (i.e. defining “who was Jewish, who was Mischling,”) was a prerequisite for determining “who (if anybody) should be spared.” Thus Wannsee significantly broadened the scope of genocide involving Mischlinge, particularly in occupied territories, de jure bearing historical responsibility. Additionally, both Heydrich’s invitation letter and the protocol's opening convey the message of “a genocidal programme only now taking shape”. Wannsee's controversial purpose leaves room for interpretation on its overall. Lannahan argues genocide had been decided earlier and the concept of a “coming Final Solution” part of Heydrich’s self-aggrandisement plan and “love of the political limelight.”] Eichmann’s testimony supports the argument that Heydrich’s focus was “to extend the scope of his influence.” Eichmann’s testimony does serve to mitigate his personal role and portray Heydrich as the authority figure. Rees however, considers Wannsee a larger attempt on behalf of the ϟϟ to establish their “control of the whole deportation process.” The difficulty in understanding Wannsee's purpose frames the greater debate on its significance, though the protocol and invitation suggest that Himmler and his emissary considered it significant in determining the Holocaust.              

Wannsee’s significance to the development of the Final Solution is based on its role of coordinating both prior killing initiatives and government organs. The necessity to coordinate the “variety of killing initiatives that had emerged from a number of sources within the Nazi state” in the autumn of 1941 is what Rees regards as Wannsee’s purpose, supported by Eichmann who says a “coordinated solution” was necessary. Hence, Wannsee’s importance can be seen as administrative, “…to ensure the cooperation of the various departments in conducting the deportations,” further supported by attendees being of the Staatsekretare, the Reich’s “essential medium of policy coordination.”

 However, if Wannsee was an administrative meeting for planning the coordination of previous initiatives and government cooperation, why ignore the pressing issues of finding destinations for transport? Claims that Wannsee significantly shaped deportation arraignments, can be effectively disregarded when studying the list of attendees and the lack of any transport specialist or member of the Financial Ministry. Hence, Wannsee was not fully significant in determining the practical aspects of committing genocide but rather to the development of the Final Solution, by determining the scope of deportation, and planning government and policy cooperation for the Final Solution.              

Whilst Wannsee has been described as “the single most important event in the history of the Nazis’ ‘Final Solution’,” this is, Rees argues, an epithet “it does not quite merit” given that the bureaucracy of genocide was “decided elsewhere,” though precisely where, when and by whom is subject to debate. Rees, taking a quasi-intentionalist stance, asserts Hitler’s discussions in December 1941 were most significant to the decision making process given Hitler’s agentive control “made all this suffering enter the world.” Göbbels’s diary supports the intentionalist argument. However, Overy and Roseman have examined Wannsee’s role in the wider context of genocide, limiting it to “one of many stepping stones in the middle of a long messy process of turning vicious anti-Semitic discrimination into stark mass murder.” Nevertheless, Eichmann’s testimony in which he claims the preparatory work (prior decisions and genocidal activity and gassing) were already “known to the participants of the Wannsee Conference”, support the conclusion that genocide and its means were conceptualised elsewhere.              

2017 School trip

Rees goes on to argue that in terms of Wannsee’s role in developing the final solution, it did not catalyse genocide and was not fully causal to the great expansion of murder in 1942 by questioning why “the discussions at Wannsee had no immediate effect upon Auschwitz.”Browning insists that before killings became truly comprehensive, a further decision must have taken place, interpreting Wannsee as less significant to developments of the “Solution”. Roseman argues that “after Wannsee the operation didn’t run like clockwork,” demonstrating the lack of subsequent 'progress'; Eichmann’s testimony crucially emphasises that Himmler kept issuing orders.” The close relationship between Himmler’s visits and development of extermination support Eichmann’s claims. 

After the the war, the Red Army and later the American Army used the property. From 1947 the SPD moved in and used the house as a school camp. In 1966 the historian Joseph Wulf, who survived the Auschwitz concentration camp, founded an association for research into National Socialism. The building was to be rededicated as a documentation centre and used by the association. The plan remained controversial for a long time; it was not until 1988 that the villa and garden were reconstructed according to historical preservation criteria and for use as a memorial. In 1992 the memorial and educational centre that would become the House of the Wannsee Conference opened in the rooms of the villa; it bears the name of Joseph Wulf. Deeply traumatised by his camp experiences, lonely after the death of his wife and disappointed by the lack of interest in the Holocaust or seeking justice, Wulf killed himself on October 10, 1974. In his last letter to his son David on August 2, 1974, he wrote down a list of his disappointments, for example “9. I know that after 1945 Ilya Ehrenburg wrote an 'In memoriam' for the murdered Jews and the Soviet Union did not allow the book to appear” and “I published 18 books here about the Third Reich, and none of them had any effect. You can document yourself utterly with the Germans, it can be the most democratic government in Bonn - and the mass murderers go around freely, have their houses and grow flowers." 

My students in the Joseph Wulf Library, located on the building’s second floor and which has remained part of the memorial’s educational concept from the start. The collection focuses on the history of the Jews in Europe, anti-Semitism, persecution and genocide, National Socialism, racism, neo-Nazism, remembrance culture, treatment of Nazi history after 1945 and memorial site educational studies. The book collection currently includes some 40,000 monographs and 18,000 periodical volumes. In addition the library holds a large collection of documentary and feature films and a considerable set of periodicals and documents on microfilm and microfiche. My students were able to search through various databases for their IBDP internal assessments in History. Memorials and museums like the House of the Wannsee Conference and the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, serve as physical reminders of the Holocaust’s bureaucratic origins offering a place for reflection and education, reinforcing the importance of historical memory in preventing future atrocities. The emphasis placed on the Wannsee Conference in cultural representations underscores its role in shaping Germany’s collective memory of the Holocaust. This collective memory, in turn, plays a crucial role in Germany’s ongoing efforts to combat anti-Semitism and preserve the truth of the Holocaust for future generations.

The Wannsee Conference is the subject of now three feature films. Here is the start of the 1984 German television production Die Wannseekonferenz which presents the conference in real time. Directed by Heinz Schirk based on the play by Paul Mommertz. It shows a disturbing performance of charm and calculation by Dietrich Mattausch as Heydrich with Gerd Böckmann as Eichmann. In 1987 the cinema version followed which was filmed at the conference venue and was based on records and minutes kept of the conference, spoken by unnervingly convincing actors in carefully reconstructed surroundings and wearing meticulously authentic uniforms. In it however, Kritzinger is portrayed as a skeptic which does not correspond to the historical facts that have been handed down. In his review for The American Historical Review, Alan Steinweis notes scenes where Heydrich pulls Krtizinger and Stuckart aside as dramatic inventions. Nicholas K. Johnson (80) laments that Steinweis "unfortunately reviews the film as historians are prone to—he focuses on several scenes that obviously contain fictional elements, or “artistic license,” and avoids engaging with the film’s broader arguments and vision. The review also compares Conspiracy with Die Wannseekonferenz and actually argues that the former may be more historically accurate because it discusses the killing process in more detail, as mentioned by Eichmann during his interrogation."

Here is the entrance as shown in the film and from the same position during my 2021 class trip:

The film won numerous international prizes, including the Adolf Grimme Prize. in his review for Der Spiegel, Heinz Höhne was unimpressed:

Screenwriter Paul Mommertz, 54, is delighted: 'An optimal film, on a remarkable level.' The praise goes above all to the director Heinz Schirk, and rightly so: he understood it with a squad of proven actors, above all Dietrich Mattausch in the role of Heydrich and Gerd Böckmann as Eichmann, the Mommertz play that atmosphere of racist mania for cleansing and callous bureaucratic perfection that made the Wannsee Conference the most horrific Hitlerite in Germany. But what is presented here as a document-safe reconstruction of contemporary history, on closer inspection, proves to be a product of televised fabulous fabulousness and combination. Because: This is not the Wannsee Conference as historians know it. It's the Wannsee Conference a la Paul Mommertz.

Conspiracy featuring Kenneth Branagh as Reinhard Heydrich, Stanley Tucci as Adolf Eichmann, and Colin Firth as Wilhelm Stuckart.

Frank Pierson was the director of the 2001 Anglo-American film based on the script by Loring Mandel which, like the historical meeting, also lasts 85 minutes and is based on the minutes. However, since this does not reproduce a literal speech, the dialogues are reconstructed and therefore not historically documented. The documentary character originally intended by Pierson's production was not achieved because the implementation was dramaturgically revised.

Wannseekonferenz appears to be the better movie with Conspiracy coming across as a flashy imitation, although watching both films is instructive. Both have the same people attending the conference, but how each attendee is portrayed at the conference is strikingly different. Most of the attendees in Conspiracy (except for Dr. Klopfer) are viewed as flawed intellectuals, but full of grace, charm and manners (which makes a nice stark comparison with what they are discussing). Almost all of the attendees in Die Wannseekonferenz (except for the female secretary) are shown as crude, corrupt pigs that differ with each other only as to how to divide their 'power'. I'm tempted to have my students research the 'real' Major Lange. The crude drunken Major Lange of Die Wannseekonferenz seems more likely to be butchering the Jews of Riga than the soft spoken, charming, well-mannered Major Lange of Conspiracy. 

Nicholas K. Johnson “A classroom history lesson is not going to work”: HBO’s Conspiracy and Depicting Holocaust Perpetrators on Film The historical record needs to be read; it is not enough for a few scholars to know and understand – if history is not recreated for each generation it might as well be forgotten and its lessons left unlearned. Frank Pierson, 19981 In 2001, HBO and the BBC aired Conspiracy, a dramatization of the infamous Wannsee Conference.2 The conference, organized by Reinhard Heydrich and Ad- olf Eichmann, took place in Berlin on 20 January 1942 and was intended to bring various strands of the Third Reich government under the leadership of the SS in order to coordinate the so-called Final Solution. The surviving Wannsee Protocol3 stands as one of the most compelling pieces of evidence for the Third Reich’s genocidal intent and is emblematic of the shift from mass shootings in the occupied East to industrial-scale murder.4 The conference was not the event where “the decision” about the Holocaust was made, contrary to popular imagination.5 Conspiracy, written by Loring Mandel and directed by Frank Pierson, is an un- usual historical film because it reenacts the Wannsee Conference in real time and is devoid of the clichés prevalent throughout Holocaust films. It also engages 1 Frank Pierson. Letter to Stanley Scheinbaum, September 30, 1998, Box 11, Folder 4, Loring Man- del Papers, 1942-2006, Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, University of Wisconsin Madison, Madison, Wisconsin. 2. 2 This piece is based on my 2016 MA thesis: Nicholas K. Johnson. “HBO and the Holocaust: Con- spiracy, the Historical Film, and Public History at Wannsee” (Master’s Thesis, Indiana University, Indianapolis, 2016). 3 The protocol is not a verbatim transcript of the meeting, but rather a summary written in a euphe- mistic, bureaucratic language in order to mask the meeting’s true purpose. 4 Mark Roseman, The Villa, The Lake, The Meeting: Wannsee and the Final Solution (London: Allen Lane, 2002), 106-107. 5 Conspiracy is not innocent of spreading this erroneous view of the Wannsee Conference. Although the film itself makes no such claim, HBO’s promotional material for it certainly did, with the taglines “One of The Greatest Crimes Against Humanity Was Perpetrated in Just Over an Hour” and “One Meeting. Six Million Lives.” – See IMDb. “Conspiracy,” URL: https://www.imdb.com/ title/tt0266425/taglines (accessed November 12, 2019). For more on misconceptions reinforced by Conspiracy, see Stefanie Rauch. “Understanding the Holocaust through Film: Audience Reception between Preconceptions and Media Effects,” History & Memory 30.1 (2018): 151-188.  doi.org/10.35468/5828_11 “A classroom history lesson is not going to work” | 173 with historiographical arguments and makes a few of its own. Conspiracy is part of a subset of Holocaust films which have an “explicitly educative or conscious- ness-raising agenda, or which consciously engage with academic historical inter- pretation of the Holocaust.”6 This essay uses the production history of Conspiracy as a case study for how filmmakers can make difficult histories accessible to wide audiences. Due to the nature of film distribution, particularly in the digital age, filmmakers can reach much larger audiences than historians or museum curators (with very few exceptions). Grounded in archival sources from the Loring Mandel Collection such as script drafts, production notes, HBO meeting minutes, and correspondence, this essay analyzes Conspiracy on all three levels introduced by Robert Toplin.7 In his article “Cinematic History: Where Do We Go From Here?”, Toplin argues that most historians only engage with individual films as texts; that is, they watch the film and then write about it. Some historians go further and will touch on a film’s his- torical context and the background of its creators. However, Toplin’s third level of analysis is much rarer and guides my own research into Conspiracy: Only a few historians, though, are taking the analysis of film to a third and still deeper level. Investigations of this nature may examine the production histories behind the movies. They can extend the range of primary sources to include a wide assortment associated with the crafting of a motion picture. In this case historians can examine film treatments (story narratives and descriptions), inter-office memos from studios and production companies, letters between individuals involved in production, drafts of the script, and other materials. Analyses at this third level often include original interviews with principal artists and business managers involved in a production. The scholarship may feature evidence drawn from conversations with the cinematographer, writer, di- rector, producer, or studio executive.8 6 Barry Langford. “Mass Culture/Mass Media/Mass Death: Teaching Film, Television, and the Ho- locaust,” in Teaching Holocaust Literature and Film, ed. by Robert Eaglestone and Barry Langford (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). 64. 7 The Loring Mandel Collection at the Wisconsin Center for Theater and Film Research mostly contains Mandel’s personal files spanning his entire career in radio, film, and television. The section devoted to Conspiracy contains correspondence, his own personal notes, scans of primary and sec- ondary sources, and script drafts. The bulk of these script drafts are for Conspiracy, but the collection also includes multiple drafts for Complicity as well as drafts that combine both films into a three- hour epic. Some drafts are fresh printouts from Mandel’s word processor, others contain copious handwritten notes and emendations. Almost all drafts contain footnotes and bibliographies – with the exception of the shooting scripts. 8 See Robert Brent Toplin. “Cinematic History: Where Do We Go From Here?,” The Public Historian 25.3 (2003): 86-87. – In this piece, Toplin categorizes three levels of historical film analysis: 1. A film as a primary source. 2. The film’s historical context, background, and reception. 3. A produc- tion history of the film in question, based on archival research (scripts, memos, correspondence) and interviews.  doi.org/10.35468/5828_11 174 | Nicholas K. Johnson Furthermore, my focus on the Loring Mandel collection and the Conspiracy screenplay furthers Bruno Ramirez’s argument for the screenwriting process as the most important step in creating historical films.9 It is through the script archive that one can see how Conspiracy was conceived, its source base, what sorts of his- toriographical arguments it referred and responded to, and how the film serves as an example of responsibly “doing history” in a way that largely – no film, book, or exhibit is flawless – fulfills the goals of public history. One of the advantages of this approach is that it allows us to see what the filmmakers’ intent was, what their particular viewpoint on history was, and how they conducted research and factchecking. It is one thing for a historian to view a historical drama and specu- late about what the filmmakers meant to say. It is quite another to have documen- tary evidence of intent, bibliographies about the depicted historical events, and detailed examples of primary sources, fact checking, and argument between the consulted historians and the filmmakers – without the usual spin, simplification, and advertising language bound up in a particular film’s promotional material like trailers, press kits, and pre-air interviews.10 It is important to note that this type of source material is exceedingly rare as scripts usually belong to film studios and cor- respondence and production memos usually do not survive long enough to make it into archival collections. However, several recent studies have fruitfully utilized screenplay archives.11 Before analyzing this production material, it is important to discuss the particular problems associated with depicting the Holocaust on film. The Holocaust and Film How can one explain the “unexplainable?” This is the central challenge for film- makers depicting the Holocaust. Holocaust films at their best make the crime immediate, unsettle audiences, and go beyond mere costume drama. Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel has argued that film’s range of expressive possibilities exceeds that of the written text, but cautions us about the dangers of misrepresentation and exploitation that can only be amplified by film, a more accessible medium.12 Other survivors have suggested film as a means of communicating the experience of the Holocaust to future generations. In his memoir, Literature or Life, the Buch- 9 See Bruno Ramirez, Inside the Historical Film (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014). 10 Note the misleading language in Conspiracy’s promotional material. 11 Two recent examples are Nicholas Evan Sarantakes. Making Patton: A Classic War Film’s Epic Jour- ney to the Silver Screen (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2012), and Earl J. Hess and Pratibha A. Dabholkar. Singin’ in the Rain: The Making of an American Masterpiece (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2009). 12 Elie Wiesel. “Foreword,” in Anette Insdorf. Indelible Shadows. Film and the Holocaust (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), xi.  doi.org/10.35468/5828_11 “A classroom history lesson is not going to work” | 175 enwald survivor Jorge Semprún discussed the potential of film for communicating the experience of the camps to the rest of humanity. He recounts one survivor, a professor, discussing how to depict the Holocaust in art: ‘The cinema would seem to be the most appropriate art form,’ he adds. ‘But there certainly won’t be many film documents. And the most significant events of camp life have surely never been filmed.... In any case, the documentary has its limitations, in- superable ones.... A work of fiction, then – but who would dare? The best thing would be to produce a film right now, in the still visible truth of Buchenwald...with death still clearly present. Not a documentary, a work of fiction – I really mean that. It’s unthinkable....’13 Others, most notably the French documentarian Claude Lanzmann, famous for Shoah (1985), have argued against the fictional representation of the Holocaust. Lanzmann’s most visible critique occurred in 1994, when he argued that Schindler’s List was beyond the pale due to “trivializing the Holocaust” and that dramatically portraying the Holocaust was a “betrayal.”14 Many scholars and commentators as- sociate Lanzmann with a “prohibition on representation” (Darstellungsverbot) that places all fictionalized (or re-created) filmic depictions of the Holocaust beyond the acceptable boundaries of appropriateness or taste, as doing so would harm the “uniqueness of the Holocaust.”15 Some critics have alleged that Lanzmann was engaging in self-promotion by arguing that his documentary style was the only acceptable method of portraying the Holocaust.16 Most studies of the Holocaust and film tend to hold up Lanzmann as advocating an extreme position, vehe- mently rejecting any attempts at portraying the Holocaust dramatically. Howev- er, Lanzmann has recently amended his position, praising the 2015 Hungarian Auschwitz drama Son of Saul, as well as by collaborating with Steven Spielberg.17 In critical literature, Lanzmann has often served as an avatar for one side of what film historian Catrin Corell has identified as a debate between “mimesis and pro- hibition of images” that has existed since the end of the Second World War.18 This debate over film echoes Theodor Adorno’s oft-misquoted aphorism “To write a 13 Jorge Semprun. Literature or Life (New York: Viking Adult, 1997), 126-127. 14 Insdorf, Indelible Shadows, 259. 15 Waltraud Wende. “Medienbilder und Geschichte – Zur Medialisierung des Holocaust,” in Ges- chichte im Film: mediale Inszenierungen des Holocaust und kulturelles Gedächtnis, ed. by Waltraud Wende (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2002), 12-13. 16 Insdorf, Indelible Shadows, 259. 17 Jordan Cronk. “‘Shoah’ Filmmaker Claude Lanzmann Talks Spielberg, ‘Son of Saul,’” The Holly- wood Reporter, 2 May 2016, URL: http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/shoah-filmmaker- claude-lanzmann-talks-869931 (accessed November 12, 2019). 18 Catrin Corell. Der Holocaust als Herausforderung für den Film: Formen des filmischen Umgangs mit der Shoah seit 1945: eine Wirkungstypologie (Bielefeld: transcript, 2009), 15. doi.org/10.35468/5828_11  176 | Nicholas K. Johnson poem after Auschwitz is barbaric.”19 Historian Waltraud Wende has characterized both Wiesel and Lanzmann as embodying the “prohibition on representation” school of thought, which is complicated by the fact that Wiesel contributed the foreword to Annette Insdorf’s Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust. Wende however has astutely pointed out that any sort of standard that bans the represen- tation of the Holocaust on film is logically inconsistent unless one advocates ban- ning the depiction of all sorts of historical periods including the American West.20 Other scholars have critiqued Holocaust film from the opposite stance. Aaron Kerner has argued against an “authenticity” fetish on the part of both filmmakers and historians. For Kerner, “authenticity is a red herring” due to the inherently constructed nature of film.21 Furthermore, historians’ evaluations and critiques of films based solely on “authenticity” quickly become predictable and of little use for further analysis. The debate is important because it is the context in which Conspiracy was produced. The film succeeds in examining the Holocaust from a detached point of view that avoids depicting physical violence in any form. In doing so, it evades controversy by instead drawing attention to how the Holocaust unfolded – from the Nazi point of view. In this way, Conspiracy acts as “translator” of history, or an “intermediary between the past and present.”22 There is an imperative on the part of filmmakers and historians specializing in the Holocaust to make this difficult history accessible and understandable. In a 1994 article for Die Zeit, discussing Schindler’s List, in which he called for “images instead of footnotes,” the German historian Wolfgang Benz powerfully articulated this imperative: Documentaries cannot depict the destruction of human beings through fear of death, the perpetrators’ lust for murder, the moral ambivalence in a chaotic time and under existential threat. In order to make what happened comprehensible, the literary and dramatic form is needed.23 Similarly, Catrin Corell has argued that Erfahrbarmachung, or “experience- able-making” is the “central difficulty” of depicting the “unrepresentable” reality 19 This misquotation stems from a longer sentence: “Kulturkritik findet sich der letzten Stufe der Dialektik von Kultur und Barbarei gegenüber: nach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu schreiben, ist bar- barisch, und das frisst auch die Erkenntnis an, die ausspricht, warum es unmöglich ward, heute Gedichte zu schreiben.” – Theodor W. Adorno. Gesammelte Schriften, Band 10.1: Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft I, Prismen. Ohne Leitbild (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977), 30. 20 Wende, “Medienbilder und Geschichte – Zur Medialisierung des Holocaust,” 12, 14. 21 Aaron Kerner. Film and the Holocaust: New Perspectives on Dramas, Documentaries, and Experimen- tal Films (New York: Continuum, 2011), 15. 22 Wende, “Medienbilder und Geschichte - Zur Medialisierung des Holocaust,” 9. 23 Wolfgang Benz. “Wie authentisch muß der Bericht über ein geschichtliches Ereignis sein? An- merkungen eines Historikers zu „Schindlers Liste“: Bilder statt Fußnoten,” Die Zeit, March 4, 1994, URL: http://www.zeit.de/1994/10/bilder-statt-fussnoten (accessed November 12, 2019).  doi.org/10.35468/5828_11 “A classroom history lesson is not going to work” | 177 of the Holocaust. For her, film is the “central form of the memory of the Ho- locaust.”24 Annette Insdorf echoes this sentiment – and the arguments of film historians like Robert Rosenstone and Anton Kaes, as well as Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen’s landmark study The Presence of the Past – when she notes that Holocaust films are the primary means by which the public learns about the Holocaust; they make this historical event more accessible.25 It is important to restate here that none of these authors or filmmakers are naïve about the inherent problems associated with film as a commercial enterprise. All of the above-men- tioned authors discuss financial concerns and take them seriously. For example, Aaron Kerner notes the difficulties in reconciling the need for commercial breaks in NBC’s 1978 miniseries Holocaust with the subject matter, but his argument falters with his claim that all of television is hampered by this intimate connec- tion between production and corporate sponsorship.26 This outdated critique, or stereotype, of television is a common trope among scholars and critics who funda- mentally ignore the (initially American, but now global) cultural shift towards dif- ficult, complex dramas on cable (or streaming) networks that rely on subscriptions instead of advertising revenue.27 Conspiracy is also a historical artifact, a snapshot of HBO programming during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. HBO continues to produce historical dramas, but has recently shifted towards more blockbuster-style, special effects-driven series. Television has fundamentally changed the landscape of the historical film. Tele- vision is more accessible than theatrical film; its lower budgets also permitted a wider range of possible productions, especially on networks like HBO that do not rely on advertising. The Second World War has been a staple since the early days of television. Dramatic or comedic series like ABC’s Combat! or CBS’ Hogan’s Heroes28 were popular during the 1960s, and the 1970s saw groundbreaking doc- umentaries like ITV’s The World at War and serious dramas like NBC’s Holocaust. The West German television landscape saw an upswing in both dramas and docu- mentaries about the Second World War and the Holocaust during the 1970s and 1980s. During this period, television “popularized the task of [coming to terms with the past].”29 With the advent of long-form cable dramas on HBO like Oz 24 Corell, Der Holocaust als Herausforderung für den Film, 17. 25 Insdorf, Indelible Shadows, xvii. 26 Kerner, Film and the Holocaust, 29. 27 For HBO’s role in the changing television landscape, see The Essential HBO Reader (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2013), and Dean J. DeFino. The HBO Effect (New York, London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013). For more on recent cable television and the (serial) historical dra- ma, see Chapter 2 of Alison Landsberg’s Engaging the Past: Mass Culture and the Production of Historical Knowledge (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015). 28 Known as Ein Käfig voller Helden in Germany. 29 Wulf Kansteiner. In Pursuit of German Memory: History, Television, and Politics After Auschwitz (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2006), 111.  doi.org/10.35468/5828_11 178 | Nicholas K. Johnson and The Sopranos during the 1990s, networks like HBO became able to attract larger audiences. In other words, this new style of cable drama primed audiences for more “difficult” productions, including thought-provoking historical dramas. These are not “TV movies” in the traditional – and sometimes pejorative – sense of the term, which means something inferior to theatrical releases due to lower budgets, network restrictions, and the like.30 Historians have analyzed historical cable television dramas like Deadwood and argued for them as works of historical interpretation that can compete or stand alongside traditional, physical public history sites such as museums.31 Historian Alison Landsberg has analyzed series like Mad Men, Rome, and Deadwood and dubbed them “historically conscious television dramas,” arguing that long-form television has distinct advantages over theatrical films for depicting history.32 While Conspiracy is a 90-minute movie, it also benefits from some of the same factors that give long-form cable drama a distinct advantage over the theatrically-released film. This focus on accessibility and on making a difficult history comprehensible for international publics that did not experience the Second World War firsthand places trends in Holocaust film directly in line with trends in the public history movement. Public history is similarly invested in making difficult histories acces- sible to wide audiences. Both Anton Kaes and Annette Insdorf have borrowed a metaphor for film from film theorist Siegfried Kracauer. This metaphor sees film as Athena’s polished shield in the face of Medusa: it allows one to see a “reflection” of pure horror without being destroyed by it (as one would by witnessing it first- hand).33 Kracauer’s view of the utility and possibility of film in the wake of the Holocaust is well-worth repeating for this study; it articulates Kracauer’s reasoning for confronting the difficult and terrifying past on film. Furthermore, it serves as an important capstone on the discussion of the Holocaust, public history, and film: The mirror reflections of horror are an end in themselves. As such they beckon the spectator to take them in and thus incorporate into his memory the real face of things too dreadful to be beheld in reality. In experiencing the rows of calves’ heads or the 30 Emphasizing this difference is especially important when discussing cable and streaming provid- er-produced productions with Germans, who are often unfamiliar with the peculiarities of the German television landscape compared to Anglophone or other European countries. German television, while publicly funded, often suffers due to an overwhelming amount of formulaic pro- grams geared towards older audiences. So-called “quality TV” is slowly but surely starting to return to the German small screen. See Babylon Berlin (2017) and Hindafing (2017), to name a few. 31 Andrew Urban. “Review of Legends of Deadwood.” The Journal of American History 94.1 (2007): 224-231. 32 Alison Landsberg, Engaging the Past: Mass Culture and the Production of Historical Knowledge (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 61-62. 33 Insdorf, Indelible Shadows, xvii.  doi.org/10.35468/5828_11 “A classroom history lesson is not going to work” | 179 litter of tortured human bodies in the films made of the Nazi concentration camps, we redeem horror from its invisibility behind the veils of panic and imagination. And this experience is liberating in as much as it removes a most powerful taboo. Perhaps Perseus’ greatest achievement was not to cut off Medusa’s head but to overcome his fears and look at its reflection in the shield. And was it not precisely this feat which permitted him to behead the monster?34 In light of high-quality television productions like Conspiracy, among others, it is worth reiterating Anton Kaes’ reapplication of Kracauer’s quote to this era: Per- seus’ shield is no longer a cinematic canvas. It is a television (or tablet, laptop) screen.35 Films are significant for public historians because they attract large audi- ences, spawn public debates, especially in the press, and often serve as a “gateway” to history for their audiences. By seeing film as mere entertainment or a purely profit-driven enterprise, historians and educators can miss out on how film can enter into historiographical conversations and ignore how it influences mass audi- ences. After all, audiences will watch historical films and television series regard- less of whether or not they have the historians’ seal of approval. The following sections will now turn to a production history of Conspiracy and the archival ma- terial mentioned earlier in order to analyze how filmmakers create historical films. Using this material illustrates the film’s conception, writing process, and the work of several historical consultants and advisers. It also permits analysis of Conspiracy on all three levels of historical film analysis outlined by Toplin.36 A Production History of Conspiracy Conspiracy dramatizes The Wannsee Conference by recreating it in real time; the conference lasted ninety minutes, so does the film. The plot is grounded in the surviving meeting minutes, but most of the dialogue is invented. Conspiracy fo- cuses on how educated men in the prime of their lives met in a charming villa to discuss the logistics of mass murder. The camera rarely leaves the meeting table, and its documentary-style techniques, including eye-level placement and the use of long takes and close-ups, place the audience at the meeting rather than at a more distanced vantage point. Unlike most other Holocaust films, it portrays no victims, it tugs at no heartstrings. The men joke about the effects of gassing Jews to death, they get drunk, they allow petty jealousies and institutional rivalries to 34 Siegfried Kracauer. Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960), 306. 35 Anton Kaes. “History and Film: Public Memory in the Age of Electronic Dissemination.” History and Memory 2.1 (1990): 117. 36 Toplin, “Cinematic History: Where Do We Go From Here?,” 86-87.  doi.org/10.35468/5828_11 180 | Nicholas K. Johnson surface. Additionally, the film explicitly references the Wannsee Protocol and its constructed nature, ranging from scenes mentioning the Protocol itself to instanc- es of Eichmann ordering his stenographer to stop transcribing the meeting at key moments. One such moment occurs when SS Major Rudolf Lange implores the attendees to drop the veneer of “evacuation,” a euphemism for mass murder.37 There are no heroes in this film for the audience to identify with; there is no up- lifting message or happy ending. It is a film utterly devoid of sentimentality. The film portrays key personalities of the Third Reich, most notably those of Reinhard Heydrich and Adolf Eichmann, but it also explores the power struggles between different institutions. In doing so, the film raises questions about the Wannsee Conference and the Holocaust as well as the dangers and final consequences of far-right politics. Conspiracy is not the first filmic adaptation of the Wannsee Conference. It follows in the footsteps of a 1984 West German/Austrian film, Die Wannseekonferenz, which stood out among a wave of historical television productions in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Although Conspiracy initially began as an idea for an En- glish-language remake of Die Wannseekonferenz, the two films are similar on only a surface level. They both reflect historiographical trends during the decades in which they were produced and are attempts to make that historiography and his- tory accessible to wide audiences. In 1984, Die Wannseekonferenz premiered on the West German network ARD. Written by the trained-historian-turned-screen- writer Paul Mommertz and directed by Heinz Schirk, Die Wannseekonferenz stood out for its uncompromising depiction of Nazi perpetrators from a German point of view. This earlier film is characterized by its astounding level of detail, intri- cate German dialogue, and recreation of the Wannsee Conference in real time. Although it suffers from the low budgets of West German public television in the early 1980s, the film still holds up today, particularly for German speakers. After a scathing review by the Der Spiegel journalist Heinz Höhne, Mommertz responded with a spirited defense of his film.38 In contrast with Conspiracy, the earlier film 37 Simone Gigliotti. “Commissioning Mass Murder: Conspiracy and History at the Wannsee Con- ference,” in Repicturing the Second World War: Representations in Film and Television, ed. by Michael Paris (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 129. 38 See Mommertz’s account of the dispute and his bibliography on “Paul Mommertz | Wannsee- konferenz,” URL: http://www.paul-mommertz.de/wannseekonferenz01.html (accessed August 15, 2019). Heinz Höhne is best known in the Anglophone world for his history of the SS, The Order of the Death’s Head: The Story of Hitler’s SS, 1967. Contemporary historians have criticized Höhne for uncritically accepting the statements of former SS members that he had befriended in the course of his research. See Karsten Wilke. Die “Hilfsgemeinschaft auf Gegenseitigkeit” (HIAG) 1950 - 1990. Veteranen der Waffen-SS in der Bundesrepublik (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2011), 388.  doi.org/10.35468/5828_11 “A classroom history lesson is not going to work” | 181 focuses strongly on Hitler’s role in the Holocaust, reflecting the so-called “inten- tionalist” historiographic trend popular in the 1970s and early 1980s.39 The Director: Frank Pierson At the behest of Peter Zinner, Austrian exile and later editor of Conspiracy, director Frank Pierson first watched Die Wannseekonferenz in the mid-1990s and, accord- ing to screenwriter Loring Mandel, it “didn’t move [Pierson] to tears, but moved him to anger.” Recreating the Wannsee Conference quickly became a passion project.40 That same year, Pierson met with HBO executives Bob Cooper and Mi- chael Fuchs, who agreed to produce an English-language version for “a new gener- ation.” At this time, the project was simply titled Wannsee.41 According to Loring Mandel, Pierson approached him after viewing Die Wannseekonferenz and asked him to draft a screenplay for HBO.42 Mandel and Pierson had worked together on Citizen Cohn, an HBO movie about the McCarthy era. Shortly after signing on to Wannsee, Mandel and Pierson became attached to Complicity, another historical drama set during WWII. Complicity was a pet project of Colin Callender, then head of HBO NYC Productions, which managed the Wannsee project. Complicity explored Allied indifference towards the fate of European Jewry in the face of overwhelming evidence. Callender decided to combine the two projects into com- panion films.43 As film and television critic Alan Sepinwall has noted, the 1990s and early 2000s were a time when “If you wanted thoughtful drama for adults, you didn’t go to the multiplex; you went to your living room couch.”44 HBO had further invested in original film by forming HBO NYC Productions, a company 39 At the end of Die Wannseekonferenz, Kritzinger and Stuckart discuss which pages of Mein Kampf argue that Jews should be killed with poison gas. Furthermore, a bust of Hitler lingers in the back- ground of the conference room throughout the film. Note that the debate between “intentional- ism” and “functionalism” has largely fallen by the wayside, but during the 1980s and 1990s, it was the subject of fierce debate among historians of the Holocaust and twentieth-century Germany. Most historians today tend to combine a mixture of both viewpoints. For a discussion of inten- tionalism, see Charles S. Maier. The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German National Identity (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1988). Chapter 3, “A Holocaust like the Others? Problems of Comparative History.” 40 Alexander Tang. “A Conversation with Loring Mandel.” The Harvard Crimson. November 12, 2013, URL: http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2013/11/12/interview-loringmandel/ (accessed November 12, 2019). 41 Frank Pierson, Letter to Stanley Scheinbaum, 1. 42 Tang, “A Conversation with Loring Mandel.” 43 Pierson, Letter to Stanley Scheinbaum, 1. 44 Alan Sepinwall, The Revolution Was Televised: The Cops, Crooks, Slingers, and Slayers Who Changed TV Drama Forever (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2013), 7-9, 102. doi.org/10.35468/5828_11  182 | Nicholas K. Johnson whose goal was to “[produce] ‘edgier and more diverse’” programming.45 HBO NYC Productions produced Conspiracy and Complicity46 during the early stages of the writing process and continued to do so until it eventual merged with HBO Films. HBO Films made a name for itself by producing quality original program- ming that simultaneously embodied and subverted established genres; it actively sought to be the “auteur studio of the nineties.”47 HBO Films sought to “make us nervous” with “fearless” and “provocative” programming by examining con- troversial issues that traditional broadcast networks actively avoided. According to The Essential HBO Reader, a scholarly examination of HBO’s history, HBO’s “most notable” productions “negotiate the past and interrogate cultural memo- ry through the depiction of individual lives that are positioned at the center of national struggles, community conflicts, social movements, and scandals.”48 Fur- thermore, these productions usually avoid the clichéd uplifting moral lessons and happy endings common to programming on other networks.49 Instead, HBO’s historical productions often use history to impart “lessons” to the audience.50 Con- spiracy certainly fits this description and is a typical example of HBO’s output during the turn of the millennium. Additionally, Conspiracy was part of a wave of television and film productions during this period produced with the fiftieth an- niversary of World War II in mind, including HBO’s miniseries Band of Brothers, which also aired in 2001. In a preface to Conspiracy, director Frank Pierson outlined the film’s key features: At Wannsee, near Berlin, the plan [coordinating the so-called Final Solution] was out- lined and Germany’s ruling bureaucrats were given their instructions. The meeting’s atmosphere was like a corporate board meeting. In “Conspiracy,” the meeting at Wann- see – a beautiful lakeside mansion confiscated from a Jewish family – is dramatically rec- reated from the actual minutes of the meeting, written and edited by the then obscure Lt Col Adolf Eichmann and General Heydrich, himself. The meeting lasted approximately an hour and a half. Certainly, in that period, these men were not always at their best and always on the point. There are moments of light- ness, moments of hostility, plenty of defensiveness, a few moments when the subtext is utterly revealed, and much self-protective game-playing. I want, too, to show how, 45 Dana Heller, “Films,” in The Essential HBO Reader, ed. by Gary R. Edgerton and Jeffery P. Jones (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2013), 42-51. 43. 46 Note that HBO eventually dropped the Complicity project, possibly for political reasons. For a de- tailed discussion of this project’s cancellation, see Nicholas K. Johnson, “HBO and the Holocaust: Conspiracy, the Historical Film, and Public History at Wannsee,” 37-42. 47 Heller, “Films”, 44-45. 48 Heller, “Films”, 46. 49 Heller, “Films”, 46 50 Heller, “Films”, 50.  doi.org/10.35468/5828_11 “A classroom history lesson is not going to work” | 183 in any individual, cruelty and sociopathology can coexist with the sappiest sentimen- tality.51 In Pierson’s preface, which functions as a sort of outline of the film and its un- produced sequel, Complicity, he touches on several overarching themes. The most prominent is the incongruity of the Wannsee Conference’s purpose with that of its location and manner – a charming lakeside villa where Nazi functionaries, as Mark Roseman has noted, “[spoke] to one another with great politeness, sipping their cognac, [they] really had cleared the way for genocide.”52 The sheer banality of what Pierson describes as “a corporate board meeting” does not fit with our preconceived notions of how the Holocaust unfolded and confronts us with our own ideas about what evil truly is. Indeed, the image of the Nazi as the quintessen- tial “desk murderer” (Schreibtischtäter) is a trope that the filmmakers were keenly aware of, utilized, and responded to in the film, with Stanley Tucci’s portrayal of Adolf Eichmann being the most notable and important example. An early com- ment from Pierson on Eichmann’s character argued that Eichmann should fool the audience into underestimating him, because “Heydrich may be the architect, but Eichmann as the carpenter and plasterer is the man who will do it.”53 As evidenced by earlier discussion, and the final film, the filmmakers honed in on this subtext and made it one of the film’s two major historiographical arguments. For them, Wannsee was the moment where Eichmann became a major player, even if he later denied it, and even if other, higher-ranking conference attendees underestimated him. This choice is further revealed by Eichmann’s introducto- ry scenes focusing on a meticulous and ruthless figure obsessed with numbers, especially a scene in which Eichmann instructs butlers to “itemize the costs” for broken china and ensure that the butler who had broken said china pay for all of it.54 Nevertheless, the film does not only portray the conference participants as “desk murderers.” Eberhard Schöngarth and Rudolf Lange, both highly educated leaders of Einsatzgruppen, exemplify what Heydrich dubbed his “fighting admin- istration” (kämpfende Verwaltung), those SD functionaries who combined bureau- 51 Frank Pierson. “Preface,” April 28, 1998, Box 6, Folder 7, Loring Mandel Papers, 1942-2006, M2006-124, Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wisconsin. 1. 52 Mark Roseman, The Villa, The Lake, The Meeting: Wannsee and the Final Solution (London: Allen Lane, 2002), 107. 53 Loring Mandel and Frank Pierson. “Commented Version of Conspiracy: The Meeting at Wanns- ee, 1st Draft” December 18, 1996, Box 2, Folder 9, Loring Mandel Papers, 1942-2006, M2006- 124, Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madi- son, Wisconsin. 6. 54 Loring Mandel. “Conspiracy by Loring Mandel, with Scene Numbers, 5/19/01” May 19, 2001, Box 1, Folder 6, Loring Mandel Papers, 1942-2006, M2006-124, Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wisconsin. 3.  doi.org/10.35468/5828_11 184 | Nicholas K. Johnson cratic expertise with what the Wannsee Protocol ominously refers to as “practical experience.”55 In this respect, the film plays to – and then subverts – preconceived notions about Holocaust perpetrators. The characters in Conspiracy, with the ex- ception of the inexplicably obese Gerhard Klopfer, are no “diabolical-psychopath- ic beasts,” contrary to claims still advanced by historians.56 Pierson’s preface also focuses on the rivalries between institutions and individuals within the Nazi state, which counters the stereotypical image of an efficient, top- down bureaucracy carrying out Hitler’s orders to the letter. Later in the preface, Pierson characterizes the conference as “primarily for the purpose of consolidat- ing [Heydrich’s] power as the sole commander of the Final Solution. The various ministries of the Reich had been dealing with the “Jewish Question” in various ad hoc ways...”57 This characterization of various ministries jockeying for position fits with the functionalist historiographical school first made popular in the 1980s and 1990s. It is important to note that this preface also contains a factually incorrect state- ment that the filmmakers removed from later script drafts (at the behest of histor- ical advisor Andrea Axelrod and Norbert Kampe, then-director of the Wannsee Conference Memorial): the villa did not belong to a Jewish family, but instead to the industrialist Ernst Malier and later, the fraudulent businessman Friedrich Minoux. As a consequence of his imprisonment and financial difficulties, Minoux sold the villa to an SS front group (Stiftung Nordhav), which is how it became SS and SD property.58 One key point made by Pierson that sums up the view he and Mandel had of film as history as well as their goal with Conspiracy appears in a 1997 letter that he wrote to producer Frank Doelger. The production team had been arguing back and forth over whether to make the historical narrative clearer to the audience, in other words, to spell it out for them. In response, Pierson argued that such tactics would reduce the project to “dry documentary” and that this defeated the purpose of the film.59 For Pierson, the audience’s emotional response to the film 55 Mark Roseman. “Appendix A: Translation of the Protocol,” in The Villa, The Lake, The Meeting: Wannsee and the Final Solution (London: Allen Lane, 2002), 111. 56 Hans-Christian Jasch and Christoph Kreutzmüller. “Die Teilnehmer: Die Männer der Wannsee- Konferenz”, ed. by Hans-Christian Jasch and Christoph Kreutzmüller (Berlin: Metropol, 2017), 13-14. 57 Pierson, “Preface,” 1. 58 For the history of the Villa itself, see Johannes Tuchel. Am Grossen Wannsee 56-58: Von der Villa Minoux zum Haus der Wannsee-Konferenz (Berlin: Edition Hentrich, 1992), and Michael Haupt. Das Haus der Wannsee-Konferenz: Von der Industriellenvilla zur Gedenkstätte (Berlin: Haus der Wannseekonferenz, 2009). 59 Frank Pierson. “Frank Pierson to Frank Doelger,” August 15, 1997, Box 11, Folder 4, Loring Mandel Papers, 1942-2006, M2006-124, Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, Uni- versity of Wisconsin Madison, Madison, Wisconsin.  doi.org/10.35468/5828_11 “A classroom history lesson is not going to work” | 185 was paramount: the audience should be “getting angry and it should be emo- tional.”60 Showing a historical event was more important than exposition via voi- ceover narration: “We are almost always up against the tendency to move the subtext into text – which is the exact opposite of drama.”61 This tension between the needs of drama and the imparting of historical truths cuts to the heart of the dilemma faced by filmmakers or historians trying to produce historical films. Many ideas that sound good at first, especially to educators and historians, such as an overabundance of expository narration or dialogue that provides background information throughout the film or on-screen text as characters are introduced, can hamper a film’s quality. Pierson’s commitment to showing rather than tell- ing also places Conspiracy firmly in the camp of HBO’s “difficult” dramas of the early 2000s like The Wire and Deadwood – series notorious for eschewing exposi- tion and dropping the viewer in an unfamiliar world and storyline. Furthermore, Conspiracy makes villains the main characters – an uncommon practice in 2001. HBO’s The Sopranos is a notable example of television succeeding at this, albeit in a much different way than Conspiracy. Indeed, Frank Pierson argued that “[t]he one truly different, shocking and original aspect of Conspiracy is presenting (in a sense) the Holocaust from the Nazi point of view.”62 Loring Mandel’s Screenplay Loring Mandel’s first script draft, titled Conspiracy: The Meeting at Wannsee shows that Mandel spent a large amount of time researching material related to the Wannsee Conference and its participants. The Wannsee Protocol itself is the most important source Mandel consulted, and a few lines of dialogue illustrate that. However, it is important to remember that the Protocol is not a verbatim tran- script of the meeting, but a heavily edited summary that depends on bureaucratic euphemisms and evasions in order to get its true meaning across. No participant would actually have spoken like the Protocol. Although the bibliography itself is sparse, the script contains forty-seven footnotes; no small number when one realizes that screenplays are much smaller in both page length and word count compared to a book, with the overwhelming majority of text devoted to dialogue. Most of the footnotes provide context to particular statements made by confer- ence participants or serve to provide evidence for opinions held by certain partic- 60 Pierson, “Pierson to Doelger.” 61 Pierson, “Pierson to Doelger.” 62 Frank Pierson. “Notes for Complicity,” February 9, 2001, Box 11, Folder 4, Loring Mandel Pa- pers, 1942- 2006, M2006-124, Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wisconsin. 3.  doi.org/10.35468/5828_11 186 | Nicholas K. Johnson ipants that are not recorded in the Wannsee Protocol itself. Mandel has referred to this process of including participants’ historical opinions in invented dialogue as “informed speculation.”63 The historian Simone Gigliotti has written at length on Mandel’s use of “informed speculation” as a way to fill in gaps in the narrative that is “not entirely dissimilar from historians investigating Wannsee.”64 In his book Reel History: In Defense of Hollywood, historian Robert Toplin uses the same term: “fictional scenes offer informed speculation – educated guesses about how the ideas and behavior found expression in those unrecorded settings.”65 Mandel’s “informed speculation” is largely successful, but not without its problems. While the first draft contains many instances of “informed speculation” and points to specific research that Mandel conducted, more rigorous historical research was yet to come; this took place after HBO renewed its agreement to produce Conspiracy after previously cancelling both it and Complicity. In April 2000, Mandel re-submitted his second draft of Conspiracy: The Meeting at Wannsee to HBO. By this time, HBO had agreed to produce Conspiracy and had relegated Complicity to the back burner. This version of the script is mostly unchanged from the first draft; it is the version most commented on by historians serving as consultants, HBO executives, and others involved with the production, but it is important to keep in mind that the producers and various historians provided extensive comments on the scripts since the project’s beginning. The earliest comments on this script (as evidenced by the archive) indicate that the production team was well-aware of script’s potential shortcomings and sought to make a particular historiographical argument. One version of this script, which contains comments in red from an unknown author (presumably Frank Pierson), contains several passages that indicate the production team’s intent. One passage emphasizes the need to avoid caricatures of Nazis that could push the film into B-movie camp: [W]e have to avoid demonizing these people who are so damned by their very presence [at Wannsee]... We have to watch out for overkill; the most interesting thing about the whole conference is the dispassionate rationality of it all.66 The second point regarding the “dispassionate rationality” of the Wannsee Con- ference being its most interesting feature is a theme that the production team hit on repeatedly during the writing process. Conspiracy is not a standard WWII or Holocaust film; there is no on-screen violence; no action (outside of Heydrich’s as- 63 Gigliotti, “Commissioning Mass Murder,” 125. 64 Gigliotti, “Commissioning Mass Murder,” 127. 65 Robert Brent Toplin. Reel History: In Defense of Hollywood (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002), 201. 66 Mandel and Pierson, “Commented Version of Conspiracy: The Meeting at Wannsee, 1st Draft.” 6.  doi.org/10.35468/5828_11 “A classroom history lesson is not going to work” | 187 sassination, which does not appear in the final screenplay) takes place. One of the main hurdles the filmmakers had to overcome was how to make a ninety-minute meeting capture and hold an audience’s attention. For Pierson, one of the goals was to dramatize Arendt’s banality of evil concept itself.67 Early comments on the scripts chiefly came from HBO officials like Ani Gasti, Colin Callender, Frank Doelger, and Frank Pierson. The earliest set of available comments (from December 1996, less than one month after the first draft was submitted to HBO), from Colin Callender, then head of HBO NYC Productions (and soon-to-be president of HBO Films), identify Conspiracy’s two historiograph- ical arguments: 1) The Wannsee Conference was a way to consolidate Reinhard Heydrich’s power and, by extension, the leadership of the SS in carrying out the so-called Final Solution; and 2) Wannsee was a turning point in the career of Adolf Eichmann.68 Callender continues by asking for a more clear explanation of the competition between agencies over the Jewish Question; he emphasizes the fact that there was no clear and “centralized” policy before Wannsee. Callender’s comments follow what Holocaust historians broadly refer to as a “functionalist” interpretation of the Holocaust. Callender also wonders if the rise of Eichmann after Wannsee is Heydrich’s intention and whether this was decided at the confer- ence.69 Later versions of the script emphasize Eichmann’s ascent in importance as more of an accident of history – for the filmmakers, his position at the conference placed him in the perfect position to carry out the Final Solution. The final draft also emphasizes Heydrich’s viewing Eichmann as a sort of awkward and some- times embarrassing, albeit extremely competent, subordinate; Heydrich becomes irritated with or dismisses Eichmann on occasion. For example, there is a brief scene towards the end of the film when Heydrich asks the attendees to “astonish Charles Darwin” by agreeing to provide him and the SS with their utmost support in carrying out mass murder. The final version of the script notes that Heydrich resents Colonel Eberhard Schöngarth’s “deference” toward Eichmann and sub- sequently “passes over” him when asking for each attendee’s agreement to the decisions made at the meeting.70 Later comments by Callender and producer Frank Doelger show that the pro- duction team was aware of historical invention and sought to avoid it whenever possible. Early character descriptions provided by Mandel included statements that could not be confirmed historically, the most egregious of which being “I’ve given him some heart” in reference to Major Rudolf Lange, Commander of the 67 Pierson, “Preface,” 1. 68 Colin Callender. “Notes/Wannsee,” December 6, 1996, Box 10, Folder 7, Loring Mandel Papers, 1942- 2006, M2006-124, Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, University of Wis- consin-Madison, Madison, Wisconsin. 1. 69 Callender, “Notes/Wannsee,” 1. 70 Mandel, “Conspiracy, by Loring Mandel, with Scene Numbers, 5/19/01.” 96.  doi.org/10.35468/5828_11 188 | Nicholas K. Johnson SD (Security Service) and SiPo (Security Police) in Riga.71 Callender and Doelger rejected the “I’ve given him some heart” statement on the grounds that it “sug- gest[s] a degree of invention that undermines the factual basis of the script.”72 This criticism holds up upon viewing the final film; certain characters, most notably Klopfer, are portrayed in ways that are not supported by the historical record. Not all early comments by the producers were sound. In many instances, they desired unnecessary exposition or wanted to tone down coarser language that they felt sounded “contemporary,” including one of Heydrich’s most chilling lines in the entire screenplay: We will not sterilize every Jew and wait for the race to die. We will not sterilize every Jew and then exterminate them, that’s farcical. Dead men don’t hump, dead women don’t get pregnant; death is the most reliable form of sterilization, put it that way.73 In almost every instance of coarse language or harsh vocabulary that emphasiz- es the gravity of the issues being discussed, the vulgarity of the participants, or shocks the audience in some way, HBO executives tended to err on the side of caution. However, Mandel and Pierson fought for the inclusion of this type of language and it ultimately remained in the final film. In the instance of harsher language producers found “contemporary,” the decision to leave it in arguably made the film more accessible. Expunging the dialogue of profanity or explicit statements would bowdlerize the film and lend it a Masterpiece Theater aesthetic that would do a disservice to the subject matter. Historical Advisors Three historians, including a full-time researcher hired by HBO, provided exten- sive commentary on the script and offered a myriad of suggestions for improving its historical accuracy and historical argument. Michael Berenbaum of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum was the film’s credited historical consultant, and the amount of comments he submitted attests to that. However, Andrea Axel- rod, credited as the film’s historical advisor, clearly conducted much more research and put forth a much larger effort than has been previously acknowledged in the press or in various publications which reference Berenbaum as if he were the project’s sole historical advisor. The production team also consulted Holocaust 71 Mandel, “Conspiracy: The Meeting at Wannsee, 1st Draft.” ii. 72 Colin Callender and Frank Doelger. “Notes Conspiracy - Complicity,” June 28, 1997, Box 10, Folder 9, Loring Mandel Papers, 1942-2006, M2006-124, Wisconsin Center for Film and The- ater Research, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wisconsin. 1. 73 Mandel, “Conspiracy, by Loring Mandel, with Scene Numbers, 5/19/01.” 59.  doi.org/10.35468/5828_11 “A classroom history lesson is not going to work” | 189 historian Christopher Browning, who provided brief comments on an early script draft.74 The earliest commentary from a historian came in the form of a letter from Mi- chael Berenbaum in 1998. Berenbaum bluntly opened with: “The script doesn’t make it. The Wannsee Conference is inherently undramatic.” He was more partial to Complicity and offered extended commentary on it in this document.75 Ber- enbaum then commented on various things that he thought needed correcting in the Conspiracy screenplay. Notably, he emphasized the importance of the age of the respective characters, who were all relatively young men.76 By July 2000, Berenbaum was mostly satisfied with the script. However, he advocated several changes in a somewhat rambling document that HBO executives, Frank Pierson, and Loring Mandel were clearly unhappy with. In a few instances, he argued for changes to make the film easier, in his opinion, for the audience to comprehend. However, one of these changes involved removing Heydrich’s following line: “[H] istory will mark us for having the gift and the will to advance the human race to greater purity in a space of time so short that Charles Darwin would be aston- ished.”77 For Berenbaum, this statement was too much for an audience to handle, and he thought that the reference to Darwin should be removed or contextu- alized with a scene depicting a private conversation between Heydrich, Müller, and Eichmann referencing “survival of the fittest.”78 Needless to say, this “creative comment”79 as Pierson put it, did not go over well. In a large internal memo detailing how the production team was responding to comments, criticism, and suggestions from all three historians involved with the project, the producers answered Berenbaum’s suggestion by stating: “The Darwin reference remains in script. Poor practice to assume that the audience is insufficiently educated.”80 This 74 Christopher Browning. Letter to Ani Gasti, August 22, 2000, Box 10, Folder 7, Loring Mandel Papers, 1942-2006, M2006-124, Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wisconsin. 75 Michael Berenbaum. Letter to Frank Doelger, February 5, 1998, Box 10, Folder 7, Loring Mandel Papers, 1942-2006, M2006-124, Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wisconsin. 1. 76 Berenbaum, April 1998 Letter to Frank Doelger, 2. 77 Loring Mandel. “Conspiracy: The Meeting at Wannsee, an Original Drama” April 19, 2000, Box 3, Folder 4, Loring Mandel Papers, 1942-2006, M2006-124, Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wisconsin. 90. 78 Michael Berenbaum. Letter to Frank Doelger, July 5, 2000, Box 10, Folder 7, Loring Mandel Papers, 1942-2006, M2006-124, Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wisconsin. 1-2. 79 Berenbaum, July 2000 Letter to Frank Doelger, 2. Note inserted and signed by Pierson directly under Berenbaum’s text. 80 Ani Gasti. “Conspiracy: The Meeting at Wannsee - Notes Review,” October 2, 2000, Box 10, Folder 7, Loring Mandel Papers, 1942-2006, M2006-124, Wisconsin Center for Film and The- ater Research, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wisconsin. 11.  doi.org/10.35468/5828_11 190 | Nicholas K. Johnson refusal to assume that their audience would be “insufficiently educated” is one of Conspiracy’s strengths. As with other HBO dramas, little is spelled out for the viewer, and much of the plot is conveyed through subtle turns of phrase or facial expressions. In this sense, the film treats its audience like adults. The idea that historians should “dumb down” history for non-specialist audiences in order to make it palatable or inoffensive is one that most history educators and public his- torians are familiar with. Rather than “dumbing down” complicated histories for wider audiences, public history is partially an exercise in translation – one is able to tell exceedingly complicated histories by employing language appropriate to the audience. In this respect, both historians and filmmakers face similar challenges when writing narratives. After HBO renewed its commitment to the Conspiracy project, it hired Andrea Axelrod to conduct full-time research and fact check Mandel’s script. She provid- ed the most extensive amount of commentary and additional research for Con- spiracy. The majority of Axelrod’s input took place after April 2000. She was very familiar with the historiography of the Third Reich and the Wannsee Conference. Around a month before shooting commenced, Axelrod provided a document that managed to provide citations for most scenes, lines, or other statements within the script. In total, the document provides almost 170 citations for a script totaling a little over one hundred pages, a much larger figure than the number of footnotes visible in the earlier drafts of the script itself. The citations include sources, com- ments, questions, and notes if a particular line or scene has no basis in the histor- ical record. Axelrod cites a plethora of sources, the most important of course be- ing the Wannsee Protocol and Eichmann’s trial transcripts, evidence gathered for the Nuremberg Trials, biographies of conference participants, conversations with members of the Wannsee Memorial Museum staff, and works by German and An- glophone historians like Claudia Koonz, Christopher Browning, Raul Hillberg, Günther Deschner, Hans Mommsen, and others.81 With few exceptions, the cited works are all academic – rather than popular – histories. Axelrod’s efforts show that historical films are not uniformly “entertainment” vehicles that ignore histor- ical “facts.” It is also important to keep in mind that these are internal documents – the audience, including critics, did not have access to them; there was no need for HBO to conduct this level of research and fact-checking if it were just about them being able to slap the boilerplate “this film is based on a true story” phrase onto a title card. It is also hard to argue that making their sources and bibliogra- phies available would have been possible in an era before the Internet’s ubiquity.82 81 Andrea Axelrod. “Sources for September 13, 2000 Script,” September 13, 2000, Box 10, Folder 8, Loring Mandel Papers, 1942-2006, M2006-124, Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Re- search, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wisconsin. 82 Contrast the early 2000s with our current era, in which screenwriter Craig Mazin (of HBO’s 2019 miniseries Chernobyl) listed all of his sources on Twitter, made his screenplays available on  doi.org/10.35468/5828_11 “A classroom history lesson is not going to work” | 191 Furthermore, footnoting and fact-checking scripts to this degree is not a standard practice in the film industry. In an earlier document, Axelrod provided the production team with a script re- view. In this document, she vastly expanded the number and depth of citations that Mandel himself had provided. She even contacted the German Weather Ser- vice to find out if snow blanketed the Wannsee area on 20 January 1942. The script review also confirms that Axelrod collaborated with Gaby M. Oelrichs, then head librarian at the Gedenkstätte Haus der Wannseekonferenz.83 The script re- view references then-recent developments in historiography, including whether or not the SS had confiscated the Wannsee Villa from a wealthy Jew.84 It would be impossible to exhaustively list every aspect of the script that Axelrod found evidence for, but it includes tidbits like whether Heydrich would have shuffled his note cards (yes, he liked to adlib) or to which attendees Stuckart would be likely to complain about the large SS presence at the meeting.85 Axelrod cites a range of what was then cutting-edge Holocaust scholarship from both the Anglosphere and Germany, most notably Hans Mommsen’s work on the Civil Service and the Holocaust, which emphasizes a weakened Civil Service that took a backseat to SS domination.86 It is important to note that not all of Axelrod’s objections were taken into account, notably one she had to the conflict between Wilhelm Stuckart and Gerhard Klopfer, a conflict which has no basis in reality and instead seems to use the two as avatars of the Civil Service and the Party, respectively, in order to give the audience insight into the tangled rivalries among agencies and power-holders during the Third Reich.87 This hypothesis is the only way the film’s heated conflict between Stuckart and Klopfer makes even a bit of sense, as both men not only knew each other, but had collaborated on a journal that dealt with “ethnically based constitution and administration.” In other words, on a project that was clearly grounded in a shared understanding of race.88 Although the production team ignored a few of Axelrod’s critiques – most notably the one his website, and produced a companion podcast in which he discussed exactly which aspects of his scripts were fictionalized and if so, why. See HBO, “Chernobyl,” URL: https://www.hbo.com/ chernobyl (accessed November 12, 2019) for the scripts and podcast. See https://twitter.com/ clmazin/status/1135766541843066880 for a partial bibliography. 83 Andrea Axelrod. “Conspiracy: Script Review,” June 23, 2000, Box 10, Folder 8, Loring Mandel Papers, 1942- 2006, M2006-124, Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wisconsin. 2. 84 Axelrod, “Conspiracy: Script Review,” 7. 85 Axelrod, “Conspiracy: Script Review,” 13. 86 Andrea Axelrod, “Overall Issues Part II,” June 23, 2000, Box 10, Folder 8, Loring Mandel Papers, 1942- 2006, M2006-124, Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, University of Wis- consin-Madison, Madison, Wisconsin. 1. 87 Axelrod, “Overall Issues Part II,” 4. 88 Roseman, The Villa, the Lake, the Meeting, HBO and the Holocaust: Conspiracy, the Historical Film, and Public History at Wannsee In 2001, Home Box Office aired Conspiracy, a dramatization of the infamous Wannsee Conference organized by Reinhard Heydrich and Adolf Eichmann. The Conference took place in Berlin on 20 January 1942 and was intended to coordinate the Final Solution by asserting the dominance of Heydrich and the SS over other governmental departments. The surviving Wannsee Protocol stands as one of the most compelling pieces of evidence for the Third Reich’s genocidal intent and emblematic of its shift from mass shootings in the occupied East to industrial-scale murder. Conspiracy, written by Loring Mandel and directed by Frank Pierson, is an unusual historical film because it reenacts the Wannsee Conference in real time, devoid of the usual clichés prevalent throughout Holocaust films. It also engages with historiographical arguments and makes a few of its own. This thesis argues that dramatic film has been relatively ignored by the public history field and uses Conspiracy as a case study for how dramatic film and television can be used to further the goals of public history, especially that of making complex and difficult histories accessible to wide audiences. Grounded in a thorough reading of script drafts, production notes, HBO meeting minutes, and correspondence, this thesis examines Conspiracy from the vantage point of scholarship in public history, film studies, and Holocaust studies. It details the film’s production history, the sources used for the film, the claims it makes, and advocates for dramatic film as a powerful public history outlet. Ultimately, this thesis argues that Conspiracy is exactly the type of historical film that historians should be making themselves. Raymond J. Haberski, Ph.D., Chair  viTable of Contents Chapter One: Public History, Film, and Wannsee ................................................1 Chapter Two: Conspiracy’s Production Process and Public History ............................. 32 Chapter Three: Die Wannseekonferenz and Conspiracy ................................................65 Bibliography ................................................................ .........................98 Curriculum Vitae vii “Historians must take an interest in the audiovisual world, if they are not to become schizophrenics, rejected by society as the representatives of an outmoded erudition.”1 Chapter One: Public History, Film, and Wannsee I. Introduction This thesis examines HBO’s Conspiracy (2001) as an example of a dramatic historical film as a public history method. Conspiracy is an Anglo-American dramatization of the Wannsee Conference, an event that took place on 20 January 1942. Conspiracy dramatizes this meeting by recreating it in real time; the conference lasted ninety minutes, so does the film. The plot and dialogue are based off of the surviving meeting minutes, but most of the dialogue is invented as the minutes are not a verbatim transcript. Conspiracy focuses on how educated, middle-aged men met in a charming villa to discuss the logistics of mass murder. The camera rarely leaves the meeting table, and its documentary-style techniques, including eye-level placement and the use of long takes and close-ups, place the audience at the meeting rather than at a more distanced vantage point. Unlike most other Holocaust films, it portrays no victims, it tugs at no heartstrings. The men joke about the effects of gassing Jews to death, they get drunk, they allow petty jealousies and institutional rivalries to surface. There are no heroes in this film, there is no uplifting message or happy end. The film portrays key personalities of the Third Reich, most notably those of Reinhard Heydrich and Adolf Eichmann, but it also explores the power struggles between different institutions. In doing so, the film raises important questions about the inner workings of the Third Reich, the Holocaust, and the importance of the Wannsee Conference itself. 1 Pierre Sorlin, “How to Look at an ‘Historical’ Film,” in The Historical Film: History and Memory in Media, ed. Marcia Landy (New Brunswick, N.J: Rutgers University Press, 2000), 25–49. 26.   1 Conspiracy is not the first filmic adaptation of the Wannsee Conference. It is a remake of a 1984 West German/Austrian film, Die Wannseekonferenz, which stood out among a wave of historical television productions in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Although Conspiracy began as a remake of Die Wannseekonferenz, the two films are similar on only a surface level. They both reflect the historiographical trends in their respective countries during the decades in which they were produced and are attempts to make that historiography and history accessible to wide audiences. They are also the products of different directorial and screenwriting visions. Due to a large archival collection containing production material for Conspiracy, this thesis focuses on Conspiracy more than Die Wannseekonferenz. Nevertheless, it is important to discuss the earlier film as it is also a work of public history in its own right. This chapter provides context for using HBO’s Conspiracy (2001) as a case study for regarding dramatic film as public history. Using Conspiracy as a case study illustrates the entire history of the film: its conception, writing process, historical research, production meetings, filming, and reception. Before doing so, it is necessary to examine public history as a practice, how the discipline has been traditionally defined, current trends in the field, and how dramatic historical film (as opposed to documentary) can fit into the wider public history framework. Using the production history of a dramatic film as a case study allows this thesis to examine the challenges—and advantages—of using dramatic film as a public history method in a way that goes beyond mere analysis of a finished film. The chapter will first provide a brief history of the Wannsee Conference, the infamous meeting and basis for these two films. It outlines various ways of analyzing historical films, including those that address the problematic aspects of “fictionalizing” historical events. This chapter will move to an exploration of history on film, how several historians have been grappling with this issue, and how their ideas inform the methodology. 2 These historians have explored the issues surrounding fictionalizing historical events and argue that a degree of fictionalization is absolutely necessary due to the constraints of dramatic film as a medium, but that fictionalization has to be kept within reason. Beyond methodological issues, it will then discuss the different issues and challenges posed by depicting the Holocaust on film. Scholars, filmmakers, Holocaust survivors, journalists, and others consistently debate the ethics of depicting the Holocaust, an event that some have deemed “unrepresentable,” on film. Conspiracy and Die Wannseekonferenz (1984) will be placed in the wider context of Holocaust film and allowing analysis of both films in the second and third chapters, which will, in part, look at the two films as examples of two very different waves in the history of Anglo-American and German television. This history will also explore key historiographical debates surrounding the conference, and it will briefly touch on predominant trends in Holocaust historiography relevant to each film’s respective historical arguments. Three sections: public history and film, the Holocaust on film, and the history of the Wannsee Conference will provide necessary background to the following chapters. These chapters will analyze the filmmaking process behind Conspiracy, compare Conspiracy with its predecessor Die Wannseekonferenz, examine the reception of both films, and evaluate both films as works of public history. Conspiracy and Die Wannseekonferenz are part of a subset of Holocaust films that have an “explicitly educative or consciousness-raising agenda, or which consciously engage with academic historical interpretation of the Holocaust.” 2 This distinction is important. Historians have also analyzed historical HBO dramas like Deadwood and argued for them as works of historical interpretation that can compete with traditional, physical public history 2 Barry Langford, “Mass Culture/Mass Media/Mass Death: Teaching Film, Television, and the Holocaust,” in Teaching Holocaust Literature and Film, ed. Robert Eaglestone and Barry Langford, First Edition edition (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 63–77. 64.  3 sites.3 After all, engagement in historiographical debates is one of the cornerstones of the historical profession. If this is not an example of “doing history” or public history on film, there is very little else that could be. Films are significant for public historians because they attract large audiences, spawn public debates, especially in the press, and often serve as the “gateway” to history for their audiences. By seeing film as mere entertainment or a purely profit-driven enterprise, historians can miss out on how film can enter into historiographical conversations and ignore how it influences mass audiences. Dramatic films do not compete with or replace traditional history, but complement it. Conspiracy does so by responding to various historiographical trends and by making historiographical arguments of its own. II. Wannsee Conspiracy and Die Wannseekonfenenz are dramatic reconstructions of the Wannsee Conference that unfold in real time. The Wannsee Conference occurred on 20 January 1942 in a villa overlooking the Wannsee, a lake west of Berlin. The meeting took place at Am Großen Wannsee 56-58, which served as a guesthouse for traveling members of the SS security police and SD, the intelligence arm of the SS.4 Reinhard Heydrich led both organizations, along with the Gestapo, under the umbrella of the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA).5 Heydrich led the meeting, the stated goal of which was to discuss coordinating policy for “the Final Solution of the European Jewish question.”6 Adolf Eichmann, at the 3 Andrew Urban, “Review of Legends of Deadwood,” The Journal of American History 94, no. 1 (2007): 224–31. 4 Johannes Tuchel, Am Grossen Wannsee 56-58: Von der Villa Minoux zum Haus der Wannsee-Konferenz (Berlin: Edition Hentrich, 1992). 108. 5 Mark Roseman, The Villa, The Lake, The Meeting: Wannsee and the Final Solution (London: Penguin Books, 2002). 14. 6 Mark Roseman, trans., “Appendix A: Translation of the Protocol,” in The Villa, The Lake, The Meeting: Wannsee and the Final Solution (London: Penguin Books, 2002), 108–18. 109. When directly quoting from the Wannsee Protocol, I will use Mark Roseman’s translation from The Villa, The Lake, The Meeting. For the German original, see the scans located on the Haus der Wannsee-Konferenz website:  4 time Heydrich’s expert on Jewish affairs, organized the meeting of high-ranking members of the SS, the Nazi Party, and civilian ministries whose missions were concerned with the Jewish Question, including ministries with which the SS had previously had difficulty.7 Civilian attendees were mostly Staatssekretäre, or State Secretaries, a rank roughly approximating that of the US under-secretary of state.8 The main evidence for the meeting consists of a fifteen-page protocol—written by Adolf Eichmann—that records the meeting minutes in the evasive, euphemistic language of bureaucracy. This protocol, discovered by the Nuremberg Trial prosecution team in 1947, “remains the most emblematic and programmatic statement of the Nazi way of doing genocide.”9 Wannsee has captured the imaginations of historians and the public since the Protocol’s discovery. As historian Katie Digan notes, “...the document and the meeting have become a powerful symbol of the Holocaust for the wider public.”10 The Protocol begins with a list of attendees and their organizations, then moves into a discussion of Nazi persecution of the Jews up to that date and a list of the Jewish populations of every European country totaling over 11 million. Due to the war, the previous Nazi policy of Jewish emigration had become untenable, so the “new solution” of “evacuating Jews to the east” was underway.11 The Protocol is full of euphemism like “evacuation,” but its genocidal intent is clear, especially in a section describing the future use of Jews to work on “constructing roads” in the East: http://www.ghwk.de/fileadmin/user_upload/pdf-wannsee/dokumente/protokoll-januar1942_barrierefrei.pdf (PAAA Berlin, R 100857, Bl. 166-180) 7 Richard J. Evans, The Third Reich at War (London: Penguin Books, 2010). 260. 8 Roseman, The Villa, the Lake, the Meeting. 57. 9 Ibid. 1-2. 10 Katie Digan, Places of Memory: The Case of the House of the Wannsee Conference (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). 23. 11 Roseman, “Appendix A: Translation of the Protocol.” 111.  5 Doubtless the large majority will be eliminated by natural causes. Any final remnant that survives will doubtless consist of the most resistant elements. They will have to be dealt with appropriately, because otherwise, by natural selection, they would form the germ cell of a new Jewish revival. (See the experience of history).12 Europe was to be “combed through from west to east” of Jews, who would be sent to “transit ghettos” before heading eastwards. The Protocol then includes an extensive discussion on the treatment of so-called Mischlinge, or persons of partial Jewish ancestry.13 The Nuremberg Laws—or The Law for the Defense of German Blood and Honor—were enacted in 1935. They based citizenship on blood, stripping Jews of their civil rights, and forbidding marriage and sexual relations between Jews and Germans. The Nuremberg Laws were intended to further isolate the Jewish population during the 1930s and to encourage emigration.14 The Protocol records Heydrich and the conference attendees reviewing these laws and advocating evacuation or mass sterilization depending on whether the people in question were “persons of mixed blood of the first degree” (half-Jews), “persons of mixed blood of the second degree” (quarter-Jews), Jews married to Germans, or “persons of mixed blood” married to Germans. State Secretary Dr. Wilhelm Stuckart, representing the Reich Ministry for the Interior and architect of the Nuremberg Laws, argued for forced sterilization across the board due to the “endless administrative work” that the above- discussed parsing of different classifications of Jews would entail. State Secretary Dr. Josef Bühler requested that the Final Solution begin in the Generalgouvernment as quickly as possible. Finally, the meeting was ended after “the various possible kinds of solution were discussed.”15 12 Ibid, 113. 13 Ibid, 113-114. 14 Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews: Volume 1: The Years of Persecution 1933-1939 (New York: HarperCollins, 1997). 142. 15 Roseman, “Appendix A: Translation of the Protocol.” 117-118.  6 In her influential Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), Hannah Arendt controversially portrayed Adolf Eichmann as epitomizing the “banality of evil” stereotype has become cliché when discussing Nazis. Essentially, this concept refers to conscienceless and thoughtless bureaucrats who followed orders because they were orders, not because they necessarily believed in them. The “banality of evil” is an attempt to square the ordinariness of Nazi perpetrators with the extraordinariness of their crimes. In Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt describes Eichmann’s presence at Wannsee as that of a glorified secretary who held little importance at the meeting.16 Almost all histories of the Wannsee Conference disagree with Arendt’s depiction of Eichmann, as this depiction of Eichmann as relatively unimportant requires taking Eichmann’s dishonest testimony in Jerusalem at face value. The creators of both films grappled with this depiction, with Conspiracy pushing back against it a bit more than Die Wannseekonferenz. The differing characterizations of Eichmann will be explored in detail in Chapter Three. The historiography of the Wannsee Conference centers on just how important the conference was in the history of the Holocaust. Wannsee has often been erroneously seen as a “smoking gun” for the Holocaust. The Third Reich’s campaign of mass murder had begun after the June 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union, making it impossible to claim that the Wannsee Conference was the turning point where Nazi leaders decided to annihilate all of European Jewry. Note that mass shootings had taken place throughout the occupied East prior to Wannsee and that Major Rudolf Lange, a conference attendee, had firsthand 16 Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, (New York: Penguin Classics, 2010). 113-114.  7 experience in leading these executions, making him unique among the attendees.17 This is further complicated by the lack of a Hitler order, e.g. a “smoking gun” for the Holocaust. Historians are in general agreement, however, about the Conference serving to establish the dominance and preeminence of Heydrich, Himmler, and the SS in all matters related to the Final Solution.18 Even historians who argue against the Wannsee Conference as a turning point in the history of the Final Solution concede on this point.19 Historian Mark Roseman argues that the main purpose of Wannsee was to establish RSHA (and SS) dominance over the civilian ministries represented at the conference—and make them complicit in genocide.20 Nikolaus Wachsmann, historian of the concentration camp system, has pointed to the lack of a representative from the growing concentration camp empire as evidence of the camps being absent from the meeting’s content.21 This echoes Wolfgang Scheffler’s argument about Heydrich using the conference to “reassert a declining position” as the concentration camp system fell outside of his realm.22 The most convincing arguments see Wannsee as a moment in time that captures a transition to industrial-scale genocide. The German historian Peter Longerich has characterized the Protocol as a “snapshot of a transitional period.”23 Roseman echoes this by referring to Wannsee as a “keyhole” or a “signpost indicating that genocide had become official policy” which provides us with a 17 Andrej Angrick and Peter Klein, The Final Solution in Riga: Exploitation and Annihilation, 1941-1944, First English Language Edition (New York: Berghahn Books, 2009). 261-262. 18 Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945: The Years of Extermination, Reprint edition (New York: Harper Perennial, 2008). 343. 19 Robert Gerwarth, Hitler’s Hangman: The Life of Heydrich, 1st Edition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011). 210. 20 Roseman, The Villa, the Lake, the Meeting. 83-86. 21 Nikolaus Wachsmann, KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps, 1st Edition (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015). 295. 22 Roseman, The Villa, the Lake, the Meeting. 83. 23 Mark Roseman, “‘Wannsee’ als Herausforderung: Die Historiker und die Konferenz,” in Die Wannsee- Konferenz vom 20. Januar 1942: Planung und Beginn des Genozids an den europäischen Juden, ed. Peter Longerich, Norbert Kampe, and Peter Klein (Berlin: Edition Hentrich, 1998), 401–14. 44.  8 window onto how the Third Reich transitioned from mass shootings to industrial killing.24 It is in this idea—Wannsee as keyhole—that Conspiracy excels at “translating” the complicated history of the Holocaust’s origins for a mass audience. III. Public History and Dramatic Film Public history is a movement with a myriad of identities. There is no discernable difference between the practice of public history and that practiced in the academy in terms of research methodology or rigorousness of the scholarship. The key distinction, rather, is one of audience. Public history’s main purpose to make complex pasts accessible to wide audiences. It has traditionally focused on history outside of the academy, most notably in museums, archives, national parks, living history centers, and governmental agencies. Typically, film is included in this wide definition, but often only documentary films such as those by Ken Burns. The relative neglect of dramatic film is not due to any innate conservatism among public historians, but rather in the wider historical profession itself. One scholar charges that historians, in general, have been “profoundly skeptical” and dismissive of non-documentary film.25 Nevertheless, dramatic film is beginning to be taken seriously by the public history profession and has generated an enormous amount of historical scholarship since the 1980s. Different institutions, academic programs, and individual historians all have their own definitions of just what public history is. The National Council on Public History (NCPH) defines public history as “the many and diverse ways in which history is put to work in the world” and argues that the less-common term “applied history” is more 24 Roseman, The Villa, the Lake, the Meeting. 79, 106-107. 25 William Guynn, Writing History in Film (Oxford: Taylor & Francis, 2006). 1-2.  9 accurate.26 Writing for the American Historical Association, Robert Weible argues that defining the field may be an exercise in futility because “public history may even be like jazz or pornography: easier to describe than define, and you know it when you hear it or see it.”27 The public historian Philip V. Scarpino argues that public history is “a way of understanding and practicing the craft of history” and that “communication” to a wide audience is what truly distinguishes public history from the history traditionally practiced in the academy.28 Echoing this sentiment, Library of Congress historian Jason Steinhauer advocates a vision of public historians as “history communicators” who translate complex histories for the public and utilize every means of available media, including television and internet video platforms like Vine and YouTube.29 This broader idea of public history as a philosophy and methodology to disseminate historical knowledge to the public certainly has room for the dramatic film. If public history’s main priority is to communicate history to a wide audience, dramatic film, whether in the theater or on cable networks, has enormous potential to reach an audience of millions, vastly larger than most museum exhibits can ever hope to reach. In The Presence of the Past (1998), Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen’s landmark survey of American attitudes towards history, film and television come up as the most common way people encounter the past.30 Film historian Anton Kaes echoes this line of thinking: 26 “About the Field,” National Council on Public History, accessed June 7, 2016, http://ncph.org/what-is-public- history/about-the-field/. 27 Robert Weible, “Defining Public History: Is It Possible? Is It Necessary?,” Perspectives on History, March 2008, https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/march-2008/defining- public-history-is-it-possible-is-it-necessary. 28 Philip V. Scarpino, "Some Thoughts on Defining, Evaluating, and Rewarding Public Scholarship." The Public Historian 15, no. 2 (Spring 1993) 55-61. 56. 29 Jason Steinhauer, “Introducing History Communicators,” National Council on Public History, accessed June 7, 2016, http://ncph.org/history-at-work/introducing-history-communicators/. 30 Roy Rosenzweig and David Paul Thelen, The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998). 31.  10 Surpassing schools and universities, film and television have become the most effective (and paradoxically least acknowledged) institutional vehicles for shaping historical consciousness. They are powerful because they can make history come alive more readily than commemorative addresses, lectures, exhibitions or museums; they can resituate past events in the immediate experience of the viewer.31 Some public history graduate programs have begun to include film and media as possible specializations. The University of West Florida offers a Film and Media History Specialization that works in concert with PBS and the university’s Journalism Department.32 The relatively new MA program at Freie Universität Berlin emphasizes the relationship between media and history just as much as the “traditional” areas of public history, e.g. museums and memory culture. One of its stated goals is for “students [to] develop skills and competences which enable them to present historical problems and issues to the general public via different forms of media.”33 NCPH includes “film and media producers” in its list of types of public historians.34 The murky category of “media” often—but not always— appears in definitions of public history, but programs and institutions often define this conservatively, referring only to either documentary film or traditional journalism, (broadcast and print). For its part, Freie Universität Berlin encourages its public history students to take dramatic film seriously as a form of public history, and the department offers courses that focus on it and require extensive film analysis.35 31 Anton Kaes, “History and Film: Public Memory in the Age of Electronic Dissemination,” History and Memory 2, no. 1 (1990): 111–29. 112. 32 University of West Florida, “Public History | University of West Florida,” accessed June 7, 2016, http://uwf.edu/cassh/departments/history/graduate-programs/public-history/. 33 Freie Universität Berlin, “Master in Public History,” May 17, 2008, accessed June 7, 2016, http://www.geschkult.fu-berlin.de/en/e/fmi/studium/masterstudium/public_history/index.html. 34 “About the Field.” 35 See http://www.fu-berlin.de/vv/en/lv/212582?m=150192&pc=52959&sm=163783, "Geschichtskultur: Anwendungsfelder in der Public History.” As part of this course, students produced extensive analyses of dramatic films.  11 Film, including dramatic film, is increasingly becoming accepted by the wider public history community. In 2003, NCPH’s journal, The Public Historian, devoted an entire issue to film. This issue included contributions from several historians, and it touched on an array of dramatic films and documentaries including: A History of Britain, Le Retour de Martin Guerre, JFK, Reds, Mission to Moscow, Joan of Arc; but its main focus is on how film can enhance understanding of history and be a useful tool for the public historian. The issue’s introduction, “History, Historians, and Visual Entertainment Media: Toward a Rapprochement,” by Shelley Bookspan, argues that the common skepticism that historians show towards film stems from historians trained and socialized solely in written text. Analyzing visual language does not come as easily to historians, and the common criticism of historical films for using creative license also applies to the choices historians make when selecting sources and writing history. She argues that “it is time for the disciplines of history and film to cross-fertilize.”36 Bookspan advocates training students in analyzing and producing historical films and suggests that it is imperative for public historians to learn how to communicate beyond the written text, lest they “limit [their] own means of expression” and “[lose] influence over history.”37 The issue continues with the article “The (Un)Making of a Historical Drama: A Historian/Screenwriter Confronts Hollywood,” where Daniel Blake Smith discusses the pitfalls of working with Hollywood as a historian. Although a useful cautionary tale, this article’s bitterness and derision of the studio system as “Hollyweird” should be taken with a grain of salt. Nevertheless, Smith points out the danger of marginalization faced by historians who enter film production without adequate preparation. He points out that 36 Shelley Bookspan, “History, Historians, and Visual Entertainment Media: Toward a Rapprochement,” The Public Historian 25, no. 3 (August 1, 2003): 9–13. 10-12. 37 Ibid, 13.  12 Hollywood often sees the historian “as glorified fact-checker and truth police” more concerned with “buttons on the uniforms” than historical interpretation and story.38 This view also ignores the valuable works of cinematic history produced by screenwriters who are not professional historians, especially works like Conspiracy and Die Wannseekonferenz. In one of the more powerful articles in this issue of The Public Historian, the influential film historian Robert Rosenstone argues that historians should learn to “read” film and rather than simplifying history; “[f]ilms seem simple because on a surface level they are so easy to watch.”39 Rosenstone is unsure of whether we can call historical films “History” but offers a compelling call for historical films to be included in the standard list of public history “areas”: ...the historical film can do “history” —that is, recount, explain, interpret, and make meaning out of the people and events in the past. Like written history, it utilizes traces of that past, but its rules of engagement with them are structured by the possibilities of the medium and the practices it has evolved. So its claims on us will inevitably be far different from those of written history.40 Rosenstone concludes his essay by arguing that historians’ current skepticism and rejection of film is untenable in this century and that taking historical films seriously both as sources and as methods of interpreting the past can “expand the vocabulary with which we think and write history upon the page.”41 Robert Brent Toplin’s contribution to the issue, “Cinematic History: Where do We Go From Here?” argues that “cinematic artists...are becoming our most influential 38 Daniel Blake Smith, “The (Un)Making of a Historical Drama: A Historian/Screenwriter Confronts Hollywood,” The Public Historian 25, no. 3 (August 1, 2003): 27–44. 44. 39 Robert A. Rosenstone, “The Reel Joan of Arc: Reflections on the Theory and Practice of the Historical Film,” The Public Historian 25, no. 3 (August 1, 2003): 61–77. 70. 40 Ibid, 72. 41 Ibid, 77.  13 historians.”42 Toplin discusses the advantages of the standard Hollywood historical movie over the avant-garde historical film, the latter of which is often championed by scholar like Rosenstone. For Toplin, the mass-market Hollywood film is what generates “lively debates about interpretation” and reaches a wide audience.43 Toplin argues in favor of “fictionalizing,” one of the biggest qualms most historians have with film, by arguing that this is an essential aspect of filmmaking and can account for the “unknowable.”44 For him, most criticisms of historical films found in the popular press are “irrelevant” because they demonstrate an ignorance of how film and Hollywood operate.45 For Toplin, fictionalization is unavoidable and fictionalization, in and of itself, should not be criticized. Fictionalization in film should not be dismissed out of hand, but fictionalization can, and should be, criticized when it distorts history to a degree that it misleads the audience. Conspiracy mostly avoids these pitfalls, even if the dialogue is invented.46 The most important aspect of Toplin’s article—and a guiding principle for this thesis—is his concept outlining the three levels of historical film analysis. The first level of analysis examines the finished film itself, including all things that film critics traditionally examine such as dialogue, cinematography, sound, and editing. The second level of analysis places the film in a historical context, which includes the film’s reception, biographies of the filmmakers, and other aspects. The third and final level of analysis is rarely undertaken. This level examines the production history of a specific film, scripts, studio memos, meeting minutes, promotional materials, interviews, and more.47 This work engages with HBO’s 42 Robert Brent Toplin, “Cinematic History: Where Do We Go From Here?,” The Public Historian 25, no. 3 (August 1, 2003): 79–91. 91. 43 Ibid, 83. 44 Ibid, 89. 45 Ibid, 88-89. 46 See Chapter Two for an in-depth discussion of Conspiracy’s invented dialogue and “informed speculation.” 47 Toplin, “Cinematic History.” 86-87.  14 Conspiracy at all three levels of analysis due to its grounding in production materials such as correspondence, memos, meeting minutes, and most importantly, scripts. The final article in 2003’s special issue of The Public Historian is Gerald Herman’s “Creating the Twenty-First-Century ‘Historian For All Seasons.’” Herman echoes Rosenstone’s critique of historians by citing Simon Schama, who points out that historians are often only trained in textual analysis and thus err by thinking of “print as deep, images [as] shallow” and that ‘“Don’t know” is echoed by “don’t need to know.”’48 For Herman, this neglect of visual history and exclusive focus on textual analysis, especially that written for a dissertation committee as opposed to a wider audience, threatens historians because they will remain in “advisory or expert witness roles” for filmmakers instead of making films themselves. This would therefore damn historians to “minor supporting roles in the construction of popular understanding.”49 Taken together, the articles in The Public Historian illustrate that dramatic film can be a form of public history, that some public historians have done excellent work in advocating for it as such, and that the largest public history organization in existence, NCPH, took them seriously enough to devote an entire journal issue to the topic. Robert Rosenstone and Robert Brent Toplin have written multiple books on the topic of history as film; they are some of the most prominent experts on the subject, and their contribution to The Public Historian shows that they do not see their work as somehow standing outside public history. Thus, this section sets the stage for my thesis, which argues that Conspiracy stands as an exemplary case study of a dramatic film as public history. This chapter will now further 48 Simon Schama, “Television and the Trouble With History,” BBC History Magazine 3, no. 7 (July 2002): 44., quoted in Gerald Herman, “Creating the Twenty-First-Century ‘Historian For All Seasons,’” The Public Historian 25, no. 3 (August 1, 2003): 93–102. 49 Gerald Herman, “Creating the Twenty-First-Century ‘Historian For All Seasons,’” The Public Historian 25, no. 3 (August 1, 2003): 93–102. 102.  15 explore history and film beyond The Public Historian, particularly the difficulties encountered when portraying the Holocaust on film. IV. History and Film Historical dramas have been a major part of cinema since its beginnings at the turn of the twentieth century. Early Hollywood studios including Warner Brothers had entire departments devoted to historical research.50 Cecil B. DeMille maintained a library devoted to research for historical films.51 In the United States, D.W. Griffith stands out as an early pioneer of historical film, most notably with his Lost Cause-infused Birth of a Nation (1915). In Inside the Historical Film, the historian and screenwriter Bruno Ramirez points out that the former-historian, then U.S. President, Woodrow Wilson’s praise of Birth of a Nation “could also be taken as an informal validation of the new medium’s power to ‘write history’.”52 Historical film also has its roots in cinematic traditions beyond Hollywood. Early German cinema was rife with historical subjects, especially in the films of Paul Wegener, Fritz Lang, and, most notably, Ernst Lubitsch. Other Weimar Republic-era films, while not obviously concerned with historical events, were nevertheless characterized by “interpretations of historical experience,” particularly the trauma of the First World War in what Anton Kaes has dubbed “Shell Shock Cinema.”53 Ramirez rightly points out that “[i]n the country that had invented scientific history, these pioneering filmmakers did not need the approval of academic historians in their determination to search the past for their storytelling and in the 50 Fred Andersen, “The Warner Bros. Research Department: Putting History to Work in the Classic Studio Era,” The Public Historian 17, no. 1 (January 1, 1995): 51–69. 51 Bruno Ramirez, Inside the Historical Film (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014). 23. 52 Ibid, 21. 53 Anton Kaes, Shell Shock Cinema: Weimar Culture and the Wounds of War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011). 6.  16 process advance and refine film language.”54 Indeed, Ramirez notes that the epic, feature- length historical film came into being at the same time that history professionalized, and he argues that this could have created a “sense of competition or rivalry” between filmmakers and historians.55 This often-overlooked historical accident should not be ignored. Professional historians have been responding to (and largely dismissing) filmmakers from the very beginning of both professions. It is no wonder historians, trained in the methods of Leopold Ranke (wie es eigentlich gewesen), would be skeptical of the new, hyper-modern medium that Fritz Lang characterized as “the strongest instrument available for the mutual understanding of peoples” which “[had] an advantage over all other expressive forms: its freedom from space, time, and place.”56 In some ways, this debate has never gone away: historians often seem bound by a text-centric conservatism and filmmakers often ignore basic historical facts and interpretations in favor of either profit margins or artistic statement, indicating a gulf between historical analysis and “historical imagination.” Since the 1980s, several historians have pushed back against the historical discipline’s usual skepticism or dismissal of film. This group of historians includes the Americans Robert Rosenstone and Robert Brent Toplin, who contributed to the film issue of The Public Historian, but also French scholars like Marc Ferro, who argued that film’s use of imagery was too ambiguous for historians.57 Exploring the tension between the written text and all other mediums of expression is central to the works of historians that focus on film; some, including Toplin, have advocated a “history in images” to stand alongside traditional, text- based, history. Hayden White has advocated the term “historiophoty” to distinguish this 54 Ramirez, 18-19. 55 Ibid, 24. 56 Fritz Lang, “The Future of the Feature Film in Germany,” in The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, edited by Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). 57 Guynn, 8.  17 from historiography.58 At this point, it is important to examine several of these works which are concerned with history on film. Robert Rosenstone’s Visions of the Past: The Challenge of Film to Our Idea of History is a polemic that argues for dramatic film as a form of historical scholarship. One of the most prominent—and certainly most sanguine—scholars to explore film and history, Rosenstone, a historian who has worked as a historical consultant for films like Reds, argues for a radical shift in how historians treat film. He argues that “the very nature of the visual media forces us to reconceptualize and or broaden what we mean by the word, history.”59 He also calls for “the historian to accept the mainstream historical film as a new kind of history....”60 Rosenstone places film in the tradition of oral storytelling—as opposed to books—and sees a potential for film’s visual language to “represent a major shift in consciousness about how we think about our past.”61 Clearly influenced by Walter Benjamin, especially his work “The Storyteller,” Rosenstone favors a fragmentary approach to his argument rather than a traditional narrative. Rosenstone’s argument, which claims that film stands outside of, or beyond, the written tradition is questionable, especially when one considers historical films like Conspiracy, where the screenplay is the site of all historical research, argument, and representation. He fears that the rise of film may mean “history is dead in the way that God is dead” and that this will only further marginalize academic historians.62 Irrespective of their differences, all of the historians cited in this section agree on Rosenstone’s latter point. The rise of dramatic historical films and their increasing power to shape public memory make it 58 Marnie Hughes-Warrington, History Goes to the Movies: Studying History on Film (London: Routledge, 2007). 5. 59 Robert Rosenstone, Visions of the Past: The Challenge of Film to Our Idea of History (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1998). 6. 60 Ibid, 78. 61 Ibid, 14-15. 62 Ibid, 23-24.  18 imperative that historians take them seriously, whether by getting involved in production or taking them seriously as cultural artifacts with real power over audiences’ views of history that should be examined critically. Rosenstone points out historical films are not produced in a vacuum, being both influenced by and a comment on historiography. For him, historical films “cannot exist in a state of historical innocence” and are therefore, implicitly, part of the historiographical debate, whether the filmmakers explicitly declare so or not.63 The third chapter will examine how Conspiracy and Die Wannseekonferenz refer to historiographical debates and how many of the differences between the two films can be explained by shifts in Holocaust historiography during the 1990s. Rosenstone argues dismissal of historical film implicitly agrees with Hollywood by ignoring non-blockbuster, independent, or foreign film, and thus boiling down film to an exclusively profit-driven enterprise. He points out the promises of avant garde film and argues that the rise of independent film (this book was originally published in 1995) makes historical films more possible today due to the end of the studio monopoly.64 From a twenty-first century vantage point, one can see that this vision did not pan out, but as noted in Chapter Two, HBO and other cable networks have filled the artistic void previously-occupied by a robust independent film community. Rosenstone argues in favor of what he calls the “experimental history film,” which run against conventional historical films and can be characterized by emotional distance and skepticism of history as progress. This definition of the “experimental history film” certainly encompasses many Holocaust-themed films, including the two examined in this thesis. Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah is one of Rosenstone’s key examples of an experimental historical film that questions the idea of 63 Ibid, 71-72. 64 Ibid, 244.  19 progress.65 Visions of the Past is a key work; Rosenstone is one of the most important scholars to explore history and film. Most other studies of this subject respond to him and he is a good conversation starter. Although one can largely agree with him and find his use of Benjamin inventive, he is sometimes too quick to dismiss text (where are the screenwriters in his vision?) and too sanguine about film’s possibilities. Nevertheless, his discussion of the experimental film and film’s untapped potential prove extremely valuable to this study, particularly when contrasted with Robert Brent Toplin, a proponent of the Hollywood version of history. Robert Brent Toplin’s Reel History: In Defense of Hollywood vehemently argues in favor of the Hollywood blockbuster over the avant-garde film championed by Rosenstone. Toplin uses the term “cinematic history” to distinguish the films he is interested in from documentaries, purely fictional films, or more experimental films set in the past. For him, “cinematic historians” interpret history, and their work cannot be overlooked or dismissed as shallow entertainment. He argues that academic historians need to take “cinematic histories” more seriously and is upset that they ignore “that technology and art created new kinds of historians in the twentieth century, people who have been competing effectively with traditional historians in presenting views of the past.”66 Toplin also points out that “the dialogue in a two-hour movie consumes no more than ten to twenty book-sized pages.”67 This limitation sounds very similar to those encountered by public historians working with exhibit text panels, websites, historic markers, and others. Film, just like other expressions of public history, has to condense history out of necessity, but in a different form. 65 Ibid, 61-62. 66 Robert Brent Toplin, Reel History: In Defense of Hollywood (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002). 4-6. 67 Ibid, 18.  20 Toplin’s argument falters when he dismisses films that do not attract wide audiences, like Ang Lee’s Ride with the Devil. For Toplin, the Hollywood blockbuster that attracts millions is the superior form of cinematic history; “art films” like Ride with the Devil are less relevant due to their smaller audiences because they “abandon the conventions of Hollywood storytelling.”68 Toplin rightly points out that many historians’ writings on film falter due to a failure on their part to read film theory and a tendency to look at each film individually, rather than as a part of a wider historical and cultural context. He also notes the inherently-constructed nature of both film and historical writing.69 Toplin offers a rubric that identifies characteristics of cinematic history, but unlike his rubric mentioned earlier (three levels of film analysis), the one offered in Reel History is less useful. This model attempts to define cinematic history, but in many cases Conspiracy certainly does not fit this mold, especially when it comes to characteristics like heroes (in Conspiracy, there are none), “morally uplifting stories about struggles between Davids and Goliaths,” the use of composite characters, etc.70 These definitions sound like stereotypes of Hollywood films and thus betray the weaknesses of Toplin’s strict definition of cinematic history, which almost exclusively applies to Hollywood blockbusters like Titanic or Braveheart, and excludes many films like Conspiracy that certainly do not fit into the concept of the “art film” that he derides. Perhaps the creative freedom afforded by cable television as opposed to the Hollywood studio system accounts for this difference.71 Most importantly for this study, Toplin argues that “cinema need to take audiences behind closed doors...to examine the silences between history sources” and that 68 Ibid, 56-57, 164. 69 Ibid, 160-161. 70 Ibid, 16. 71 See Chapter Two for a discussion of cable television and artistic freedom.  21 “[i]nvention helps remedy this problem. The movie's fictional scenes offer informed speculation—educated guesses about how the ideas and behavior found expression in those unrecorded settings."72 Informed speculation is a cornerstone of historical filmmaking and not unlike the work historians do when writing about events or people that have a scarce primary sources, especially historians that deal with histories of people who left behind no written records. It is important to remember that when writing history, a historian will always have to address gaps in the historical record. This is where informed speculation can be a useful tool for both historians and artists such as writers or filmmakers who deal with historical topics. Toplin’s use of the term “informed speculation” echoes Conspiracy writer Loring Mandel’s use of the same exact term in several interviews to describe how he wrote dialogue for characters in the film after researching their historical personalities and opinion on various subjects.73 Despite its shortcomings and myopic focus on Hollywood, Toplin’s analysis proves very useful because he identifies filmmakers as “cinematic historians” that should be taken seriously, identifies key shortcomings in some historians’ dismissal of film, and advocates “informed speculation” when writing historical films. Inside the Historical Film by Bruno Ramirez is, like Rosenstone’s Visions of the Past, an exploration of historical film from the view of a historian who has written multiple films. Ramirez strongly focuses on the screenwriter and the writing process as the most important aspect of historical filmmaking. For him, screenwriting is the key moment in film production where historical questions ranging from interpretation to accuracy are decided, it “constitutes a sort of bridge between research-generated historical knowledge and the visual language 72 Ibid, 201. 73 Simone Gigliotti, “Commissioning Mass Murder: Conspiracy and History at the Wannsee Conference,” in Repicturing the Second World War: Representations in Film and Television, 1st edition (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 119–33. 125.  22 through which a film will speak to viewers.”74 He addresses the rise of public history since the 1980s and labels it “one of the most significant developments,” using it as evidence for a counterargument to the skeptical historian who resists collaboration with “outsiders.” To him, the collaborative nature of public history in the form of museums, oral histories, documentaries, and websites is evidence of a sea change in historical production. Ramirez argues that “[professional historians] are the major producers of historical knowledge, but...are far from being the primary agents of transmuting that knowledge into historical culture.” The historical film is “the major vehicle” for this knowledge transmission. Ramirez acknowledges the danger of this, which is why he advocates the increased participation of professional historians in filmmaking.75 Ramirez’s focus on screenwriting and collaboration are key to this particular study. The collaborative nature of filmmaking highlights its similarity to other forms of public history and his emphasis on screenwriting as the most important part of historical filmmaking bolsters available sources, the bulk of which consists of script drafts and comments on the various drafts for Conspiracy. In fact, the volume of archival material devoted to the Conspiracy scripts prompted the inclusion of an entire chapter for these sources. It is in the script material and commentary that one can find evidence for how Conspiracy was made, what its creators’ arguments were, what types of evidence they used, and how their script stands out among other historical films. Anton Kaes’ From Hitler to Heimat: The Return of History as Film is also key to this study. For Kaes, film is a “technological memory bank” that “shapes” historical perspective. Kaes notes that as visual media only become more popular, the historian’s monopoly on 74 Ramirez, 37. 75 Ibid, 203-205.  23 history is in danger of being eclipsed: “History, it would seem, has become widely accessible, but the power over memory has passed into the hands of those who create these images.”76 He sees films as “interventions in cultural or political life” due to their ability to offer complex perspectives that lend themselves to multiple interpretations.77 He argues that people are dependent on film due to the impossibility of time travel and that the “technological memory bank” supersedes personal memory. These film historians center the dramatic film as a powerful form of public history. Bruno Ramirez places filmmaking’s inherently collaborative nature squarely within the growing trend towards collaborative history. Robert Rosenstone echoes this sentiment and calls for public historians to directly engage with film: The haphazard nature of history on film and the lack of professional control make it all the more necessary that historians who care about public history learn how to ‘read’ and ‘judge’ film, learn how to mediate between the historical world of the filmmaker and that of the historian.78 Ultimately, this study draws from a variety of film historians and owes a huge debt to Rosenstone and Ramirez due to their explorations of the possibilities of historical films. While Toplin’s rubric outlining the three levels of historical film analysis has proven useful, his sole focus on Hollywood obscures the television landscape, especially on cable, the climate in which Conspiracy emerged. Conspiracy is a Holocaust film, a particularly fraught category of historical film that comes with its own controversies and debates. Nevertheless, Holocaust films are a particually important subcategory of historical films that prove valuable to public historians. The Holocaust, as one of the worst—and certainly the worst in the Western historical 76 Anton Kaes, From Hitler to Heimat: The Return of History as Film, Reprint edition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992). ix. 77 Ibid, x. 78 Rosenstone, Visions of the Past, 66.  24 imagination—crimes in history, provides particularly powerful historical drama in a way that other events do not. Holocaust films at their best make the crime immediate, unsettle audiences, and go beyond mere costume drama. How do you explain the “unexplainable”? This is the central challenge for filmmakers depicting the Holocaust. Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel has argued that film’s range of expressive possibilities exceeds that of the written text, but cautions us about the dangers of misrepresentation and exploitation that can only be amplified by film, a more accessible medium.79 Other survivors have suggested film as a means of communicating the experience of the Holocaust to future generations. In his memoir, Literature or Life, the Buchenwald survivor Jorge Semprún discussed the potential of film for communicating the experience of the camps to the rest of humanity. He recounts one survivor, a professor, discussing how to depict the Holocaust in art: ‘The cinema would seem to be the most appropriate art form,’ he adds. ‘But there certainly won’t be many film documents. And the most significant events of camp life have surely never been filmed.... In any case, the documentary has its limitations, insuperable ones.... A work of fiction, then—but who would dare? The best thing would be to produce a film right now, in the still visible truth of Buchenwald...with death still clearly present. Not a documentary, a work of fiction—I really mean that. It’s unthinkable....’80 Others, most notably the French documentarian Claude Lanzmann, famous for Shoah (1985), have argued against the fictional representation of the Holocaust. Lanzmann’s most visible critique occurred in 1994, when he argued that Schindler’s List was beyond the pale due to “trivializing the Holocaust” and that portraying the Holocaust was a “betrayal.”81 79 Elie Wiesel, “Foreword,” in Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust, Annette Insdorf and Elie Wiesel, 3 edition (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002). xi. 80 Jorge Semprun, Literature or Life, trans. Linda Coverdale, First Edition edition (New York: Viking Adult, 1997). 126-127. 81 Insdorf and Wiesel, Indelible Shadows. 259.  25 Many scholars and commentators associate Lanzmann with a “prohibition on representation” (Darstellungsverbot) that places all fictionalized (or re-created) filmic depictions of the Holocaust beyond the acceptable boundaries of taste, as doing so would harm the “uniqueness of the Holocaust.”82 Some critics have alleged that Lanzmann was engaging in self-promotion by arguing that his documentary style was the only acceptable method of portraying the Holocaust.83 Most studies of the Holocaust and film tend to hold up Lanzmann as advocating an extreme position, vehemently rejecting any attempts at portraying the Holocaust dramatically. However, Lanzmann has recently amended his position, praising the Hungarian 2015 Auschwitz drama Son of Saul, as well as by collaborating with Steven Spielberg.84 In critical literature, Lanzmann has often served as an avatar for one side of what film historian Catrin Corell has identified as a debate between “mimesis and prohibition of images” that has existed since the end of the Second World War.85 This debate over film echoes Theodor Adorno’s oft-misquoted aphorism “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” Historian Waltraud Wende has characterized both Wiesel and Lanzmann as embodying the “prohibition on representation” school of thought, which is odd considering that Wiesel contributed the foreword to Annete Insdorf’s Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust. Wende however has astutely pointed out that any sort of standard that bans the representation of the Holocaust on film is logically inconsistent unless one advocates banning the depiction of all sorts of historical periods including the American 82 Waltraud Wende, “Medienbilder und Geschichte - Zur Medialisierung des Holocaust,” in Geschichte im Film: mediale Inszenierungen des Holocaust und kulturelles Gedächtnis; Dokumentation eines Symposiums, das am 29. und 30. November 2001 auf Einladung der Herausgeberin an der Rijksuniversiteit Groningen (NL) stattfand (Metzler, 2002), 8–30. 12-13. 83 Insdorf, Indelible Shadows. 259. 84 “‘Shoah’ Filmmaker Claude Lanzmann Talks Spielberg, ‘Son of Saul,’” The Hollywood Reporter, accessed June 16, 2016, http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/shoah-filmmaker-claude-lanzmann-talks-869931. 85 Catrin Corell, Der Holocaust als Herausforderung für den Film: Formen des filmischen Umgangs mit der Shoah seit 1945: eine Wirkungstypologie (Bielfeld: transcript Verlag, 2009). 15.  26 West.86 Other scholars have critiqued Holocaust film from the opposite stance. Aaron Kerner has argued against an “authenticity” fetish on the part of both filmmakers and historians. For Kerner, “authenticity is a red herring” due to the inherently constructed nature of film.87 The debate is important because this is the context in which Conspiracy was produced. The film succeeds in examining the Holocaust from a detached point of view that avoids depicting physical violence in any form. In doing so, it evades this controversy by instead drawing attention to how the Holocaust unfolded—from the Nazi point of view. In this way, Conspiracy acts as “translator” of history, or an “intermediary between the past and present.”88 The Holocaust film is very intertwined with the historical film, and it is, after all, a subgenre of historical film, one of the most powerful (and risky) types of historical films possible. There is an imperative on the part of filmmakers and historians specializing in the Holocaust to make this difficult history accessible and understandable. In a 1994 article for Die Zeit, discussing Schindler’s List, in which he called for “images instead of footnotes,” the German historian Wolfgang Benz powerfully articulated this imperative: One cannot document the destruction of human beings through fear of death, the perpetrators’ lust for murder, the moral ambivalence in a chaotic time and under existential threat. In order to make what happened comprehensible, the literary and dramatic form is needed.89 86 Wende, “Medienbilder und Geschichte - Zur Medialisierung des Holocaust.” 12, 14. 87 Aaron Kerner, Film and the Holocaust: New Perspectives on Dramas, Documentaries, and Experimental Films (New York: Continuum, 2011). 15. 88 Wende, “Medienbilder und Geschichte - Zur Medialisierung des Holocaust.” 9. 89 Translation of “Die Zerstörung von Menschen durch Todesangst, die Mordlust der Täter, die Ambivalenzen der Moral in chaotischer Zeit und unter existentieller Bedrohung kann man nicht dokumentieren. Um begreiflich zu machen, was geschah, braucht es eben die literarische und dramatische Form.” in Wolfgang Benz, “Wie Authentisch Muß Der Bericht Über Ein Geschichtliches Ereignis Sein? Anmerkungen Eines Historikers Zu „Schindlers Liste“: Bilder Statt Fußnoten,” Die Zeit, March 4, 1994, sec. Kultur, http://www.zeit.de/1994/10/bilder-statt-fussnoten.  27 Similarly, Catrin Corell has argued that Erfahrbarmachung, or “experienceable- making” is the “central difficulty” of depicting the “unrepresentable” reality of the Holocaust. For her, film is the “central form of the memory of the Holocaust.”90 Annette Insdorf echoes this sentiment—and the arguments of film historians like Robert Rosenstone and Anton Kaes—when she notes that Holocaust films are the primary means by which the public learns about the Holocaust; they make this historical event more accessible.91 It is important to restate here that none of these authors or filmmakers are naïve about the inherent problems associated with film as a commercial enterprise. All of the above-mentioned authors discuss financial concerns and take them seriously. For example, Aaron Kerner notes the difficulties in reconciling the need for commercial breaks in NBC’s miniseries Holocaust with the subject matter, but his argument falters with the claim that all of television is hampered by this intimate connection between production and corporate sponsorship.92 This outdated critique, or stereotype, of television is a common trope among scholars and critics who fundamentally ignore the cultural shift towards difficult, complex dramas on cable networks that rely on subscriptions instead of advertising. Television has fundamentally changed the landscape of the historical film. Television is more accessible than theatrical film; its lower budgets also permit a wider range of possible productions, especially on networks like HBO that do not rely on advertising. The Second World War has been a staple since the early days of television. Dramatic or comedic series like ABC’s Combat! or CBS’ Hogan’s Heroes 90 Corell, Der Holocaust als Herausforderung für den Film. 17. 91 Insdorf, Indelible Shadows, xvii. 92 Kerner, Film and the Holocaust, 29.  28 were popular during the 1960s, and the 1970s saw groundbreaking documentaries like ITV’s The World at War and serious dramas like NBC’s Holocaust. The West German television landscape saw an upswing in both dramas and documentaries about the Second World War and the Holocaust during the 1980s. During this period, television “popularized the task of [coming to terms with the past].”93 With the advent of high-quality cable dramas on HBO like Oz and The Sopranos during the 1990s, networks like HBO were able to sell difficult and complex dramas to large audiences. In other words, this new style of cable drama primed audiences for more “difficult” productions, including thought-provoking historical dramas. This focus on accessibility and on making a complex and difficult history comprehensible for international publics that did not experience the Second World War firsthand places trends in Holocaust film directly in line with trends in the public history movement. Public history is similarly invested in making complex histories accessible to wide audiences. Both Anton Kaes and Annette Insdorf have borrowed a metaphor for film from film theorist Siegfried Kracauer. This metaphor sees film as Athena’s polished shield in the face of Medusa: it allows you to see a “reflection” of pure horror without being destroyed by it (as one would by witnessing it firsthand).94 Kracauer’s view of the utility and possibility of film in the wake of the Holocaust is well-worth repeating for this study; it articulates Kracauer’s reasoning for confronting the difficult and terrifying past on film. Furthermore, it serves as an important capstone on the discussion of the Holocaust, public history, and film: 93 Wulf Kansteiner, In Pursuit of German Memory: History, Television, and Politics After Auschwitz (Athens, O.H.: Ohio University Press, 2006). 111. 94 Insdorf, Indelible Shadows, xvii.  29 The mirror reflections of horror are an end in themselves. As such they beckon the spectator to take them in and thus incorporate into his memory the real face of things too dreadful to be beheld in reality. In experiencing the rows of calves' heads or the litter of tortured human bodies in the films made of the Nazi concentration camps, we redeem horror from its invisibility behind the veils of panic and imagination. And this experience is liberating in as much as it removes a most powerful taboo. Perhaps Perseus' greatest achievement was not to cut off Medusa's head but to overcome his fears and look at its reflection in the shield. And was it not precisely this feat which permitted him to behead the monster?95 In light of high-quality television productions like Conspiracy, Die Wannseekonferenz, and many more, it is perhaps time to reapply Kracauer’s quote to this era: Perseus’ shield is no longer a cinematic canvas. It is a television screen. The next chapter will analyze the production process of HBO’s Conspiracy based on a close reading of multiple script drafts, correspondence, interviews, meeting minutes, and HBO memoranda. The bulk of this material is part of the Loring Mandel Collection, located in the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research in Madison, Wisconsin. Loring Mandel is a prolific screenwriter who wrote the screenplay and conducted research for Conspiracy. This material will allow analysis of the film on all three levels of historical film analysis as introduced by Robert Toplin in his article “Cinematic History: Where Do We Go From Here?” Furthermore, this focus on the Loring Mandel archive and the Conspiracy screenplays will further Bruno Ramirez’s argument for the screenplay and screenwriting process as the most important step in creating historical films. It is through the script archive that one can see how Conspiracy was conceived, what sorts of arguments it referred and responded to, what the source base was, and how the film serves as an example of “doing history” in a way that largely—no film, book, or exhibit is flawless—fulfills the goals of public history. 95 Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, 1st edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960). 306.  30 The final chapter will examine the older German-Austrian film Die Wannseekonferenz and then compare and contrast it with Conspiracy while critiquing both based on their historical arguments, portrayals of key figures, and responses to historiography. It will also continue the analysis of Conspiracy begun in Chapter Two. This chapter will also explore how historians have responded to—or ignored—both films. 31 We have to watch out for overkill; the most interesting thing about the whole conference is the dispassionate rationality of it all.96 Chapter Two: Conspiracy’s Production Process and Public History A maid opens the curtains and lets in the sunlight as a mob of servants unrolls carpets and sets tables, while cooks prepare a gourmet breakfast. A calligrapher meticulously completes table cards for a conference’s seating arrangements. The scene unfolds in a charming villa on the snow-covered shore of Wannsee, a large lake west of Berlin. SS Lt. Colonel Adolf Eichmann oversees the activity as mid-level members of the SS and Third Reich’s civil service begin arriving. As the men arrive, cliques begin to form. The SS stick to themselves while civil servants nervously ponder the reasons for this meeting—and the large SS presence. After a few minutes of chatting, networking, and sizing up the other men in the room, SS General Reinhard Heydrich arrives and calls the meeting to order. Heydrich has called the meeting to discuss coordinating efforts among the Reich’s disparate government agencies to ensure a speedy implementation of the so-called Final Solution to the Jewish Question in Europe—or what will later be known as the Holocaust. A board meeting unfolds in real time, but instead of discussing stocks or shareholders, these men discuss mass murder. First, they dance around the subject at hand by using euphemisms like “resettlement,” “labor columns,” and “evacuation.” As the meeting unfolds, inhibitions loosen due to cognac and wine; Heydrich’s insistence on the supremacy of the SS becomes apparent; and the men begin to speak quite openly about murdering the entire Jewish population of Europe. Heydrich uses a mixture of charm and intimidation to quell dissenting voices of men who are not opposed to genocide per se, but rather its chosen 96 Loring Mandel and Frank Pierson, “Commented Version of Conspiracy: The Meeting at Wannsee, 1st Draft” December 18, 1996, Box 2, Folder 9, Loring Mandel Papers, 1942-2006, M2006-124, Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wisconsin. 33-34.   32 implementation. Throughout the meeting, Eichmann manages the stenotypist and serves as Heydrich’s right-hand man. At the end of the film, Eichmann, Heydrich, and Gestapo chief Heinrich Müller retire to the study for drinks and discuss the day’s successful meeting. The men are relieved, happy that they managed to organize murder on an industrial scale without major resistance. Heydrich has solidified his personal power and that of the SS; now the stage is set for Auschwitz. Conspiracy (2001) is an unusual historical film because it places the viewer in the middle of one of the most infamous meetings in history and does so in real time. The Nazis depicted in the film are terrifying not because they embody stereotypes (with the exception of a few minor characters), but because they come across as “normal” human beings: they are ambitious, vain, profane, prone to vices, and insecure. Unlike most dramas depicting the Third Reich, the actors speak English with their native British or American accents instead of exaggerated German ones. The camera remains at eye level, which further increases the viewer’s feeling of participating in the meeting. The film is devoid of an uplifting message or happy ending; it ends on an unsettling note as Eichmann drives away from the villa with the stenotypist’s minutes. Title cards before the credits explain the fate of each participant, but many ended up with rather cushy existences postwar after slaps on the wrist by the Allied authorities or the West German government. The following chapter will discuss Conspiracy’s development, the writing process, and how it serves as an excellent example of public history on film. At each step of the production, screenwriter Loring Mandel conducted extensive historical research, professional historians commented on the scripts and offered suggestions for improvement, and a full-time research assistant refined the script. In this chapter, I argue that Conspiracy is much more than a dramatic film for entertainment purposes. It is a work of public history 33 that engages with, alludes to, and comments on historiography; the film has its own historiographical argument. In this way, Conspiracy is an excellent example of the potential dramatic film holds as a medium for public history. I. Origins of Conspiracy The origins of Conspiracy stem from a desire to remake the 1984 Austrian & West German film Die Wannseekonferenz. The director/screenwriter Frank Pierson, famous for dramas like Cool Hand Luke, watched Die Wannseekonferenz in 1995 and was profoundly affected. For Pierson, the story of the meeting at Wannsee “didn’t move him to tears, but moved him to anger,” and recreating this event quickly became a passion project.97 That same year, Pierson met with HBO executives Bob Cooper and Michael Fuchs, who agreed to produce an English-language version for “a new generation.” At this time, the project was simply titled Wannsee.98 According to Loring Mandel, Pierson approached him after viewing Die Wannseekonferenz and asked him to draft a screenplay for HBO. HBO—a network that had previously collaborated with Pierson on historical films like Truman and Citizen Cohn— was involved from the beginning; Pierson and Mandel helmed the project as director and screenwriter, respectively.99 Mandel and Pierson had worked together on Citizen Cohn, an HBO movie about the McCarthy era. Shortly after signing on to Wannsee, Mandel and Pierson became attached to Complicity, another historical drama set in WWII. Complicity was a pet project of Colin Callender, then head of HBO NYC Productions, which managed the 97Alexander Tang, “A Conversation with Loring Mandel,” The Harvard Crimson. November 12, 2013, http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2013/11/12/interview-loringmandel/. 98 Frank Pierson, “Frank Pierson to Stanley Scheinbaum,” September 30, 1998, Box 11, Folder 4, Loring Mandel Papers, 1942-2006, Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, University of Wisconsin- Madison, Madison, Wisconsin. 1. 99 Tang, “A Conversation with Loring Mandel.”  34 Wannsee project. Complicity explored Allied indifference towards the fate of European Jewry even in the face of overwhelming evidence of the Third Reich’s atrocities in the East. Callender decided to combine the two projects into companion films.100 Conspiracy was part of a larger development within American television during the mid-1990s and early 2000s: the rise of the complicated and adult-oriented premium cable drama. Home Box Office (HBO) led the way in this development with influential dramatic series, especially Oz and The Sopranos, which brought the techniques—and talent—of the American independent film scene to the living room, as Hollywood studios returned to a blockbuster-centric outlook. HBO’s small, subscriber-based revenue model freed filmmakers from the restrictions of broadcast networks, which depended on advertising and large audience numbers, and helped foster a climate of creative freedom and experimentation.101 As film and television critic Alan Sepinwall has noted, the 1990s and early 2000s were a time when “If you wanted thoughtful drama for adults, you didn’t go to the multiplex; you went to your living room couch.”102 Television, in general, during this period was also characterized by an increasing number of feature films that were virtually indistinguishable from theatrical releases in terms of production quality.103 HBO further invested in original film by forming HBO NYC Productions, a company whose goal was to “[produce] ‘edgier and more diverse’” programming. 104 HBO NYC Productions produced Conspiracy and Complicity during the early stages of the writing process and continued to do so until it eventual merged with HBO Films. 100 Pierson, “Frank Pierson to Stanley Scheinbaum,” 1. 101Alan Sepinwall, The Revolution Was Televised: The Cops, Crooks, Slingers, and Slayers Who Changed TV Drama Forever (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2013). 7-9. 102 Ibid, 9. 103 Michael Paris, Repicturing the Second World War: Representations in Film and Television, 1st edition (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 8. 104 Gary R. Edgerton and Jeffrey P. Jones, The Essential HBO Reader (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2013). 43.  35 HBO Films made a name for itself by producing quality original programming that simultaneously embodied and subverted established genres; it actively sought to be the “auteur studio of the nineties.”105 HBO Films sought to “make us nervous” with “fearless” and “provocative” programming by examining controversial issues that traditional broadcast networks actively avoided. According to The Essential HBO Reader, a scholarly examination of HBO’s history, HBO’s “most notable” productions “negotiate the past and interrogate cultural memory through the depiction of individual lives that are positioned at the center of national struggles, community conflicts, social movements, and scandals.”106 Furthermore, these productions usually avoid the clichéd uplifting moral lessons and happy endings common to programming on other networks.107 Instead, HBO’s historical productions often use history to impart “lessons” to the audience.108 Conspiracy certainly fits this description, and it is a typical example of HBO’s output during the turn of the millennium. Additionally, Conspiracy was one of a wave of television and film productions during this period produced with the fiftieth anniversary of World War II in mind, including HBO’s miniseries Band of Brothers, which also aired in 2001. Indeed, HBO’s different attitude towards filmmaking was not lost on Loring Mandel, writer of Conspiracy, who as early as 1979 had argued against what he saw as a broadcast network system that straightjacketed writers into creating bland, uncontroversial, programming that had to deliver positive messages.109 In 2004, Mandel referenced his 105 Ibid, 44-45. 106 Ibid, 46. 107 Ibid, 46. 108 Ibid, 50. 109 Academy of Television Arts and Sciences and Lee Margulies, Docu-Drama Symposium 1979. (Hollywood, Calif.: ATAS, 1979). 29.  36 recently acclaimed work, including Conspiracy, and credited his success to cable networks like HBO: The Television work that I've done in the past 10 or 15 years has been on cable, where you have an enormous amount of freedom and the people who are making the decisions come from theater rather than the advertising agencies or law staff or standards and practices.110 Although Mandel sang the praises of cable networks like HBO in this interview, he has tempered his enthusiasm when discussing an unproduced companion film about the Allied failure to aid Jewish refugees, Complicity.111 The story of the Complicity script’s evolution, and eventual abandonment, by HBO serves as an important caveat to HBO’s seemingly daring and “edgy” attitude towards historical filmmaking. Complicity’s fate illustrates the dangers even well-researched historical productions face when they touch on sensitive political subjects or unearth an unpalatable past. Although Conspiracy explores a difficult past, it is far removed from American politics and very clearly engages with the Third Reich, which has, of course, been a standard (e.g., uncontroversial) movie villain since the war. As we shall see, in the late 1990s and early 2000s even more experimental networks like HBO still considered some topics too edgy for their brand. In the case of Complicity, its damning portrayal of the Churchill and, more importantly, Roosevelt administrations ultimately doomed the project. After the Conspiracy project launched in 1996, Loring Mandel quickly began research for his script. His research included trips to the Leo Baeck Institute, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, and the Gedenkstätte Haus der Wannsee-Konferenz.112 During this time, Mandel became attached to Pierson’s unproduced drama Complicity, which at the time had a script penned by British 110 Dexter H. Kim, “Paddy Chayefsky Laurel Award for Television: Loring Mandel,” Written By, 2004. 111 Loring Mandel, Interview by Stephen Bowie. “Loring Mandel”, Video, June 15, 2010, Archive of American Television, http://www.emmytvlegends.org/interviews/people/loring-mandel. 112 Ibid.  37 writer David Edgar. After it became clear that HBO wanted to produce both films and tie them together, Mandel chose the title Conspiracy: The Meeting at Wannsee in an effort to emphasize his Wannsee project as a companion piece to the already-titled Complicity.113 HBO and Pierson were very impressed with Mandel’s first draft, which he delivered to them in November 1996. Due to the quality of Mandel’s script, HBO and Pierson put him in charge of Complicity. He reworked David Edgar’s material and eventually delivered a draft script for Complicity in June 1997. This draft explicitly ties the two films together by opening as Eichmann drives away from the villa at Wannsee.114 This draft was well-received and HBO began plans to consolidate the two films into a single three-hour epic.115 When exploring the Loring Mandel Papers at the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, it quickly became apparent that the project suddenly became a massive undertaking; this 1997 draft of Complicity spurred HBO and Pierson to retool the project into a three-hour film. Initial drafts simply called for a double-feature, Conspiracy would be recapped at the beginning of Complicity via various methods, usually flashback, narration, or simply repeating the last scene from Conspiracy (which changed a great deal, for example some drafts end Conspiracy with Reinhard Heydrich’s assassination in May 1942). Mandel delivered several drafts of both films simultaneously throughout 1997. This transitioned into combined scripts after the films were merged into a three-hour film. Conspiracy roughly adheres to the original 1996 draft, but Complicity, a much more ambitious project, was clearly 113 Loring Mandel, “Loring Mandel to Frank Pierson,” 1996, Box 11, Folder 2, Loring Mandel Papers, 1942- 2006, Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wisconsin. 114 Loring Mandel, “Complicity, written by Loring Mandel, with Notes & Appendix,” June 7, 1997, Box 3, Folder 4, Loring Mandel Papers, 1942-2006, Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wisconsin. 1. 115 “Notes on HBO Meeting, 10/1/97,” October 1, 1997, Box 15, Folder 1, Loring Mandel Papers, 1942-2006, Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wisconsin.  38 constantly rewritten during 1997 and 1998. Ultimately, there were six total drafts of a combined Conspiracy/Complicity script. At this point, Complicity was wildly ambitious in scope. While Conspiracy centers on the ninety-minute Wannsee Conference, Complicity takes a much wider view: telling the story of the weak Allied response to the Holocaust and America’s rejection of Jewish refugees. Part of Complicity portrays the 1943 Bermuda Conference, where American and British officials discussed the Jewish refugee crisis and how their respective governments would respond. However, Complicity focuses on the Bermuda Conference only for a short period of time; this is not another reenactment of bureaucrats sitting around a table discussing the fate of millions. There are many scenes in Washington and London, in various extermination camps and deportation centers, the World Jewish Congress in Geneva, and, in an effort to tie the project in with Conspiracy, many scenes depicting Eichmann organizing deportations of Jews to Auschwitz. Gerhart Riegner, secretary of the World Jewish Congress in Geneva, is the central figure of Complicity (Mandel and Pierson also conducted extensive interviews with the real-life Riegner). He narrates the film and his efforts to warn the Allies about the Holocaust form a major part of the plot. Riegner, acting on information obtained from an important German industrialist, had notified the American government about mass extermination as early as August 1942.116 The combined Conspiracy/Complicity scripts use the end of the Wannsee Conference and Heydrich’s death as the bridge between the two films.117 Due to the unmanageable and, frankly, impossible nature of the Complicity script—along with 116 David S. Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust 1941-1945, (New York: Pantheon, 1984). 42-43 117 Loring Mandel, “Conspiracy: The Meeting at Wannsee” and “Complicity” July 20, 1997, Box 3, Folder 8, Loring Mandel Papers, 1942-2006, M2006-124, Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wisconsin. 117-118.  39 controversy over the film’s portrayal of the Roosevelt administration—HBO withdrew its support for both films in September 1998.118 Complicity is strongly grounded in research material, particularly primary source investigation in the National Archives. Most of these files are photocopies of State Department memoranda, meeting minutes from the Bermuda Conference, newspaper clippings, and others. The most influential secondary source is David S. Wyman’s The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust, 1941-1945.119 Wyman’s is the most-cited work in the script and is referenced often in correspondence. Andrea Axelrod was the primary researcher for both Conspiracy and Complicity; her input will be further examined as we discuss the evolution of Conspiracy’s historical argument. There are no documents available that explicitly discuss why HBO eventually produced Conspiracy. However, a September 1998 fax that Frank Pierson sent to Los Angeles-based human rights activist Stanley K. Scheinbaum lays out both the financial and, more importantly, political reasons HBO gave for withdrawing its support for the dual-film project. Pierson’s connection with Scheinbaum is telling, as the films both have activist messages compared to most historical films, although Complicity is much more explicit because it argues that America is complicit in the Holocaust due to turning away Jewish refugees. For Pierson, HBO’s backing out signified that they had “lost their nerve” and called its status as a television pioneer into question.120 After three years of work on the project, Pierson was incensed by HBO’s decision. In one paragraph, he articulates a vision of history not at all dissimilar from that of a public historian: ...I am saddened and angered by the reasons for [the cancellation] happening. The historical record needs to be read; it is not enough for a few 118 Pierson, “Frank Pierson to Stanley Scheinbaum,” 2. 119 Mandel, “Complicity.” i-iv. 120 Ibid, 1.  40 scholars to know and understand—if history is not recreated for each generation it might as well be forgotten and its lessons left unlearned.121 With this statement, Pierson hits upon an integral aspect of public history. No matter how varied definitions of public history can be, it is safe to say that all agree history should be disseminated to audiences wider than a dissertation committee or other specialists. An HBO production reaches an audience of millions; it goes without saying that this is an extremely large audience compared to “traditional” works of history. Although filmmakers do not usually consider themselves historians, in this case, the amount of historical research and debate that went into Conspiracy and Complicity shows that these are works of history by any reasonable public historian’s measure. There is little consequential difference between the types of sources or research techniques that the production team used than those any historian would use when creating an exhibit or writing a book. The desired end product and audience are the key differences. Pierson describes the “extraordinarily difficult” writing and rewriting process for Complicity—for him, Wannsee “lent itself to dramatization” compared to Complicity’s complicated portrayal of Allied indifference to the Holocaust. Pierson discussed financial reasons for HBO’s decision—three years of “enormous” amounts of money had been invested in a complicated and ambitious project that seemed impossible to film. Furthermore, partner networks including the BBC and Germany’s UFA, held various rights to the project due to plans to utilize various overseas production facilities during filming. HBO also went through a regime change during this period; new management had different ideas about the network’s future than the executives who had originally backed the project. For HBO’s new management, Complicity’s portrayal of the Roosevelt administration in 121 Ibid, 2.  41 particular constituted sufficient grounds to terminate the project. Pierson felt that these executives were “uncomfortable with the idea of depicting our wartime leaders as in any way complicit” and “particularly disturbed” by the depiction of members of Roosevelt’s cabinet, including Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long, as anti-Semites.122 The controversy over Complicity and its portrayal of American leaders as complicit anti-Semites was a bridge too far even for HBO during this period; this, rather than the expense of the project, seems a more likely reason for HBO passing on the project, particularly when one examines the brief revival—and second cancellation—of the Complicity project after Conspiracy’s enormous success in terms of viewership, awards, and critical acclaim. The archival record on what transpired between the project’s cancellation and its resurgence is sparse. Pierson’s September 1998 fax also outlines his strategy to get HBO to renew its support for Conspiracy, which apparently worked; production was back on track by early 2000. Pierson argued that Conspiracy, which mostly takes place inside one room, was much easier—and cheaper—to film than Complicity and that it avoided the political controversy which had made HBO skittish.123 This reasoning, along with the fact that the final version of Conspiracy largely retains both the structure and dialogue of early script drafts, likely led HBO to relent and back Conspiracy in 1999. II. Writing Conspiracy In November 1996, Mandel finished his first draft of Conspiracy: The Meeting at Wannsee. This early draft does differ from the final film, but not overly so; most of the dialogue remains the same. The beginning and end sections of the film transform the most 122 Ibid, 2. 123 Ibid, 2.  42 over the course of the script’s evolution. Nevertheless, a few subplots and characterizations either transform or disappear from later versions of the script, most notably an odd subplot involving Under State Secretary of the Foreign Ministry Martin Luther’s dog. However, the portrayals of characters including Heydrich and Eichmann are the most striking differences between the film and early script drafts. These differences in character portrayals may appear minor at first, but they have a big impact on the final film. In a film like Conspiracy, which is mostly character and dialogue-driven (it is mainly a group of men sitting around a table, not a standard setting for a historical film), details of characters’ personalities and their statements on ideology and policy are important to both the film’s dramatic and historical imperatives. The changes in Heydrich’s characterization are the most pronounced in the scripts. The original script begins with a scene of Heydrich flying low over Berlin in his small aircraft, smiling as he looks over the Wannsee villa, as if he is a prince looking over his domain.124 Although the completed film emphasizes Heydrich’s daredevil personality and love of fast cars and airplanes, the original script devotes even more time to it. Heydrich is also more humorous (as in Die Wannseekonferenz) in the early drafts of Mandel’s scripts, which also nod to his historic reputation for womanizing. Heydrich’s wife suspected him of infidelity and the rumor of his love for Berlin brothels followed him throughout the 1930s and 1940s.125 Additionally, Heydrich’s career as an officer in the Reichsmarine (Weimar Republic-era navy) was abruptly cut short due to a sex scandal and subsequent court martial.126 This may also be a nod to Dietrich Mattausch’s portrayal of Heydrich in Die 124 Loring Mandel, “Conspiracy: The Meeting at Wannsee, 1st Draft” November 14, 1996, Box 3, Folder 4, Loring Mandel Papers, 1942-2006, M2006-124, Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wisconsin. 1. 125 Gerwarth, Hitler’s Hangman. 112-113. 126 Ibid, 43-44.  43 Wannseekonferenz, which we will return to later. Examples of Heydrich’s womanizing reputation include a scene of Heydrich openly flirting with a telephone operator and then chiding her for accepting calls while he is busy.127 In the final version of the film, this scene is changed to show Eichmann scold a male telephone operator for interrupting the meeting. Furthermore, Gerhard Klopfer comments directly on Heydrich’s womanizing at several points in this draft. Klopfer also gives voice to rumors about Heydrich having Jewish relatives in both this draft and the final film, but the early drafts go even further in depicting Klopfer as a petty, backbiting Party representative. Portrayed as an obese, red-faced martinet in the film, the Klopfer in the first draft is even more of a pig. In one scene, he harasses the previously-mentioned telephone operator: KLOPFER Get into bed with that powerful man, huh? What an adventure. Blushing, she lowers her head. KLOPFER Of course he’s married, would that matter?128 Appropriately, Klopfer is described as “conscienceless, crude, a bully and a braggart” in the script’s opening material.129 This description, however, does not exactly square with the historical Klopfer. The differences in the portrayals of Heydrich are important because his character becomes more subtle and his growing status as a major figure in the Third Reich government becomes more apparent. The womanizing, daredevil Heydrich of earlier script drafts may be grounded in historical reality, but they veer too close to other portrayals of Heydrich, distracting from the film’s main point regarding him: the meeting at Wannsee was above all a show of power for Heydrich. The final film does reference Heydrich’s 127 Mandel, “Conspiracy: The Meeting at Wannsee, 1st Draft.” 26-27. 128 Ibid, 51. 129 Ibid, ii.  44 penchant for fast airplanes and adultery, but it places much less emphasis on it than in the earlier script. The Adolf Eichmann of Mandel’s first draft also differs from the final filmed version, but in ways less obvious than Heydrich. In the early drafts, Eichmann is more explicitly described as a humorless, and somewhat obtuse, bureaucrat that fits a bit more into the “banality of evil” stereotype popularized by Hannah Arendt in Eichmann in Jerusalem. Nevertheless, this Eichmann is still far removed from Arendt’s description of him as a glorified secretary who held little importance at the meeting.130 Indeed, Mandel’s preface to the first draft openly references Arendt’s thesis: Heydrich’s use of Eichmann as a glorified flunky gave Eichmann the opportunity to involve himself in every detail of the program, and left him in a perfect position to become the prime mover once Heydrich was assassinated.131 Rather than a “nonentity,” Mandel’s Eichmann is calculating and uses his relatively low rank as a cover to increase his own power while remaining in the background. All script drafts and the final film include short scenes of higher-ranking conference attendees dismissing or ignoring Eichmann, something the filmmakers want the audience to notice. A cover sheet attached to the first script draft describes a first and third act that, while not filmed, further illustrate the filmmakers’ early desire to focus on the rise of Eichmann in the machinery of the Holocaust. HBO originally wanted to depict Heydrich’s assassination on 27 June 1942 at the hands of Czech commandos. This action sequence was to culminate in a scene of Eichmann learning about the attack while bowling, where, according to the note, he “[remarks] that [the assassination] shows that history is more than personality, that the work 130 Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: 113-114. 131 Mandel, “Conspiracy: The Meeting at Wannsee, 1st Draft.” i.  45 would be done. And became the relentless soul of the Holocaust.”132 For the filmmakers, a main story thread of Conspiracy (and earlier versions of Complicity) was about a transfer of power and control over the Holocaust from Heydrich to Eichmann, which was only made possible by Heydrich’s assassination. In a sense, they portray Eichmann as Heydrich’s unlikely heir apparent who arrived at that position through cunning, calculation, and initiative. The first draft of Conspiracy: The Meeting at Wannsee shows that Mandel spent a large amount of time researching material related to the Wannsee Conference and its participants. The Wannsee Protocol itself is the most important source Mandel consulted, and a few lines of dialogue illustrate that. However, it is important to remember that the Protocol is not a verbatim transcript of the meeting, but a heavily edited summary that depends on bureaucratic euphemisms and evasions in order to get its true meaning across. No bureaucrat would actually speak like the Protocol. Although the bibliography itself is sparse, the script contains forty-seven footnotes; no small number when one realizes that screenplays are much smaller in both page length and word count compared to a book, with the overwhelming majority of text devoted to dialogue. This is also unusual when one considers that the vast majority of film scripts do not contain footnotes. The limited amount of space for exposition is not too dissimilar from the limited space requirements encountered when writing exhibit text or other public history projects. Most of the footnotes provide context to particular statements made by conference participants or serve to provide evidence for opinions held by certain participants that were not recorded in the Wannsee protocol itself. Mandel has referred to this process of including participants’ historical 132 Ibid, Cover Page.  46 opinions in invented dialogue as “informed speculation.”133 The historian Simone Gigliotti has written at length on Mandel’s use of “informed speculation” as a way to fill in gaps in the narrative that is “not entirely dissimilar from historians investigating Wannsee.”134 For her, this technique “gives angry, frustrated and impassioned voices” to the sober, matter-of-fact Wannsee Protocol and creates Mandel’s own version of the Wannsee Conference.135 Mandel’s “informed speculation” is largely successful, but not without its problems, as the following example of a minor character illustrates. Mandel’s characterization of the State Secretary136 representing the Ministry of Justice, Roland Freisler, as rabidly anti-Russian provides us with one example of Mandel’s “informed speculation.” Freisler, a notorious judge who gained infamy due to his ruthless sentences and tirades as President of the Volksgerichtshof, or People’s Court, speaks little in the film.137 One of his few scenes includes this racist statement about Russians: Oh my friend, the Russian isn’t a communist. The Russian doesn’t care who runs things, I’ve lived amongst ‘em; the Russian only cares he has a bottle of vodka to suck and some form of domestic animal life to fuck and he’ll happily sit in shit his whole life. That’s his politics. I know those people...138 Although no statement like this is present in the Wannsee Protocol, this extreme bit of dialogue illustrates several aspects of Mandel’s “informed speculation.” Mandel footnotes this line and gives an explanation along with a citation to Robert S. Wistrich’s Who’s Who in Nazi Germany, an encyclopedia of Nazi personalities: “Freisler’s background...gave him a 133 Gigliotti, “Commissioning Mass Murder.” 125. 134 Ibid, 127. 135 Ibid, 126. 136 Staatssekretär. For a description of the Staatssekretär, see Roseman, The Villa, The Lake, The Meeting. 57. 137 For a comprehensive account of Freisler’s tenure as President of the Volksgerichtshof, see Helmut Ortner, Der Hinrichter: Roland Freisler - Mörder im Dienste Hitlers (Frankfurt am Main: Nomen Verlag, 2014). 138 Mandel, “Conspiracy: The Meeting at Wannsee, 1st Draft.” 83. 47  particularly bitter anti-Russian Bias”139 This is somewhat contradicted by the brief character description of Freisler at the beginning of the script, which states that he was “more anti- Communist than anti-Russian.”140 Indeed, Freisler had spent many years in Russia and spoke Russian fluently after his time as a POW and subsequent tenure as a Bolshevik.141 His rabid- anti-Russian stance in the film fits with his political transformation into a hardline anti- communist and later tenure as the most powerful judge in the Third Reich. Freisler would have wanted to overcompensate for his past as a Leninist and active participant in the Russian Revolution. More importantly, the profanity-laced excerpt illustrates Freisler’s propensity for public tirades and tongue-lashings that he liberally inflicted upon defendants in the People’s Court during show trials, especially those accused of treason, sabotage, or any number of acts that the regime deemed subversive. Freisler was a very prominent public figure during the Third Reich; the regime celebrated him by showing his “fiendish, raucous” courtroom tirades against “traitors” in newsreels.142 In one notorious case, he publicly called a defendant a “shabby rascal” who “shattered under [the weight of] his own disgrace,” which although quaint to our modern ears, was quite insulting during early twentieth-century Germany, especially coming from a government official.143 Freisler was an enormously intimidating figure during the Third Reich and his notorious, boorish tirades form key scenes in Hans Fallada’s Every Man Dies Alone, a 1947 novel depicting an ill-fated resistance cell. In the case of Freisler, Mandel’s “informed speculation” gets across a lot of information about this historical figure in three lines of dialogue. In addition to just imparting fact to the 139 Ibid, Appendix 3, note 40. 140 Ibid, ii. 141 Claudia Koonz, The Nazi Conscience (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2003). 172. 142 Steven Lehrer, Wannsee House and the Holocaust (Jefferson, N.C: McFarland & Company, 2000). 159. 143 Translation of “Sie sind ja ein schäbiger Lump! Zerbrechen Sie unter der Gemeinheit?” quoted in Hans Royce, Erich Zimmermann, and Hans-Adolf Jacobsen, 20. Juli 1944, 4. Aufl. (Bonn: Berto-Verlag., 1961). 206.  48 audience, e.g. Freisler spent time in Russia, the offensive nature of the dialogue also provides us with a window into the historical figure’s chauvinistic and brash personality. While the first draft contains many instances of “informed speculation” and points to specific research conducted by Mandel, more rigorous historical research was yet to come; this took place after HBO agreed to produce Conspiracy after previously cancelling both it and Complicity. III. Conspiracy as a work of public history Once HBO recommitted itself to the Conspiracy project, it also dedicated itself to engaging with the historiography of the Wannsee Conference and the Holocaust, which illustrates how a dramatic film can use historical research and argument in the same vein as other “channels” of public history. Conspiracy provides an excellent case study not only due to the extensive documentation surrounding its production, but because of how it responds to the challenges unique to portraying the Holocaust on film. It “translates” and interprets a complicated history for a wide audience in a way that goes further than most other historical films. The dramatic film can explore historical issues at a level of visual and emotional depth that is difficult for most other public history projects to reach. Furthermore, the potential audience for dramatic films vastly outsizes that of other public history projects. If communicating history—in an accessible manner grounded in historical research—to the large, amorphous “public” is the primary goal of public history, dramatic films like Conspiracy fulfill that purpose. They do not replace historical monographs, but they certainly complement them and may lead curious audiences to historical literature after viewing a film. In April 2000, Mandel re-submitted his second draft of Conspiracy: The Meeting at Wannsee to HBO. By this time, HBO had agreed to produce Conspiracy and had relegated Complicity to the back burner. This version of the script is mostly unchanged from the first 49 draft; it is the version most commented-on by historians serving as consultants, HBO executives, and others involved with the production, but it is important to keep in mind that the producers and various historians provided extensive comments on the scripts from the beginning of the project. The earliest comments on this script (as evidenced by the archive) indicate that the production team was well-aware of potential shortcomings of the film and sought to make a particular historiographical argument. One version of this script, which contains comments in red from an unknown author (presumably Frank Pierson), contains several passages that indicate the production team’s intent. One passage emphasizes the need to avoid caricatures of Nazis that could push the film into B-movie camp: “...we have to avoid demonizing these people who are so damned by their very presence [at Wannsee]... We have to watch out for overkill; the most interesting thing about the whole conference is the dispassionate rationality of it all.144 The second point regarding the “dispassionate rationality” of the conference being its most interesting feature is a theme that the production team hit on repeatedly during the writing process. Conspiracy is not a standard WWII or Holocaust film; no one is killed on screen, no action (outside of Heydrich’s assassination, which was ultimately cut from the script) takes place. One of the main hurdles the filmmakers had to overcome was how to make a ninety-minute meeting capture and hold an audience’s attention. For Pierson, one of the goals was to dramatize Arendt’s banality of evil concept itself.145 Indeed, the image of the Nazi as the quintessential “desk murderer” is a trope that the filmmakers were keenly aware of, utilized, and responded to in the film, with Stanley Tucci’s portrayal of Adolf Eichmann being the most notable and important example. An early comment from Pierson on Eichmann’s character argued that Eichmann should fool the audience into underestimating 144 Mandel and Pierson, “Commented Version of Conspiracy: The Meeting at Wannsee, 1st Draft” 33-34. 145 Pierson, “Preface.” 1.  50 him, because “Heydrich may be the architect, but Eichmann as the carpenter and plasterer is the man who will do it.”146 As evidenced by earlier discussion, and the final film, the filmmakers honed in on this subtext and made it one of the film’s two major historiographical arguments. For them, Wannsee was the moment where Eichmann became a major player, even if he later denied this, and even if other, higher-ranking conference attendees underestimated him. This choice is further revealed by Eichmann’s introductory scenes focusing on a meticulous and ruthless figure obsessed with numbers, especially a scene in which Eichmann instructs butlers to “itemize the costs” for broken china and ensure that the butler who had broken said china pay for all of it.147 Early comments on the scripts chiefly came from HBO officials like Ani Gasti, Colin Callender, Frank Doelger, and Frank Pierson. The earliest set of available comments (from December 1996, less than one month after the first draft was submitted to HBO), from Colin Callender, then head of HBO NYC Productions (and soon-to-be president of HBO Films), identify the two historiographical arguments of Conspiracy: 1) The Wannsee Conference was a way to consolidate Reinhard Heydrich’s power and, by extension, the leadership of the SS in carrying out the so-called Final Solution; and 2) Wannsee was a turning point in the career of Adolf Eichmann.148 Callender continues by asking for a more clear explanation of the competition between agencies over the Jewish Question; he emphasizes the fact that there was no clear and “centralized” policy before Wannsee. Callender’s comments follow what Holocaust historians broadly refer to as a functionalist 146 Mandel and Pierson, “Commented Version of Conspiracy: The Meeting at Wannsee, 1st Draft.”6. 147 Loring Mandel, “Conspiracy. by Loring Mandel, with Scene Numbers, 5/19/01” May 19, 2001, Box 1, Folder 6, Loring Mandel Papers, 1942-2006, M2006-124, Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wisconsin. 3. 148 Colin Callender, “Notes/Wannsee,” December 6, 1996, Box 10, Folder 7, Loring Mandel Papers, 1942- 2006, M2006-124, Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wisconsin. 1.  51 interpretation of the Holocaust. That is, rather than the product of a concrete plan set in motion by Hitler (commonly referred to as the intentionalist approach), the Holocaust evolved and radicalized in fits and starts, often from the lower ranks, and was the product of competing interest groups from among different governmental agencies.149 Callender also wonders if the rise of Eichmann after Wannsee is Heydrich’s intention and whether this was decided at the conference.150 Later versions of the script emphasize Eichmann’s ascent in importance as more of an accident of history—his position at the conference placed him in the perfect position to carry out the Final Solution. The final script also emphasizes Heydrich viewing Eichmann as a sort of awkward and sometimes embarrassing, albeit extremely competent, subordinate; Heydrich becomes irritated with or dismisses Eichmann on occasion. For example, there is a brief scene towards the end when Heydrich asks the attendees to “astonish Charles Darwin” by agreeing to provide him and the SS with their utmost support in carrying out mass murder. The final version of the script notes that Heydrich resents SS-Colonel Schöngarth’s “deference” toward Eichmann and subsequently “passes over” him when going around the table seeking each attendee’s agreement to the decisions made at the meeting.151 Later comments by Callender and producer Frank Doelger show that the production team was aware of historical invention and sought to avoid it whenever possible. Early character descriptions provided by Mandel included statements that could not be confirmed historically, the most egregious of which being “I’ve given him some heart” in reference to Major Rudolf Lange, Commander of the SD (Security Service) and SiPo (Security Police) in 149 Charles S. Maier, The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German National Identity (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1988). 95. 150 Ibid, 1. 151 Mandel, “Conspiracy. by Loring Mandel, with Scene Numbers, 5/19/01.” 96.  52 Riga.152 Like Eichmann, Lange was one of the lowest-ranking attendees at the Wannsee Conference, but his “practical experience,” to use the Protocol’s terminology, made him an important voice at the meeting. Among the men around the meeting table, Lange was unique due to his experience as a “practitioner of mass murder.”153 Callender and Doelger rejected the “I’ve given him some heart” statement on the grounds that it “suggest[s] a degree of invention that undermines the factual basis of the script.”154 This criticism in particular holds up even upon viewing the final film; certain characters, most notably Klopfer, are portrayed in ways that are not supported by the historical record. Not all early comments by the producers were sound. In many instances, they desired unnecessary exposition or wanted to tone down coarser language that they felt sounded “contemporary,” including one of Heydrich’s most chilling lines in the entire screenplay: We will not sterilize every Jew and wait for the race to die. We will not sterilize every Jew and then exterminate them, that’s farcical. Dead men don’t hump, dead women don’t get pregnant; death is the most reliable form of sterilization, put it that way.155 In almost every incidence of coarser language or harsher vocabulary that really hits home the gravity of the issues being discussed or shocks the audience in some way, commenters from the HBO side of things tended to err towards caution. However, Mandel and Pierson fought for the inclusion of this type of language and it ultimately remained in the final film. In the instance of harsher language producers found “contemporary,” the decision to leave it in arguably made the film more accessible. Expunging the dialogue of profanity or explicit 152 Mandel, “Conspiracy: The Meeting at Wannsee, 1st Draft.” ii. 153 Angrick and Klein, The Final Solution in Riga. 260-261 154 Colin Callender and Frank Doelger, “Notes Conspiracy - Complicity,” June 28, 1997, Box 10, Folder 9, Loring Mandel Papers, 1942-2006, M2006-124, Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wisconsin. 1. 155 Mandel, “Conspiracy. by Loring Mandel, with Scene Numbers, 5/19/01.” 59.  53 statements would bowdlerize the film and lend it a Masterpiece Theater aesthetic that would do a disservice to the subject matter. HBO executives were not the only individuals to have extensive input in the script development of Conspiracy. Three historians in particular, including a full-time researcher hired by HBO, provided extensive commentary on the script and offered a myriad of suggestions for improving the piece’s historical accuracy and historical argument. Michael Berenbaum of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum was the official historical consultant for Conspiracy, and the amount of comments he submitted attests to that. However, Andrea Axelrod, credited as the film’s historical advisor, clearly conducted much more original research and put in a much larger effort into the project than has been publicly acknowledged either in the press or in various publications which reference Berenbaum as if he were the project’s sole historical advisor. The production team also consulted Holocaust historian Christopher Browning, who provided brief comments on an early script draft. The earliest commentary from a historian came in the form of a letter from Michael Berenbaum in 1998. Berenbaum bluntly opened with: “The script doesn’t make it. The Wannsee Conference is inherently undramatic.” He was more partial to Complicity and offered extended commentary on it in this document.156 Berenbaum then commented on various things that he thought needed correcting in the Conspiracy script. Notably, he emphasized the importance of the age of the respective characters, who were all relatively young men.157 By July 2000, Berenbaum was mostly satisfied with the script. However, he advocated several changes in a somewhat rambling document HBO executives, Frank 156 Michael Berenbaum, “Michael Berenbaum to Frank Doelger,” February 5, 1998, Box 10, Folder 7, Loring Mandel Papers, 1942-2006, M2006-124, Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wisconsin. 1. 157 Ibid, 2.  54 Pierson, and Loring Mandel were clearly unhappy with. In a few instances, he argued for changes to make the film easier, in his opinion, for the audience. However, one of these changes involved removing Heydrich’s line “...[H]istory will mark us for having the gift and the will to advance the human race to greater purity in a space of time so short that Charles Darwin would be astonished.”158 For Berenbaum, this statement was, for some reason, too much for an audience to handle, and he thought that the reference to Darwin should be removed or contextualized with a scene depicting a private conversation between Heydrich, Müller, and Eichmann referencing “survival of the fittest.”159 Needless to say, this “creative comment”160 as Pierson put it did not go over well. In a large internal memo detailing how the production team was responding to comments, criticism, and suggestions from all three historians involved with the project, the producers answered Berenbaum’s suggestion by simply stating: “The Darwin reference remains in script. Poor practice to assume that the audience is insufficiently educated.”161 This refusal to assume that their audience would be “insufficiently educated” is one of Conspiracy’s strengths. As with other HBO dramas, little is spelled out for the viewer, and much of the plot is conveyed through subtle turns of phrase or facial expressions. In a sense, the film treats its audience like adults. The idea that historians should “dumb down” history for a non-specialist audience in order to make it palatable or inoffensive is one that most public historians are familiar with. Rather than “dumbing down” complicated histories for 158 Loring Mandel, “Conspiracy: The Meeting at Wannsee, an Original Drama” April 19, 2000, Box 3, Folder 4, Loring Mandel Papers, 1942-2006, M2006-124, Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wisconsin. 90. 159 Michael Berenbaum, “Michael Berenbaum to Frank Doelger,” July 5, 2000, Box 10, Folder 7, Loring Mandel Papers, 1942-2006, M2006-124, Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wisconsin. 1-2. 160 Ibid, note added and signed by Pierson directly on Berenbaum’s text. 161 Ani Gasti, “Conspiracy: The Meeting at Wannsee - Notes Review,” October 2, 2000, Box 10, Folder 7, Loring Mandel Papers, 1942-2006, M2006-124, Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wisconsin. 11.  55 wider audiences, public history is a translation—one is able to tell exceedingly complicated histories by employing language appropriate to the audience. Conspiracy does this well by clearly delineating the power struggle between the SS and civilian ministries, emphasizing Heydrich’s authority, and using arguments between individuals to illustrate wider conflicts within the Third Reich’s government. With the exception of the brief narration at the film’s opening, Conspiracy refrains from simplifying history, the main exception, of course, being the invented conflict between Stuckart and Klopfer, which serves to illustrate a wider conflict between the Party and civil service. At its best, Conspiracy acts as a translation – it boils down the incredibly complex history of the Holocaust into a ninety-minute film that plops the audience into the middle of a turning point in the history of the Final Solution. In these ninety minutes, the film manages to explain the shift from mass shootings to industrialized murder via gas, how the SS took control of Nazi Jewish policy, and how setbacks on the Eastern Front provided an impetus for an increasingly radicalized policy which culminated at Auschwitz. Most importantly, the film avoids all sentiment. In this sense, the film is closer to the “truth” of the Holocaust than many more-prominent films which focus on escape and survival against all odds. The average Jew’s experience during the Holocaust was death, not last-minute mercy. Conspiracy manages to get at this truth without depicting a single murder on camera. Christopher Browning provided comments and critiques during the summer of 2000, which HBO accepted for the most part, with a few exceptions. Browning is most famous for his work on the Reserve Police Battalion 101 in his book Ordinary Men, a key work of “functionalist” Holocaust scholarship that explores the “Holocaust of bullets” in the Soviet Union after the German invasion. Browning agreed that the Wannsee Conference was about consolidating Heydrich’s power, but he also felt that the script was too heavy-handed at 56 times, particularly when alcohol was involved. For him, the early script portrayed the conference as “a little too rowdy.”162 Browning provided a list of minor errors that needed correcting, most of which were corrected in the final version of the script. These errors included German officials referring to each other on a first-name basis; geographical mistakes; whether or not Martin Luther had received a delayed invitation to the conference, references to speeches or events that had not yet happened in January 1942; and other relatively minor points.163 Although HBO conceded to Browning’s suggestions for the most part, he had three larger problems with the script that HBO was forced to address. The first is what Browning justifiably refers to as an “absurd” subplot involving Martin Luther, representative of the Foreign Ministry, and his dog. In early versions of the script, Martin Luther brought his German shepherd with him and at several instances left the conference area to check on her. By the time of this meeting, the producers were still set on including this subplot, but it was eventually dropped due to lack of historical evidence and being too similar to scenes in Die Wannseekonferenz, where Major Rudolf Lange brings his German shepherd with him from Latvia. Browning’s second point of contention with the script is the amount of alcohol and “rowdy” atmosphere of the conference. HBO eventually responded to this with discussions about whether or not this was too similar to Die Wannseekonferenz and reduced the overall amount of references to alcohol in the script. HBO’s legal department even went so far as to catalog every time alcohol or tobacco were visible in Die Wannseekonferenz in order to avoid 162Christopher R. Browning, “Christopher Browning to Ani Gasti,” August 22, 2000, Box 10, Folder 7, Loring Mandel Papers, 1942-2006, M2006-124, Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wisconsin. 1. 163 Ibid, 1-7.  57 copyright infringement.164 Browning’s largest issue with the script was the portrayal of Dr. Wilhelm Stuckart. Browning felt that the script portrayed Stuckart as too much of a moderate who was potentially not fully on board with the Final Solution. For Browning, Stuckart’s anger can be explained by Heydrich and the SS finally wresting control from civilian ministries, one of which he represented.165 The production team argued that Stuckart’s anger in the script was not due to objecting to specific policies, but rather due to having authored the Nuremberg Laws and feeling that his legal “baby” was being done away with via SS fiat.166 This assertion is supported by the script, which emphasizes Stuckart’s authorship of the Nuremberg laws and his monologue on the “sublimely clever,” “arrogant,” and “calculating” Jew.167 Nevertheless, this same monologue includes a line about the Jews “reject[ing] The Christ” which Browning found anachronistic due to Nazi anti-Semitism’s emphasis on racial rather than religious justifications for anti-Semitism.168 This line remains in the final film and does not square with Stuckart’s historical anti-Semitism. A legal scholar and committed Nazi, Stuckart would not have cited religious reasons for his anti-Semitism. The Nuremberg Laws themselves justify the exclusion of Jews from German society on racial grounds and racial theory because, after all, they redefine citizenship to be based on German blood.169 Furthermore, his denunciation of “vulgar” anti-Semitism espoused by the Party contradicts his statement about the Jews rejecting Christ as exploiting older, religious-based anti-Semitism precisely fits the “vulgar’ anti-Semitism Stuckart is attacking so vehemently in this monologue. 164 Steven M. Blacher, “‘The Wannsee Conference’ Portrayal of Drink/Food,” October 10, 2000, Box 10, Folder 8, Loring Mandel Papers, 1942-2006, M2006-124, Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wisconsin. 1. 165 Ibid, 4-5. 166 Gasti, “Conspiracy: The Meeting at Wannsee - Notes Review.” 13. 167 Mandel, “Conspiracy. by Loring Mandel, with Scene Numbers, 5/19/01.” 61. 168 Browning, “Christopher Browning to Ani Gasti.” 5. 169 Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews: Volume 1: The Years of Persecution. 142.  58 It is also important to keep in mind that this back and forth between filmmakers, historians, and the producers makes it evident that film is rarely the product of a single vision, of an auteur. Conspiracy was very clearly a collaborative project, even in the early stages of writing. Collaboration refined its historical argument, removed (for the most part) inaccuracies, but also provided some challenges. Although collaborative work itself is certainly not a criteria for whether something is “public” history, it certainly is a common thread. Most museum exhibits, large documentary editing projects, park interpretation, oral histories, and other public history projects are collaborative by their very nature, whether the involved historians collaborate with other historians, community partners, other institutions, government agencies, or simply individuals from other fields that happen to work on the same projects. Public history is, for the most part, the opposite of the stereotypical view of history as the product of an individual’s research conducted without the help of others. Filmmaking is just as collaborative, if not more so. One only needs to take a look a credits reel to appreciate the fact that any film is no small undertaking driven by single-minded directorial visions. Researcher Andrea Axelrod provided the most extensive amount of commentary and additional research for Conspiracy. The majority of Axelrod’s input took place after April 2000. She was very familiar with the historiography of the Third Reich and the Wannsee Conference. Around a month before shooting commenced, Axelrod provided a document that managed to cite most scenes, lines, or other statements within the script. In total, the document provides almost 170 citations for a script totaling a little over one hundred pages, a much larger figure than the citations visible in the script itself. Axelrod cites a plethora of sources, the most important of course being the Wannsee Protocol; Eichmann’s trial transcripts; evidence gathered for the Nuremberg Trials; biographies of conference 59 participants; interviews with members of the Wannsee Memorial Museum staff; and German and Anglophone historians like Claudia Koonz, Christopher Browning, Raul Hillberg, Günther Deschner, Hans Mommsen, and others.170 With few exceptions, these are all academic—rather than popular—histories. Axelrod and the production team were familiar with Holocaust historiography and both their bibliography and extended comments prove this. This exhaustive document, while by no means as extensively cited as an academic book project, is nevertheless cited and footnoted to a degree that one would be hard-pressed to characterize it as anything other than a historian doing a historian’s work. Additionally, Axelrod produced a script review, of which roughly 40% is available. She clearly went above and beyond the amount of citations that Mandel himself had provided. She even contacted the German Weather Service to find out if snow blanketed the Wannsee area on 20 January 1942. The script review also confirms that Axelrod collaborated with Gaby M. Oelrichs, then head librarian at the Gedenkstätte Haus der Wannsee- Konferenz.171 The script review references recent developments in historiography, including whether or not the SS had confiscated the Wannsee Villa from a wealthy Jew.172 It would be impossible to exhaustively list everything from the script that Axelrod found a citation for, but it includes tidbits like whether Heydrich would have shuffled his note cards (yes, he liked to adlib) or to which attendees Stuckart would be likely to complain about the large SS- presence at the meeting.173 Axelrod cites a range of what was then cutting-edge Holocaust scholarship from both the Anglosphere and Germany, most notably Hans Mommsen’s work 170 Andrea Axelrod, “Sources for September 13, 2000 Script,” September 13, 2000, Box 10, Folder 8, Loring Mandel Papers, 1942-2006, M2006-124, Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wisconsin. 171 Andrea Axelrod, “Conspiracy: Script Review,” June 23, 2000, Box 10, Folder 8, Loring Mandel Papers, 1942- 2006, M2006-124, Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wisconsin. 2. 172 Ibid, 7. 173 Ibid, 13.  60 on the Civil Service and the Holocaust, which emphasizes a weakened Civil Service that took a backseat to SS domination.174 To be certain, not all of Axelrod’s objections were taken into account, notably one she had to the conflict between Stuckart and Klopfer, a conflict which has no basis in reality and instead seems to use the two as avatars of the Civil Service and the Party, respectively, in order to show the audience a broader view of the tangled rivalries among agencies and power-holders during the Third Reich.175 This hypothesis is the only way the film’s heated conflict between Stuckart and Klopfer makes even a bit of sense, as both men not only knew each other, but had collaborated on a journal that dealt with “ethnically based constitution and administration.” In other words, on a project that was clearly grounded in a shared understanding of race.176 Although the production team ignored a few of Axelrod’s critiques—most notably the one about the invented conflict between Klopfer and Stuckart—the majority of her criticisms and suggestions made their way into the final film. A few months after Axelrod wrote this document, Conspiracy completed filming in London and Berlin and would air in the US the following spring. Although the film offers a nuanced view of the Holocaust and its perpetrators, and focuses on the fits and starts, radicalization, and competing interests involved, HBO’s promotional material for Conspiracy took a different tack. In an April 2001 press release, HBO advertised Conspiracy as the story of how the “blueprint for the Holocaust” came to be and that the Wannsee Protocol is “the only document where the details of Hitler’s maniacal plan were actually codified.” Furthermore, the press release gives us the mistaken impression 174 Andrea Axelrod, “Overall Issues Part II,” June 23, 2000, Box 10, Folder 8, Loring Mandel Papers, 1942- 2006, M2006-124, Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wisconsin. 1. 175 Ibid, 4. 176 Roseman, The Villa, The Lake, The Meeting. 90. 61  that Conspiracy is a reenactment of the Protocol verbatim, something it certainly is not.177 Rather, Conspiracy is an attempt at “present[ing] a close approximation of actually being there, as if it were a live event,” not a documentary recreation of what can be found in the Protocol itself.178 This reluctance to describe the film as a documentary serves two purposes. First, it absolves the filmmakers of criticism (in their own eyes, this does not, of course, place them off limits to historians) regarding any historical inaccuracies present in the film. Second, it speaks to a desire on the part of the filmmakers to make a case for dramatic film as a method of communicating history to a wide audience. Unlike documentaries (and, arguably, lesser- quality dramatic films), a good dramatic film shows rather than tells; it relies sparingly on exposition and uses all the aspects of the medium (staging, cinematography, acting, editing) to tell a story in ways that are simultaneously more restricted, yet more free, than traditional ways of telling a historical narrative. By its very nature as a visual medium, dramatic film provides the public historian with a different set of challenges than those faced by historians working with more text-based forms of imparting historical knowledge like an article, museum exhibit, or a narration-driven documentary. Pierson and Mandel in particular repeatedly and explicitly state in HBO memoranda and correspondence that they are not seeking to create a documentary or a school lecture that provides all the historical context a textbook or documentary film would provide. When asked by HBO executives, or consulted historians like Michael Berenbaum, to make the film a bit easier on the audience via explanations or voiceovers, they repeatedly refused and very little, apart from brief statements that bookend the film, remains in the final cut. 177 HBO Films, “Kenneth Branagh and Stanley Tucci Star in HBO Films’ Conspiracy, Debuting May 19” (HBO Films, April 5, 2001), Box 15, Folder 6, Loring Mandel Papers, 1942-2006, M2006-124, Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wisconsin. 1. 178 Ibid, 2.  62 One key point made by Pierson that sums up the view he and Mandel had of film as history as well as their goal with Conspiracy can be found in a 1997 letter that he wrote to producer Frank Doelger. The production team had been arguing back and forth over whether to make a historical narrative more clear to the audience, in other words, to spell it out for them. In response, Pierson argued that such tactics would reduce the project to “dry documentary” and that this defeats the purpose of the film.179 For Pierson, the audience’s emotional response of the film was paramount: the audience should be “getting angry and it should be emotional.”180 Showing a historical event was more important than exposition via voiceover narration: “We are almost always up against the tendency to move the subtext into text – which is the exact opposite of drama.”181 This tension between the needs of drama and the imparting of historical truths cuts to the heart of the dilemma faced by filmmakers or historians trying to produce historical films. Many ideas that sound good at first, including expository narration that provides background information throughout the film, can be much less effective in the filmic medium. Pierson’s commitment to showing rather than telling also places Conspiracy firmly in the camp of HBO’s “difficult” dramas of the early 2000s like The Wire—a series notorious for eschewing exposition and dropping the viewer in an unfamiliar world and storyline. Furthermore, Conspiracy makes villains the main characters—an uncommon practice even by 2001. HBO’s The Sopranos is a notable example of television succeeding at this, albeit in a much different way than Conspiracy. Indeed, Frank Pierson argued that “[t]he one truly different, shocking and original aspect of Conspiracy is 179 Frank Pierson, “Frank Pierson to Frank Doelger,” August 15, 1997, Box 11, Folder 4, Loring Mandel Papers, 1942-2006, M2006-124, Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, University of Wisconsin- Madison, Madison, Wisconsin. 1. 180 Ibid. 1. 181 Ibid. 1.  63 presenting (in a sense) the Holocaust from the Nazi point of view.”182 In this sense, no matter how flawed or in some cases, over-the-top it can be, Conspiracy succeeds in this endeavor. It manages to “represent the un-representable” without depicting a single death on-screen and without crossing the line into either didactic docudrama or campy horror- movie clichés. It places the viewer at a version of the Wannsee Conference that, with one or two exceptions, follows the major historiography of its time and responds to it. The film translates a vast amount of complicated history into a manageable ninety-minute drama touching on a key moment in the history of the Holocaust’s evolution. It manages to keep the source material front and center during the film (there is even a title card at the end of the film discussing the only surviving copy of the Protocol); make an argument about the meeting; cause us to reexamine our ideas about supposedly unideological “desk murderers” like Eichmann; and get across an important historical truth: namely, that the Holocaust was not perpetrated by monsters, but rather by exceedingly “normal,” educated, middle-class, professional, “modern” men who met for drinks and cigars in January 1942.  182 Frank Pierson, “Notes for Complicity,” February 9, 2001, Box 11, Folder 4, Loring Mandel Papers, 1942- 2006, M2006-124, Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wisconsin. 3. 64 KRITZINGER Yes. The rest is Argument. The curse of my profession. LANGE I studied Law as well. KRITZINGER How do you apply that education to what you do? LANGE It has made me...distrustful of language. A gun means what it says.183 Chapter Three: Die Wannseekonferenz and Conspiracy This chapter compares and contrasts Conspiracy with its German-language predecessor, Die Wannseekonferenz (1984), directed by Heinz Schirk and written by Paul Mommertz. It begins with a description of Die Wannseekonferenz, its production history, historical context, and then moves into a comparison of both films, an analysis of their respective receptions, and a critique of both as works of public history. Due to the lack of archival material related to Die Wannseekonferenz, the first section relies largely on information gleaned from contemporary German newspapers, the website of screenwriter Paul Mommertz, and email interviews with Mommertz conducted by the author. I. Die Wannseekonferenz (1984) Die Wannseekonferenz, a joint production of the Austrian television network ORF and the West German network Bayerischer Rundfunk, is very similar to HBO’s Conspiracy at first glance. The film reenacts the Wannsee Conference in real time and argues that the meeting was largely about Heydrich and the SS demonstrating their supremacy in all matters related 183 Mandel, “Conspiracy. by Loring Mandel, with Scene Numbers, 5/19/01.” 68. 65   to the Final Solution. Die Wannseekonferenz begins with a shot of the front gate of the actual villa at Am Großen Wannsee 56-58, (the entire film was shot on location in the actual conference house) flanked by two members of the German Schutzpolizei or uniformed police force. Most of the conference attendees have already arrived by the film’s beginning, the SS are jovial, tell jokes, and get tipsy from cognac. Even Eichmann partakes and appears to be in good spirits. The Wannsee hotel’s status as an SS-run site is quite apparent. Switchboard operators have a station set up and Eichmann stops by at several points during the film to coordinate transports of Jews. In scenes where Eichmann loses his temper with the other party members over the phone, his abusive tendencies towards subordinates and groveling towards superiors are emphasized. The Nazi officials discuss mass murder almost immediately; a drunk SS Major Lange mentions gas vans, which were precursors to the death factories at Treblinka and Auschwitz—a revelation that Conspiracy only hints at much deeper into the story. Once Heydrich arrives, he orders Müller, Eichmann, Lange, and Luther to another room and holds a pre-meeting to discuss the course of the Holocaust thus far, the day’s agenda, and outline his strategy for bringing the civilian bureaucrats from various government ministries and the Party in line. Heydrich tells Eichmann, Lange, and Müller that their objective is to “force [civilian ministries and the Party] to share responsibility...or stumble into it.”184 During this pre-meeting, the entry of the United States into the war after the attack on Pearl Harbor dominates their discussion of current events, which is important because the Wannsee Conference was delayed by a month due to the American declaration of war.185 Eichmann discusses early experiments with Zyklon B in Auschwitz and an 184 Heinz Schirk, Die Wannseekonferenz, Drama, History, (1984). 185 Roseman, The Villa, The Lake, The Meeting. 60.  66 increasingly inebriated Lange—who later falls asleep during the meeting—discusses the mass shootings he led in Riga. Lange’s experiences in the Einsatzgruppen are directly cited as a reason to shift towards industrial-scale killing with poison gas, due to the “emotional burden” (emotionale Belastung) carried by those like him who have conducted mass shootings. Lange has also brought his German shepherd along; the dog constantly interrupts the meeting, providing comic relief. Humor is ever-present in the film, which takes a darkly comic turn and at one point veers into slapstick. Heydrich often tells jokes and laughs throughout the film; he comes across as a humorous playboy in many scenes. Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, is an ever-present figure lurking in the background: Heydrich refers to his orders, receives a telephone call from him, and a photograph of Himmler literally looms in the background during an early scene. The meeting itself takes place in the actual dining room at the historical location. All of the SS representatives sit on one side of the table and this seating arrangement plus camerawork help emphasize the SS’ domination over the proceedings. Indeed, at various points throughout the film, members of the SS stand up and literally stride across the room while making statements. A large map of Europe is placed at the head of the table and Heydrich often rises from the table to use the map as a visual aid. A female stenotypist interjects at various points and serves as an audience surrogate; Heydrich’s answers to her questions explain complicated issues for the audience. Earlier in the film, she asks Dr. Wilhelm Stuckart about the Nuremberg Laws and he goes on to explain the Mischlinge issue and mixed marriages. Furthermore, she and Heydrich flirt throughout the film and this dynamic serves to illustrate Heydrich’s historical reputation for womanizing. The camera pans freely around the conference table; this is not a static or conventionally-shot docudrama. In one single take, the camera pans over halfway around the table while 67 Friedrich Wilhelm Kritzinger expresses his doubts about the reasons for the meeting and about the plight of Berlin’s Jews, who had started committing suicide as deportations began. Like Conspiracy, Die Wannseekonferenz utilizes and responds to historical literature and takes a historiographical position. The overall argument of Die Wannseekonferenz is in line with intentionalist historiography, which is a school of thought characterized by an emphasis on Hitler and top-down decisionmaking. This is best illustrated by the presence of Hitler in the film. As with Himmler, Hitler’s presence overshadows the entire film. It is abundantly clear that the unfolding Final Solution is a plan directed by Hitler himself. A bust of Hitler looms behind Kritzinger, emphasizing both his position in the Reich Chancellery and his weakened position at the Conference. Heydrich points out that Hitler’s verbal orders are worth more than any written statements. Furthermore, characters reference two classic examples used by intentionalist historians. First, Heydrich refers to Hitler’s speech of January 30, 1939, in which he prophesized the destruction of European Jews: Today I want to be a prophet again: If international finance Jewry inside and outside Europe again succeeds in precipitating the nations into a world war, the result will not be the Bolshevization of the earth and with it the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.186 At the end of the film, Stuckart and Kritzinger discuss the meeting’s outcome and what that means for the future. Stuckart expresses disgust at the meeting and states that he wishes to resign from the Ministry of the Interior and volunteer for the front lines. He then tells Kritzinger that Hitler had expressed a desire to gas the Jews in Mein Kampf. A few minutes earlier, Heydrich had referenced a specific page number of the book and told Kritzinger to “learn to take the Führer at his word.” Stuckart paraphrases the following passage: 186 Adolf Hitler, Speech of 20 January 1939, quoted in Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews: Volume 1: The Years of Persecution. 310. Note that Friedländer is often associated with the “intentionalist” school of Holocaust historians.  68 If, at the beginning of the War and during the War, twelve or fifteen thousand of these Hebraic corrupters of the nation had been subjected to poison gas such as had to be endured in the field by hundreds of thousands of our very best German workers of all classes and professions, then the sacrifice of millions at the front would not have been in vain.187 The use of these two quotes from Hitler himself illustrates the filmmaker’s argument for the Holocaust as a plan drawn up by Hitler from the beginning. Indeed, Vincent Camby of the New York Times concluded in his 1987 review of the film, “Mr. Schirk and Mr. Mommertz are clearly intentionalists.” Although functionalism dominates current Holocaust historiography, intentionalism was very strong during the 1980s. Many of the key differences in portrayals of certain characters and the historical argument of Conspiracy can be attributed to changes in Holocaust historiography that made the functionalist position more prominent during the 1990s. HBO’s script review from functionalist historian Christopher Browning further underscores this key difference between the two films. Die Wannseekonferenz arrived in the midst of a wave of German and Austrian television productions that unpacked and explored the legacies of the Third Reich and the Holocaust. West Germany (the BRD) and, to a lesser extent, Austria had begun facing their difficult pasts after the 1968 Student Movement and a series of Holocaust-themed television productions during the 1970s, most notably NBC’s Holocaust (1974). This process of exploring and uncovering the previously-hidden or whitewashed past is a key concept in German history and memory known as Vergangenheitsbewältigung, or “coming to terms with the past.” Vergangenheitsbewältigung is the dominant force—indeed, an obligation—in contemporary German historical culture, whether in academia, politics, the mass media, museums, or historic sites. The historian Wulf Kansteiner characterizes the wave of German 187 Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (New York: Reynal And Hitchcock, 1941), http://archive.org/details/meinkampf035176mbp. 984.  69 docudramas that explore the Nazi past as part of a larger cultural “routine” which began in the 1960s.188 He also argues that “West German television popularized the task of Vergangenheitsbewältigung and shaped the collective memory of the Holocaust.”189 Die Wannseekonferenz belongs to this tradition of using television to explore and work through the difficult past. However, it is important to note that for most of its history, West German television—which was exclusively publicly-financed until the mid-1980s—avoided truly difficult aspects of the Nazi past, especially German guilt. During the 1960s, these television programs largely consisted of what Kansteiner characterizes as “philo-Semitic” dramas or stories about rescuing persecuted Jews. German guilt and stories about the perpetrators were absent from German television during this period.190 However, Kansteiner goes on to argue that West German television portrayed the Holocaust as a “genocide without perpetrators” and consciously avoided productions that could make viewers uncomfortable by critically examining German guilt.191 Die Wannseekonferenz clearly stands outside of this paradigm with its exclusive focus on the perpetrators and lack of sentimentality. In addition to its place within the television history of Austria and the BRD, Die Wannseekonferenz is the product of the most heated historical controversy in postwar Germany, the Historikerstreit, or “historians’ quarrel. This politically-charged historiographical argument played out in German newspapers and magazines throughout the 1980s. The Historikerstreit focused on whether the Holocaust was unique or if it could be compared to other genocides in history, thus rehabilitating Germany’s national self-image.192 In addition to the argument over the uniqueness of the Holocaust, the Historikerstreit also included the 188 Kansteiner, In Pursuit of German Memory. 5. 189 Ibid, 111. 190 Ibid, 112-115. 191 Ibid, 122. 192 Maier, The Unmasterable Past. 1.  70 intentionalism versus functionalism debate discussed earlier. Some intentionalist historians decried what they saw as the functionalists attempt to “relativize” the Holocaust due to their push for its historicization. Functionalists argue that focusing on Hitler at the center absolves the actual perpetrators of guilt.193 Die Wannseekonferenz’s intentionalist stance at this particular point in time places it as one of the early products of the Historikerstreit. By virtue of its stance, the film took a position in this very public debate. Die Wannseekonferenz is the brainchild of the director Heinz Schirk and the writer Paul Mommertz. Although no archival collection as vast as the Loring Mandel Papers exists for this film (there is a collection of his research material at the Wannsee Conference Memorial’s archive in Berlin), it is still possible to trace the production history and Mommertz’s research process based on articles in the German press, his personal website, and an email interview with him that I conducted earlier this year. Before writing the script for Die Wannseekonferenz, Mommertz had collaborated with Heinz Schirk on a Heydrich biopic. According to Mommertz, the German-Israeli producer Manfred Korytowski had to produce a film on the Wannsee Conference for years and only got the green light from Bayerischer Rundfunk after he attached Mommertz to the project because Mommertz had previously written documentaries and was a trained historian.194 Mommertz spent over a year conducting archival research for the script, this included the archives of the ministries represented at the meeting.195 Mommertz provides a list of the archival material he consulted for the film on his website. This material consisted of over 500 pages of archival sources. Mommertz actually 193 Ibid, 95. 194 Paul Mommertz, Email Interview with Paul Mommertz, interview by Nicholas Johnson, Email, May 18, 2016. 195 Paul Mommertz, “„WIR LEBEN NICHT SO LANGE, WIE WIR ERSCHÜTTERT SEIN MÜSSTEN“,” VT-Zeitung Nr. 1, September 19, 1986, http://paul-mommertz.de/wannsee04.html.  71 wrote the script at the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich (IfZ).196 He also lists published sources that were important to the project, these include both key works of history and primary sources such as Albert Speer’s memoirs.197 Mommertz sees the portrayal of the Holocaust through film as an imperative both as a historian and as a former member of the Hitler Youth (he was fifteen when the war ended). For him, confronting Nazi crimes became his “purpose in life.”: He acknowledges that film “is always in danger of becoming melodramatic.” He discusses the language used by his characters and says that he “as a contemporary witness (of the Nazi period), I still have their language in my ear.”198 Mommertz further explains his intentions for Die Wannseekonferenz: I saw it as my task to dramatically abstain from all filmic effects, because I see it as absolutely inappropriate for this subject. I restrained myself completely, let the facts speak for themselves and left the judgement up to the viewer. I see that as the only possibility to reasonably do justice to the subject matter.199 Mommertz intended to create a historical film that avoided exaggeration, over-dramatization, and sought to present an important historical event as objectively as possible. Like Conspiracy, the dialogue is an invention grounded in historical research. He addressed this in a 1986 interview where he referred to the language used at other Nazi conferences, including one held by Hermann Goering after Kristallnacht in 1938. For him, each of the three groups present at Wannsee had their own ways of talking about the Jews and the Holocaust, in a 196 “Paul Mommertz | Materialien Zum Film „Die Wannseekonferenz“, "Akten” accessed July 9, 2016, http://paul-mommertz.de/wannseeAkten.html. 197 “Paul Mommertz | Materialien Zum Film „Die Wannseekonferenz“, "Literatur” accessed July 9, 2016, http://paul-mommertz.de/wannseeLiteratur.html. 198 Paul Mommertz, Email Interview with Paul Mommertz. 199 Ibid.. Original: “Ich habe es als meine Aufgabe angesehen, dramaturgisch von allen filmischen Effekten abzusehen, weil ich sie bei diesem Thema für absolut unangemessen halte. Ich habe mich vollständig zurückgehalten, die Tatsachen sprechen lassen und das Urteil dem Zuschauer überlassen. Das halte ich für die einzige Möglichkeit, dem Thema einigermassen gerecht zu werden.”  72 way, each institution had its own “dialect”: “The tragedy of millions of people was discussed cynically by the SS, bureaucratically by the representatives of the ministries, vulgar and plebian by the representatives of the Party.”200 This is played out in the film; the SS constantly jokes about mass murder while the ministry representatives look on and engage in legalistic arguments. One can also see this divide into three distinct linguistic camps in Conspiracy, but it is important to note that Mommertz is using this technique in order to emphasize the three different spheres of power within the Third Reich’s government. II. Reception of both Conspiracy and Die Wannseekonferenz Both films made about the Wannsee Conference have generally been well-received, although they are not without their critics, particularly from historians. The biggest difference between the two is that Die Wannseekonferenz was at the center of a debate in West Germany’s most prominent periodical, while Conspiracy escaped harsh critique from the press. Die Wannseekonferenz provoked a debate in Der Spiegel in which Mommertz himself took part. As early as 1977, a review in the center-left newspaper Die Zeit criticized Mommertz’s previous film, Reinhard Heydrich – Manager des Terrors for not portraying Holocaust victims and paradoxically argued that Mommertz was glorifying Heydrich with his portrayal. This particularly harsh review echoes later German criticism of Die Wannseekonferenz and illustrates the moral minefield encountered when producing films about the Holocaust or the Third Reich: The millions remain silent, so that [Heydrich] can enjoy his role to the fullest: No gassed child, no skeleton, no ramp (e.g. at Auschwitz), even the bench which Jews were not allowed to sit on at that time in Germany didn’t come into the picture. The state of mind of the victims (perhaps one of them also 200 Mommertz, “„WIR LEBEN NICHT SO LANGE, WIE WIR ERSCHÜTTERT SEIN MÜSSTEN“.” Original: “Die Tragödie von Millionen Menschen wurde zynisch diskutiert bei der SS, bürokratisch bei den Vertretern der Ministerien, vulgär und pöbelhaft bei den Vertretern der Partei.”  73 had a funny father and a strict mother; one of the countless whose date of death is unknown in contrast with Heydrich’s hour of death?), the state of mind of the victims, the nameless with his dreadful everyman’s end, was not mentioned.201 202 Wolfgang Benz has noted that some historical films, including Die Wannseekonferenz, attract negative attention not just from historians and university faculty, but also from film and television critics.203 In 1984, Der Spiegel editor Heinz Höhne scathingly reviewed Die Wannseekonferenz. His review attacks television for its obsession with Vergangenheitsbewältigung and insinuates that too many Holocaust-themed films had been released and that Die Wannseekonferenz adds nothing of value to an already-saturated landscape of history-themed television. Höhne praises Schirk’s directorial abilities and the acting chops of Dietrich Mattausch (Heydrich) and Gerd Böckmann (Eichmann), but takes Mommertz to task for creating what he sees as a mostly-invented portrayal: “This is not the Wannsee Conference that historians know. It is the Wannsee Conference a la Paul Mommertz.”204 Höhne then curiously argues that Mommertz should not have made Eichmann as important of a figure in the film and claims that unnamed “historians” know that Eichmann had an insignificant role. In this sense, Höhne is just accepting Eichmann’s testimony at face value like Hannah Arendt. Most tellingly, he cites Eichmann’s earlier—and later contradicted—statements in order to prove that no discussions of mass murder took place, only “evacuation.” This takes 201 “Fernseh-Kritik: Der Große Dämon Reinhard H.,” Die Zeit, August 5, 1977, sec. Gesellschaft, http://www.zeit.de/1977/32/der-grosse-daemon-reinhard-h. 202 Translation of: “Die Millionen blieben stumm, damit der eine seine Rolle auskosten konnte: Kein vergastes Kind, kein Skelett, keine Rampe, nicht einmal die Bank kam ins Bild, auf der Juden nicht sitzen durften, damals in Deutschland. Die Seelenlage der Opfer (vielleicht hatte da auch jemand einen lustigen Vater und eine pflichtstrenge Mutter: einer der Unzähligen, deren Todesdatum man, im Unterschied zu Heydrichs Sterbestunde, nicht kennt?), die Seelenlage der Opfer, der Namenlosen mit ihrem schauderhaften Jedermanns Ende, wurde nicht erwähnt.” 203 Wolfgang Benz, “Wie Authentisch Muß Der Bericht Über Ein Geschichtliches Ereignis Sein? Anmerkungen Eines Historikers Zu „Schindlers Liste“: Bilder Statt Fußnoten,” Die Zeit, March 4, 1994, sec. Kultur, http://www.zeit.de/1994/10/bilder-statt-fussnoten. 204 Heinz Höhne, “Eine Falle Der Betroffenheit,” Der Spiegel, December 17, 1984, http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-13511955.html.  74 the highly-euphemistic Wannsee Protocol at its word and completely ignores the nuanced and euphemism-charged language of Nazi bureaucracy. Höhne continues and accuses Mommertz of ignoring his historical advisors at the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich (IfZ) and Israeli historian Shlomo Aronson. The Mommertz portrayed here is a vain and arrogant filmmaker with no use for historians—something that seems more than questionable given Mommertz’s graduate training as a historian and relatively open policy of listing all of the sources he consulted for the film. Höhne argues that not enough source material on the Wannsee Conference exists to create a film of this length, a curious assertion considering the number of books and articles published on the conference. He then recounts an alleged falling out between Mommertz and Aronson due to various historical errors, including the portrayal of Stuckart as a less-than-enthusiastic Nazi (a criticism echoed in later critiques of Conspiracy). Although Höhne’s review has valid criticisms, it mostly comes across as a too-conservative journalist attacking film for not adhering to a murky definition of historical “facts” and for engaging in what every single dramatic film is forced to do by the very nature of the medium: inventing dialogue and conflict. In an unusual move (according to Mommertz)205, Der Spiegel gave him the opportunity to reply with a full-length article of his own in January 1985. This article responds to Höhne point by point and recounts evidence for each of the participants having known about the Holocaust, something that Höhne had contested. However, Mommertz evades answering Höhne’s assertions about Aronson or his criticism about the portrayal of Stuckart. At the end of his response, Mommertz fires a broadside against the charge that not enough historical evidence exists to create a ninety-minute film about Wannsee: I have six folders with original documents from the Conference’s environment at my disposal. I am also a historian. Perhaps it is conceivable 205 Paul Mommertz, Email Interview with Paul Mommertz. 75  that a historian, after fourteen months of specialized study in a particular subject area is a bit ahead of other historians.206 207 Later in 1985, Mommertz also wrote a lengthy response to his critics in which he repeated some of his arguments in his Der Spiegel article. In this response, Mommertz argues for the historical film in a radical way reminiscent of Robert Rosenstone: “Before this film, there was not a single monograph about the Wannsee Conference. The film is the first and furthermore historically-grounded portrayal of the Conference ever.”208 While technically correct, it is important to remember that historical monographs do not need to invent dialogue and that the film medium requires a certain degree of fictionalization that is unavoidable no matter how many archival sources the filmmaker consults. Although Die Wannseekonferenz initially sparked outrage in the German press, later reviews and articles about it treat the film much more favorably. With few exceptions, historians ignore the film or treat it as a footnote. Steven Lehrer devotes one paragraph to the film in his book about the Wannsee House in which he refrains from commenting on the film at all, instead quoting reviewer Leonard Maltin: “According to Maltin, the film presents a fascinating, chilling recreation of the conference.”209 German-language scholars tend to be more forgiving, but no detailed analysis of Die Wannseekonferenz has yet taken place. Furthermore, some commenters tend to erroneously hold the film up as a “sober” and “historically 206 Paul Mommertz, “Völlig Unrealistisch Und Lebensfremd,” Der Spiegel, January 1985. 207 Translation of “Ich verfüge über sechs Ordner mit Originaldokumenten aus dem Umfeld der Konferenz. Auch ich bin Historiker. Vielleicht ist es denkbar, dass ein Historiker nach vierzehn Monaten Spezialstudien auf einem besonderen Sachgebiet anderen Historikern ein wenig voraus ist.” 208 Paul Mommertz, “DIE WANNSEEKONFERENZ - ‘Von Der Abwehr Einer Historischen Information Durch Filmkritik’ - Festschrift Zum DAG-Fernsehpreis 1985,” 1985, http://www.paul- mommertz.de/wannsee03.html. 209 Lehrer, Wannsee House and the Holocaust. 180.  76 grounded” alternative to Conspiracy, which is often portrayed as “overblown” or “over- dramatized.”210 The fact that Conspiracy is an HBO/BBC production led some critics to dismiss it as “Hollywood,” which obscures the great difference between how movie studios and premium cable networks approach filmmaking. The right-wing German magazine Blaue Narzisse epitomizes this now-hackneyed criticism by referring to Conspiracy as “completely overblown.”211 This criticism of Conspiracy holds water in some areas but is not sufficient to completely dismiss the film; these same criticisms can equally be applied to the Austro- German film, in which certain characters also do not behave as they would have historically. Kritzinger and Stuckart are portrayed as doubters instead of committed Nazis; the film is not “sober” enough. One can even see this attitude on display if one compares the German and English Wikipedia entries on the Wannsee Conference. The German page praises Die Wannseekonferenz and then claims that due to the dialogue being invented, the film is not historically-grounded. This exact criticism can be applied to Die Wannseekonferenz as most of its dialogue is also invented. The page further makes an unsourced claim stating that the film made Kritzinger look like a doubter, which is supposedly historically incorrect—again an area where both films are in agreement.212 Curiously, German newspapers and periodicals praised Conspiracy at the same level seen in British and American periodicals. Der Tagesspiegel noted that the production “leaves no doubt that all 15 attending Nazi policymakers 210 See the IMDB user reviews of both films for some of these typical statements: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088377/reviews?start=0 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0266425/reviews?filter=hate 211 Benjamin Marx, “Die Wannseekonferenz: Unterhaltsame Geschichtsstunde Mit Kleinen Mängeln,” Blaue Narzisse, accessed July 12, 2016, http://www.blauenarzisse.de/index.php/rezension/item/969-die- wannseekonferenz-unterhaltsame-geschichtsstunde-mit-kleinen-maengeln 212 “Wannseekonferenz,” Wikipedia, July 11, 2016, https://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wannseekonferenz&oldid=156059037.  77 supported the annihilation of the Jews.”213 This latter claim is intriguing because many commenters—both online and in literature—seem to believe that Colin Firth had portrayed Stuckart as being against the Final Solution, whereas the filmmakers are on record stating that his objections in the film are due to protection of his “baby,” the Nuremberg Laws, not any humanitarian concern. Much like its German-language predecessor, Conspiracy mostly remains a footnote or wholly ignored by historians. Mark Roseman mentions Conspiracy as part of the public’s view of Wannsee. For him, the meeting at Wannsee—which took place without Hitler— contradicts a conventional view of the Holocaust that places Hitler at the center of the decision-making process. He argues that Conspiracy’s creators were aware of this conventional view and thus felt the need to suggest a Hitler order (in the narration sequence beginning the film) as the catalyst for the meeting without stating that Hitler himself pulled the strings behind the meeting.214 The lines in question occur at the start of the film as an aerial shot reveals the Wannsee villa and Heydrich’s plane: NARRATOR While he hired and fired Generals and winter grew colder, 15 of his officials were ordered from their comments and ministries to meet in a quiet lakeside residence at Wannsee, in Berlin far from the crisis at the front. In two hours, these men changed the world forever. Only one record of what was said and done here survives from the wreckage of what was the Thousand Year Reich.215 Roseman is correct that the film’s opening narration emphasizes Hitler; the first line of the film is, after all, “Adolf Hitler invaded Poland in 1939, starting World War Two.”216 Nevertheless, the lines mentioned in his article are harder to pin down. While Hitler “hired 213 Kurt Sagatz, “Drehbuch Des Schreckens,” Der Tagespiegel, January 29, 2010, http://www.tagesspiegel.de/medien/tv-film-drehbuch-des-schreckens/1672252.html. 214 Roseman, “‘Wannsee’ als Herausforderung.” 402. 215 Mandel, “Conspiracy. by Loring Mandel, with Scene Numbers, 5/19/01.” 2. 216 Ibid, 1.  78 and fired his generals,” the Wannsee Conference attendees “were ordered.” Mandel made this part of the line passive, which makes it more difficult to assess who exactly ordered the meeting (according to Mandel and Pierson) at this point in the film. Later in the film, Heydrich quotes from a Goering letter217 which provided him (and the conference attendees) with the “mandate” to carry out the Final Solution.218 Although Roseman is correct to point out the narration’s focus on Hitler, the actual film is much more nuanced than this suggests, especially when compared with Die Wannseekonfenenz, which directly references Hitler’s speeches and a passage from Mein Kampf in order to draw a line between Hitler’s pre-war statements and the Holocaust, in addition to several visual references to Hitler and Himmler. Conspiracy avoids these strategies for explaining the Final Solution and instead keeps Hitler in the background with one key exception, a confrontation between Friedrich Wilhelm Kritzinger and Heydrich that illustrates Hitler’s willingness to keep his name separate from the actual formulation and carrying out of genocidal policy. In this scene, Rudolf Lange has just angrily brought up the mass shootings he carried out in Latvia and asked Heydrich if these murdered Jews had been “evacuated,” the euphemism employed in the film up to this point: HEYDRICH Yes, in my personal opinion, they’re evacuated. KRITZINGER Explain? HEYDRICH I have just done so. KRITZINGER That is not--, no, that’s contrary to what the Chancellery has been told, I have directly been assured, I have—that we have undertaken to 217 An English translation of the historical letter to Heydrich from 31 July 1941 can be found here: http://www.ghwk.de/fileadmin/user_upload/pdf-wannsee/engl/goering.pdf 218 Mandel, “Conspiracy. by Loring Mandel, with Scene Numbers, 5/19/01.” 28-29.  79 systematically eradicate all the Jews of Europe, that possibility has been personally denied, to me, by the Führer! HEYDRICH And it will continue to be. KRITZINGER has been fearful that all the assurances he and Lammers have received have been lies. He stands again, HEYDRICH looks at him coldly. His following words, sounding regretful, are in fact a warning: this is the way it is, accept it. HEYDRICH (CONT’D) My apologies.219 This scene powerfully illustrates Conspiracy’s emphasis on the removal of Hitler from actual policy as well as the SS using the meeting at Wannsee to assert their dominance over the other institutions present at the meeting. However, it is important to note that HBO’s promotional material contradicts the more functionalist aspects of the film. An HBO press release from 5 April 2001 mentions “the blueprint for Hitler’s Final Solution” and characterizes the Wannsee Protocol as “the details of Hitler’s maniacal plan.”220 Historians have also commented on Conspiracy. Alan Steinweis reviewed Conspiracy for The American Historical Review. Steinweis points out that the above-referenced scene presents Kritzinger as a “bold dissenter” and that this is a negative example of artistic license. Steinweis also notes scenes where Heydrich pulls Krtizinger and Stuckart aside as dramatic inventions.221 Steinweis unfortunately reviews the film as historians are prone to—he focuses on several scenes that obviously contain fictional elements, or “artistic license,” and avoids engaging with the film’s broader arguments and vision. The review also compares Conspiracy with Die Wannseekonferenz and actually argues that the former may be more historically 219 Ibid, 45-46. 220 HBO Films, “Kenneth Branagh and Stanley Tucci Star in HBO Films’ Conspiracy, Debuting May 19” (HBO Films, April 5, 2001), Box 15, Folder 6, Loring Mandel Papers, 1942-2006, M2006-124, Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wisconsin. 1. 221 Alan E. Steinweis, “Review of Conspiracy,” The American Historical Review 107, no. 2 (2002): 674–75, 674.  80 accurate because it discusses the killing process in more detail, as mentioned by Eichmann during his interrogation.222 Steinweis also criticizes the appearance of Kenneth Branagh’s Heydrich, but he praises Stanley Tucci’s “pro-active anti- Semite” Eichmann as “a refreshing departure from the old, and inaccurate, cliché of the "banal" bureaucrat.”223 Although the review is ultimately positive, it suffers from the common problems encountered when historians write about film as discussed in Chapter One, e.g. it is mostly concerned with dramatic license and does not engage with the film on a deeper level. The deeper analysis missing from Steinweis’ review—and most historians’ writing on film—would investigate the production history of the film in order to determine the filmmakers’ intent, the historical argument, if any, and the research process behind the film. In other words, it would echo the three levels of film analysis outlined by Toplin, which were discussed in Chapter One. Examining the film on its own without considering production history or the biographies of the filmmakers provides both the historian and the reader with an incomplete picture. An investigation of the production history of Conspiracy, especially material found in the archive, provides us with a more complete picture of the film and the goals of its creators. The only other major historical publication that directly engages with Conspiracy does not suffer from this issue. Simone Gigliotti’s “Commissioning Mass Murder: Conspiracy and History at the Wannsee Conference,” which was briefly mentioned in Chapter Two, engages with the film in detail and is primarily concerned with Conspiracy as a “visual essay about language” and how “Mandel uses language...to create an alternative ‘Wannsee Protocol’, a visual text of historical and biographical possibilities.224 For Gigliotti, Mandel made 222 Ibid, 675. 223 Ibid, 675. 224 Simone Gigliotti, “Commissioning Mass Murder.” 128.  81 “interventions” into the historical debate surrounding the Wannsee Conference and “offered a plausible historical truth to the document’s discursive silences” by having characters discuss killing methods in detail.225 Most importantly for this study, Gigliotti focuses primarily on the writing process and on Mandel, the screenwriter, as the most important figure in the process of creating historical films. She takes issue with historians who view films like Conspiracy as “exercise[s] in translation” rather than interpretations in their own right.226 One of her most valuable contributions is her discussion of how the film is concerned with the “erosion of language’s veneer;” the characters begin the film with euphemisms for mass murder and dance around them again and again until words finally mean what they really mean: “The juxtaposition of excess and austerity is reflected, respectively, in the abundance of food and alcohol and the use of restrained language, but over time, this gulf collapses.”227 One of Gigliotti’s criticisms—that the accents are inauthentic and should be German rather than posh English accents, comes off as half-right.228 It is safer for an English- language film to use native English accents than have the characters speak English with German accents; Schindler’s List is one of the few films to pull this off without undermining the seriousness of the subject matter and descending into camp. It would have been better to remake the film in German than have Stanley Tucci attempt a Viennese accent, which might have distracted the audience. The English-language nature of Conspiracy is one of the film’s biggest flaws, even though it gave the film a much wider audience, ensured that it would be backed by the financial behemoth HBO, and allowed the filmmakers to draw from the best 225 Ibid, 131-132. 226 Ibid, 131. 227 Ibid, 129-130. 228 Ibid, 132.  82 of Great Britain’s acting talent. The fact that Die Wannseekonferenz was shot in German meant that actors could directly quote from the Protocol without the danger of mistranslation— though this is of course undermined when non-German speakers rely on subtitles to watch the film; the English subtitles included with its current release are woefully simplified and destroy a lot of that film’s nuance and detail. Ultimately, Gigliotti’s article stands out as the only academic analysis of Conspiracy carried out to date that moves beyond either a simple review or footnote. Indeed, the vast majority of historical works consulted for this study that mentioned either film simply listed them alongside other Holocaust films or briefly summarized them as part of a “sourcebook” style list of recent Holocaust films. Although virtually ignored by academic historians other than Gigliotti and Roseman, the two dramatizations of the Wannsee Conference remain popular for historians directly involved with creating educational programming for both higher and secondary education. Both films have been used as pedagogical tools. In a recent volume consisting of articles about the Conference and current research trends, Wolf Kaiser, historian and head of the pedagogical department at the House of the Wannsee Conference Memorial, suggests using extracts from both films as “points of entry” for students.229 Similarly, film historian Barry Langford advocates using both films in the classroom “because students benefit from being able to compare different dramatic treatments of the same historical material.”230 Langford also lists Conspiracy as part of a family of films which have an “explicitly educative or consciousness-raising agenda, or which consciously engage with academic historical interpretation of the Holocaust...”231 Another volume on Holocaust education uses 229 Wolf Kaiser, “Die Wannsee-Konferenz als Unterrichtsgegenstand: Anregungen und Dokumente für die Sekundarstufe II,” in Die Wannsee-Konferenz am 20. Januar 1942: Dokumente Forschungsstand Kontroversen, ed. Norbert Kampe and Peter Klein, 1. Auflage (Köln: Böhlau Köln, 2013), 437–52. 438 230 Langford, “Mass Culture/Mass Media/Mass Death: Teaching Film, Television, and the Holocaust,” 64. 231 Ibid, 64.  83 Conspiracy as a teaching tool and asks students to “[d]iscuss the irony of the detailed, meticulous preparation of the food served at the meeting as well as the beautiful setting.” A more awkward assignment asks students to: “[i]magine that you are at the Wannsee Conference. Write and deliver a dissenting argument that could possibly have changed the tone and intention of the conference.”232 III. Comparing Conspiracy with its Predecessor This section returns to the central theme of the thesis by examining Conspiracy and Die Wannseekonferenz as works of public history. On the surface, Conspiracy and Die Wannseekonferenz are quite similar films. Nevertheless, key differences expose the differing historical arguments of the two films and how changes in historiography can be seen on screen. The biggest difference between the historiographical arguments of both films is that Die Wannseekonferenz adopts what can be labeled a broadly “intentionalist” view of the Holocaust, e.g. everything was part of a plan that Hitler had set in motion beginning in the 1930s. Conspiracy, while not completely abandoning Hitler as the chief architect of the Holocaust, adopts what can be termed a more “functionalist” view of the Holocaust, where competing interests within the Third Reich vie for supremacy and many innovations and expansions of mass murder occur without needing detailed orders from Hitler. This chapter previously examined intentionalist aspects of Die Wannseekonferenz. Chapter Two discussed the more functionalist historiographical argument of Conspiracy, particularly when examining a memo by Colin Callender, head of HBO NYC Productions. It is important to note that the terms “functionalism” and “intentionalism” refer to general schools of thought and are not 232 Miriam Klein Kassenoff and Anita Meyer Meinbach, Studying the Holocaust Through Film and Literature: Human Rights and Social Responsibility (New York: Gefen Publishing House, 2004). 36.  84 necessarily labels that historians adopt for themselves. These labels are also too broad and ignore the nuances of respective historical arguments. For example, Mark Roseman’s The Villa, The Lake, The Meeting can be interpreted as a broadly functionalist argument, although Roseman acknowledges (none of them argue that Hitler was irrelevant), that a Hitler order may have kicked off the Third Reich’s campaign of mass murder sometime in the summer of 1941.233 Roseman also argues that the “pure functionalist” view does not emphasize Hitler enough.234 With these brief categorizations of both films in mind, it is now time to compare and contrast other aspects of the films in detail. Both films portray the meeting’s purpose largely as a vehicle for the SS to assert its dominance over other institutions, but emphasize this in different ways. Die Wannseekonferenz places all of the SS on one side of the table and as a group, they are more intimidating than in Conspiracy. In the latter film, the SS congregate together in a celebratory mood before the meeting, and, as in the German film, tell jokes and strut cockily around the room. Both films note that the villa is an SS-operated building, uniformed SS hotel staff are seen throughout each film. Die Wannseekonferenz repeats the myth that the villa was also Interpol headquarters, something that was not debunked until after the film’s release. The confusion was due to a typo in the original conference invitations, which listed the wrong address.235 In a pre- production document, Ani Gasti, HBO’s director of development, discusses the SS’ bid for power and how the production should portray it: ...this should be the subtext of the whole meeting. Emerging as the debate about actual policy emerges, i.e. we need a much more innocuous, surreptitious taking of control by Heydrich as a subplot, as the bigger plans and solutions are discussed. Don’t hit us over the head with it up front.236 233 Roseman, The Villa, the Lake, the Meeting. 41. 234 Ibid, 12. 235 Tuchel, Am Grossen Wannsee 56-58. 114. 236 Gasti, “Conspiracy: The Meeting at Wannsee - Notes Review.” 3-4.  85 This difference between the two films—and also, the lack of a “pre-meeting” between members of the SS, allows Conspiracy to build dramatic tension as the audience is not exactly sure about what the SS is planning, unlike in Die Wannseekonferenz where Heydrich’s general plan for the day is laid out at the beginning. Both films discuss killing methods, something not overtly present in the Protocol but hinted at by the lines “practical experience which is of great significance for the coming Final Solution of the Jewish question” and “the various possible kinds of solution.”237 In Die Wannseekonferenz, Major Rudolf Lange mentions gas vans very early on in the film; eventually the use of Zyklon B is mentioned. Conspiracy initially refrains from discussing killing methods and instead uses the euphemism “evacuation” which is found in the Protocol. Lange, the youngest conference attendee and the only one who had had “practical experience” in executions, shifts the meeting’s tone from one of evasiveness and understatement to one that directly addresses the SS’ hitherto secret campaign of mass murder, illustrating Gigliotti’s view of Conspiracy as fundamentally about the veneer of language: Upon hearing “evacuation”, Lange slowly gets to his feet during the following. HEYDRICH (CONT’D) -they, too, will fall within categories...(DEPENDING UPON ETC) LANGE (he speaks reasonably, but the liquor has triggered a deep anger) Could you, General...sorry...I have the real feeling that I evacuated 30,000 Jews already by shooting them. At Riga. Is what I did “evacuation”? When they fell, were they “evacuated”? Everything stops. The accepted euphemism has been challenged. EICHMANN’s “no” wag of the head and staying hand stop the STENOTYPIST. 237 Roseman, trans., “Appendix A: Translation of the Protocol,” in The Villa, The Lake, The Meeting. 111, 118. 86  LANGE (CONT’D) ...There’re another 20,000 at least waiting for similar “evacuation.” I just think it’s helpful to know what words mean. With all respect. This time it’s KRITZINGER who raps on the table. Angrily. EICHMANN If I might suggest that it’s unnecessary to- (BURDEN THE RECORD WITH THIS QUESTION) Yes. In my personal opinion, they’re evacuated.238 From this point forward, conference participants openly discuss mass murder and increasingly abandon euphemism. By the end of the film, the death factories of Treblinka, Bełżec, and Auschwitz are mentioned along with the effects gassings have on the victims’ bodies. This is based upon Eichmann’s postwar testimony in which he stated that participants frankly discussed the various means of mass murder at their disposal: Today, I no longer have any detailed recollection of this matter, Your Honour, but I know that these gentlemen stood together and sat together, and in very blunt words they referred to the matter, without putting it down in writing.239 The Eichmann of Conspiracy is a more complicated figure than the version found in Die Wannseekonferenz. Stanley Tucci’s portrayal is both informed by and a pushback against Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil” view of Eichmann. By the end of Conspiracy, Eichmann is perfectly positioned to take over for Heydrich after the latter’s assassination. Tucci’s Eichmann is not a minor figure or glorified secretary, but rather a cunning figure waiting to take control: “[Eichmann’s] personal technique with people was to be more silkily persuasive, and he often played the card of self-deprecation and modesty. He was different 238 Mandel, “Conspiracy. by Loring Mandel, with Scene Numbers, 5/19/01.” 45. 239 Adolf Eichmann, Eichmann Trial, session 107, 24 July 1961. Cited in Roseman, The Villa, the Lake, the Meeting. 99. HEYDRICH  87 in that way from Heydrich.”240 In contrast, Gerd Böckmann’s portrayal of Eichmann in Die Wannseekonferenz is a more extroverted figure, he drinks with other conference attendees earlier in the film and has much more of a sense of humor than the Eichmann of Conspiracy. In Die Wannseekonferenz, Eichmann berates subordinates at several points whereas in Conspiracy, he intimidates them in a quieter, more subdued manner. The two portrayals of Heydrich are similarly flipped, Kenneth Branagh’s Heydrich is incredibly intimidating and threatens both Stuckart and Kritzinger with a trip to a concentration camp or worse in several scenes. This behavior is not historically-documented and is curious considering the fact that Heydrich held roughly the same rank as the majority of conference attendees.241 Dietrich Mattausch’s Heydrich is very different—he uses humor and charm to get his points across rather than intimidation. In this sense, the Heydrich of Die Wannseekonferenz is a vainer, human figure than the one found in Conspiracy. Nevertheless, Branagh explained his portrayal by citing a “psychological profile” created by Mandel: Our scriptwriter, Loring Mandel, tried to do a psychological profile of Heydrich, looking for elements of behavior that may not appeal but perhaps lend to understanding his character, whether it be hatred of parents, a childhood trauma, some physical or mental disability, something that might illuminate his motives. Nothing seemed to make conventional psychological sense. His utter lack of compassion, lack of pity, revealed a man who has a buried conscience and as a result, seems to be soulless.242 It is difficult to say which incarnation of Heydrich is more historically correct. Branagh’s portrayal of Heydrich as an utterly pitiless man, especially when he threatens Stuckart and Kritzinger, runs the risk of veering into stereotype and making a Heydrich into a caricature or monster rather than a real human figure, his reign of terror in Prague notwithstanding. 240 Stanley Tucci, quoted in HBO Films, “Kenneth Branagh and Stanley Tucci Star in HBO Films’ Conspiracy, Debuting May 19.” 3. 241 Roseman, The Villa, the Lake, the Meeting, 57. 242 Kenneth Branagh, quoted in HBO Films, “Kenneth Branagh and Stanley Tucci Star in HBO Films’ Conspiracy, Debuting May 19.”  88 When alone with other members of the SS, Heydrich drops the mask a bit and relaxes as he realizes that the meeting has succeeded with much less difficulty than he had anticipated. Mattausch’s portrayal avoids these pitfalls, and maybe his interpretation of Heydrich as a more jovial figure is so incongruous with our own stereotypical views of Nazis that it hits a more powerful emotional and historical chord: these people laughed about murdering millions and thought it was all in a day’s work (this is also featured in Conspiracy, just not with Heydrich’s character). While Branagh certainly delivers a more memorable performance and likely gets to a truth about Heydrich, especially as a man who wielded enormous power at the time and seemed to be Hitler’s heir apparent, Mattausch’s performance serves as a needed corrective to the stereotypical view of Nazis as inhuman monsters. Major Rudolf Lange serves an important purpose for both films. He represents the Third Reich’s campaign of mass murder in the East, especially mass shootings, which provided the catalyst for the switch to industrial killing. The Lange of Die Wannseekonferenz, played by Martin Lüttge, is drunk for most of the film; this sometimes serves as comic relief. Lange also provides firsthand testimony about the effectiveness of various killing methods; he is in a sense Heydrich’s star witness to help him justify shifting towards industrial-scale killing. In contrast, Barnaby Kay’s portrayal of Lange in Conspiracy is that of a man haunted by mass shootings, a Nazi with PTSD. Although no historical sources point to Lange either being drunk at the meeting or traumatized due to his experiences, it seems that both Mommertz and Mandel used Lange as an avatar for the campaign of mass murder up to that point in time. Indeed, some historians have pointed to Lange’s “special role” at the meeting (he was by far the lowest ranking attendee) as logical only due to his “practical experience” in 89 carrying out mass shootings.243 The use of Lange to explore the campaign of mass shootings serves to 1) tell the audience that mass killing was going on before the Conference and 2) that the practice of mass shootings had worn down units and that a shift towards industrial killing with poison gas was now underway. This latter point is underscored in Conspiracy by Lange’s clear shellshock and echoes the graphic descriptions of murder found in Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men, a very influential piece of Holocaust historiography released in the 1990s (keep in mind that the production team consulted Browning, this is discussed in Chapter Two). In one scene, Lange discusses mass killings with Kritzinger and illustrates Conspiracy’s concern with euphemism and language: KRITZINGER This is more than war. There must be a different word for this. LANGE Try chaos. KRITZINGER Yes. The rest is Argument. The curse of my profession. LANGE I studied Law as well. KRITZINGER How do you apply that education to what you do? LANGE It has made me...distrustful of language. A gun means what it says.244 One potentially problematic aspect of both films, and of Conspiracy in particular, is that the audience is made to empathize with the characters. Film is a particularly adept at creating empathy and cultivating historical empathy is a key task of the historian. However, when the subjects are all committed Nazis involved in the Final Solution, creating empathy 243 Angrick and Klein, The Final Solution in Riga. 260. 244 Mandel, “Conspiracy. by Loring Mandel, with Scene Numbers, 5/19/01.” 68.  90 for them could pose an ethical dilemma. Conspiracy excels at putting the audience inside the heads of Wannsee attendees, but it veers close to creating sympathy for mass murderers like Lange. Perhaps this is another argument in favor of the film by creating empathy for the perpetrators, it implicates the audience in their crimes and unsettles them more than if the film had adopted a more distanced perspective. One of the key differences in the two films is that Conspiracy has the advantage of high-caliber British and American actors who each bring something to their roles that elevate their characters beyond their lines in the script, whether through Kenneth Branagh’s icy glares at subordinates or Barnaby Kay’s thousand- yard stares as his character thinks about the mass shootings he has committed. A key area in which Conspiracy reflects changes in historiography is its focus on the education levels of the Wannsee attendees. In one scene, Klopfer has all the lawyers present in the room raise their hands, emphasizing how highly-educated and motivated the men around the table are. These are not mere ideologues. As Mark Roseman has noted, “[i]t remains one of the most striking characteristics of Wannsee that most of the best educated round the table were also long-standing Nazis,” which smashes the stereotype of the uneducated ideologue or neutral bureaucrat.245 The men at Wannsee, especially the SS at the table, represent an “uncompromising generation” of highly-educated and ideologically committed men who “were not part of a marginal or excluded minority but were members of the mainstream elite from the very heart of German society.”246 This growing emphasis on a generation of highly-educated mid-level Nazi officials was part of a wave of scholarship during the 1990s, as was the exploration of the Holocaust pre-Auschwitz, most notably via Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men. In one production document, HBO research assistant 245 Roseman, The Villa, the Lake, the Meeting. 89. 246 Michael Wildt, An Uncompromising Generation: The Nazi Leadership of the Reich Security Main Office, trans. Tom Lampert, 1 edition (Madison, Wis: University of Wisconsin Press, 2010). 7.  91 Andrea Axelrod cites the highly-influential German historian Hans Mommsen’s “The Civil Service and the Implementation of the Holocaust,” as well as earlier works by Browning.247 The production team was aware of what was then cutting edge historiography and utilized it in the finished film. The fact that both films took different historiographical positions is important because historians often dismiss dramatic films as surface-level productions that do not engage with historical issues on a substantive level. This examination of both films exposes this stereotype as false. Not only did the filmmakers engage with and respond to historiography, but they included it in the finished films. They were not concerned about boring an audience with too much history and gave their audiences credit enough to understand the nuances on display. As discussed earlier, the key difference between these two films is Conspiracy’s more functionalist approach regarding how the Holocaust unfolded as opposed to Die Wannseekonferenz’s more intentionalist approach. Both of these approaches reflect Holocaust historiography of their respective times and places, but it is still too simplistic to simply label one film as “functionalist” and the other as “intentionalist.” Each film draws from both, but Conspiracy is more functionalist than its predecessor, as evidenced by a clearer quarrel between agencies, the almost total absence of Hitler from the narrative, and the emphasis on initiative from below as seen with the film’s depiction of Lange and Eichmann, with the latter’s initiative especially emphasized. Die Wannseekonferenz avoids more egregious errors (like Conspiracy’s portrayal of a conflict between Klopfer and Stuckart, which has no basis in reality and is discussed in Chapter Two), but also has its own quirks: it depends too much on drawing a direct line between Hitler and Wannsee and relies on a lot of exposition at the beginning, which removes some of the dramatic tension gained by 247 Axelrod, “Overall Issues Part II.” 1.  92 Conspiracy keeping Heydrich’s plan hidden at first. For its time, Die Wannseekonferenz is an excellent work of history on film; most of its shortcomings can be chalked up to the historiography of the day, budget limitations, or to a few stylistic choices characteristic of the period. Conspiracy is the better film and a much better drama, but in some areas its historical flaws render aspects of it inferior to its predecessor. Many of Conspiracy’s shortcomings can be placed at the feet of HBO’s marketing campaign, which place Hitler at the center of the narrative and make the claim that Wannsee was the “smoking gun” of the Holocaust.248 The actual film is much more nuanced than the marketing campaign suggests and its poster emphasizing the swastika further harms the film’s image. Ultimately, both films remain important and each one is strengthened by a viewing of the other; they are, in a sense, valuable companion pieces that reflect the historical climates in which they were made. IV. Conclusions Conspiracy is by no means the only example of doing history on film that public historians can find valuable. This study has engaged with Conspiracy on all three levels of Toplin’s rubric for film analysis. It has looked at the film as such and explored the biographies of the filmmakers. In contrast to other explorations of history and film, this study has looked into a film archive in order to see what the filmmakers actually thought; one now has evidence of their intent and how they constructed their historiographical argument. This study has examined the production history of Conspiracy, including the writing process, script structure (footnoting), HBO correspondence, meeting minutes, research material, and extensive script reviews from both historians and HBO’s research team. It illustrates the process of making a historical film in a way that can prove instructive 248 The film’s tagline was “One Meeting – Six Million Lives.” 93  for future films. This study has shown that the writing process is central to creating historical films, as noted by Bruno Ramirez. Although not a replacement for a historical monograph, Conspiracy is more than a dramatic movie with the Wannsee Conference as window dressing. The film engages with historiography, argues that the Conference represented a turning point in the direction of the Final Solution, challenges the stereotypical image of Adolf Eichmann, and manages to do so in real time. As Mark Roseman has noted, Wannsee is a “kind of keyhole, through which we can glimpse the emerging Final Solution.”249 Conspiracy, while flawed, serves as an excellent example of the possibilities of doing history on film and if more filmmakers and historians looked to it for inspiration, the landscape of historical filmmaking would only be richer. Until Son of Saul, Conspiracy was one of the most notable Holocaust dramas utterly devoid of sentimentality and schmaltz, one of the typical charges faced by the genre. Conspiracy is unique because it manages to convey the horror and scale of the Holocaust without showing a single violent act. It portrays the “unexplainable” by showing the audience a group of middle-aged and young men meeting over lunch—and it does so without holding the audience’s hand by using title cards or exposition. Andrea Axelrod summed up the central tenets of the film in one of her most important comments on the script review process: Making this into a classroom history lesson is not going to work....The dramatic situation here is a bunch of people are gathered together for a purpose they do not know, but that frightens them because – having been summonsed [sic] by an authority of which they are terrified – their lives will not be the same after. It is Waiting for Godot, only Godot actually comes. When he does he is not as they thought he would be. This is the drama of the piece. The more we add explanations and clarity and add historical footnotes [on screen] the more we undercut the very strength of the drama we want to tell. But, but, but – the banality of evil. We must also avoid the pitfalls of conventional dramatization: dramatic revelations, bold confrontations, big turning points, gasping denouements: everything is very 249 Roseman, The Villa, the Lake, the Meeting. 79. 94  small, ordinary, and even silly....the drama of [Conspiracy] is how the worst crime of history was done by ordinary men, worried about the weather and their jobs [sic] security, their digestion and their sex lives, their dog and their wife.250 Conspiracy is also a historical artifact, a snapshot of HBO programming during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. HBO continues to produce thought- provoking historical dramas, but has recently shifted towards more blockbuster-style, special effects-driven series. While Conspiracy is evidence of more creative freedom for filmmakers in the television landscape (as opposed to the traditional Hollywood studio system), HBO’s reluctance to produce Complicity illustrates the limits of creative freedom found on that network. In 2003, Mandel submitted a revised draft of Complicity. This version of the script removes all of the “unfilmable” plotlines discussed earlier, including those depicting Eichmann. Instead, this script focuses solely on the Roosevelt and Churchill administrations with the Bermuda Conference as the centerpiece. Gerhard Riegner has a smaller role. This version of Complicity is much more feasible and is largely free of the hokier plot devices encountered in the earlier script.251 Unfortunately, it is clear that HBO passed on this improved version of the script as well. Complicity, with its damning portrayal of the Roosevelt administration, was a bridge too far for HBO and ended up in development hell. HBO’s dismissal of the project seems like an artifact of an earlier time in which Americans trusted their government and resisted any tarnishing of the “Good War” myth. The biggest problem with Complicity is simply that it was ahead of its time. Upon reading the Complicity script, one is struck by how fresh and 250 Andrea Axelrod, “Combined Notes on 4/19/00 Draft,” 2000, Box 10, Folder 8, Loring Mandel Papers, 1942-2006, M2006-124, Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wisconsin. 251 Loring Mandel, “Complicity, First Revised Draft” July 10, 2003, Box 10, Folder 4, Loring Mandel Papers, 1942-2006, M2006-124, Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wisconsin.  95 relevant the material seems from our own vantage point almost two decades later. In an era characterized by a massive refugee crisis, renewed nationalism, rising xenophobia, and the apathy of Western governments, a revival of the Complicity project seems like just the sort of project HBO could get behind. Most importantly, this study has demonstrated that dramatic film can be a public history method and should be treated as such. As Paul Mommertz puts it, these films are “monographs” and deserve to be taken seriously as works of history; they are not mere entertainment or money-making vehicles. This study echoes Anton Kaes, Robert Rosenstone, and other historians who argue that film is one of the most powerful and accessible methods available to historians and should thus be taken seriously as both an art form and as a historical method. Historians need to expand their methodological toolkits to include film analysis, and yes, even filmmaking, if they hope to remain relevant to twenty- first century audiences used to a primarily video-based method of learning. YouTube now hosts excellent historical content that would have been unthinkable a decade ago252. Online streaming services like Netflix have completely abandoned the television system and use their subscription revenue to create dramas of their own; several critically-acclaimed historical dramas have already premiered online. The future of the historical film—outside of the Hollywood studio system, which has largely retreated into escapist superhero blockbusters and endless sequels—seems bright. Finally, Conspiracy takes ninety minutes to explore a very difficult history in a largely uncompromising fashion. Little is spelled out for the audience, the film requires one’s attention and, unlike its predecessor, does not even offer comic relief. The history presented by Conspiracy is profoundly unsettling and disturbing. As public historians, it is imperative 252 See “The Great War” https://www.youtube.com/user/TheGreatWar 96  that we confront difficult pasts and make them known and comprehendible to wider audiences. Whether through German efforts at Vergangenheitsbewältigung or recent efforts to explore America’s often-ignored slaveholding past, it is up to historians and yes, filmmakers, to ensure that the darker aspects of history are not forgotten and replaced with whitewashed, comforting tales so-often encountered in the public sphere. If “never again” was the watchword post-1945, public history projects like Conspiracy, which illustrate the sheer ordinariness of the people and events that shaped some of the worst crimes in history, serve as valuable warnings from a not-so-distant past about our own “ordinary” time. 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Smith, Daniel Blake. “The (Un)Making of a Historical Drama: A Historian/Screenwriter Confronts Hollywood.” The Public Historian 25, no. 3 (August 1, 2003): 27–44. Sorlin, Pierre. “How to Look at an ‘Historical’ Film.” In The Historical Film: History and Memory in Media, edited by Marcia Landy, 25–49. New Brunswick, N.J: Rutgers University Press, 2000. doi.org/10.35468/5828_11 192 | Nicholas K. Johnson about the invented conflict between Klopfer and Stuckart – the majority of her criticisms and suggestions made their way into the final film. A few months after Axelrod wrote this document, Conspiracy completed filming in London and Ber- lin and would air in the US the following spring. Conclusions Conspiracy is by no means the only historical film that public historians can find valuable. Nevertheless, it serves as an important case study for “doing history” on film. This article has engaged with Conspiracy on all three levels of Toplin’s rubric for film analysis. In contrast to most other explorations of history and film, this study has investigated a film archive in order to see what the filmmakers actually thought; one now has evidence of their intent and how they constructed their historiographical arguments. Although not a replacement for a historical mono- graph, Conspiracy is more than a dramatic movie with the Wannsee Conference as window dressing. The film engages with historiography, argues that the confer- ence represented a turning point in the direction of the Final Solution, challenges the stereotypical image of Adolf Eichmann, and manages to do so in real time. As Mark Roseman has noted, Wannsee is a “kind of keyhole, through which we can glimpse the emerging Final Solution.”89 Conspiracy views Wannsee in a similar manner, with its “you-are-there” cinematography and reliance on the nuances of language to tell its story. Conspiracy, although flawed, serves as an excellent example of the possibilities of historical film and if more filmmakers and histo- rians looked to it for inspiration, the landscape of historical filmmaking would be richer. Until Son of Saul, Conspiracy was one of the most notable Holocaust dramas utterly devoid of sentimentality and schmaltz, one of the typical charges faced by the genre. Conspiracy (and its German predecessor) is unique because it manages to convey the horror and scale of the Holocaust without showing a single violent act. It portrays the “unexplainable” by showing the audience a group of middle-aged and young men meeting over lunch – and it does so without holding the audience’s hand by using title cards (except for the final scene) or exposition. Andrea Axelrod summed up the central tenets of the film in one of her many comments on the script review process: Making this into a classroom history lesson is not going to work [this is in response to a suggestion to “describe the historical significance of the meeting in an opening caption”]....The dramatic situation here is a bunch of people are gathered together for a purpose they do not know, but that frightens them because – having been summonsed  89 Roseman, The Villa, the Lake, the Meeting, 79. doi.org/10.35468/5828_11 “A classroom history lesson is not going to work” | 193 [sic] by an authority of which they are terrified – their lives will not be the same after. It is Waiting for Godot, only Godot actually comes. When he does he is not as they thought he would be. This is the drama of the piece. The more we add explanations and clarity and add historical footnotes [on screen] the more we undercut the very strength of the drama we want to tell. But, but, but – the banality of evil. We must also avoid the pitfalls of conventional dramatization: dramatic revelations, bold confrontations, big turning points, gasping denouements: everything is very small, ordinary, and even silly....the drama of [Conspiracy] is how the worst crime of history was done by ordinary men, worried about the weather and their jobs [sic] security, their digestion and their sex lives, their dog and their wife.90 In short, the filmmakers did not seek to create a didactic film in order to simply “teach” the history of the Wannsee Conference to an ignorant, passive audience. If we are to teach or engage with difficult subject matter, it is important that the films we use to do so be just as difficult. Difficult history requires difficult art. Most importantly, this essay has demonstrated that dramatic film can be a public history and educative method and should be treated as such; films are not mere entertainment or money-making vehicles. Film is one of the most powerful and accessible methods available to historians and should thus be taken seriously as both an art form and as a historical method. Historians need to expand their methodological toolkits to include film analysis, and yes, even filmmaking, if they hope to remain relevant to twenty-first century audiences used to a primarily video-based method of learning. YouTube now hosts excellent historical content that would have been unthinkable a decade ago.91 Online streaming services like Netflix have bypassed the television broadcast model and use their subscription revenue to create dramas of their own; several critically-acclaimed historical dra- mas have already premiered online. The future of the historical film – outside of the Hollywood studio system, which has largely retreated into escapist superhero blockbusters and endless sequels – seems bright. Finally, Conspiracy takes ninety minutes to explore a very difficult history in a largely uncompromising fashion. Little is spelled out for the audience, the film re- quires one’s full attention, much like other HBO fare at the turn of the millenium. The history presented by Conspiracy is profoundly unsettling and disturbing. As public historians, it is imperative that we confront difficult pasts and make them known and comprehendible to wider audiences. Whether through German efforts at Vergangenheitsbewältigung or recent efforts to explore America’s often-ignored slaveholding past, it is up to historians and yes, filmmakers, to ensure that the 90 Andrea Axelrod, “Combined Notes on 4/19/00 Draft,” 2000, Box 10, Folder 8, Loring Mandel Papers, 1942-2006, M2006-124, Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wisconsin. 1. 91 See “The Great War,” URL: https://www.youtube.com/user/TheGreatWar (accessed November 12, 2019).  doi.org/10.35468/5828_11 194 | Nicholas K. Johnson darker aspects of history are not forgotten and replaced with whitewashed, com- forting tales often encountered in the public sphere and advocated by the current crop of extreme right-wing movements around the world. If “never again” was the watchword post-1945, films like Conspiracy, which illustrate the sheer ordi- nariness of the people and events that shaped some of the worst crimes in history, serve as valuable warnings from a not-so-distant past about our own “ordinary” time. The past can be unsettling – and our depictions of such pasts should be as well. 

During my 2017 visit and the same site as it appears in the German made-for-television film Die Wannseekonferenz of 2022, directed by Matti Geschonneck on the occasion of the 80th anniversary of the conference. Wolfgang Höbel praised the film in Der Spiegel as a "strict, grimly determined masterpiece" depicting "with icy meticulousness a bureaucratic meeting with breakfast, which served to arrange the murder of millions and to organise it as efficiently as possible". The Lexikon des internationalen Films praised it as a “depressing documentary about the cold-blooded strategists of the Holocaust” that “recreates the events, which last just over an hour, almost in real time, free of staging flourishes and with a top-class cast.” That said, Andreas Kilb criticised the film's acting in which the actors sometimes speak "the language of comics", as they play "with their faces turned to the audience". The only exception is Jakob Diehl, who plays his Gestapo character Müller largely "in stubborn silence": "Fifteen men decide on the genocide, but only one gives it away on his face." By meticulously reconstructing the sets and the historical details, Geschonneck exacerbated the "dilemma of historical television", which consists in being all too easily mistaken for an authentic historical source. Timo Niemeier dissented, stating that the film "demands a lot from the audience" and is therefore "a must-see". The film "breaks with established film mechanisms and makes the Nazis' perfidious plan and their mentality all too clear. The way the mass murder of millions of people is discussed here as if it were a completely normal major project of the administrative apparatus, in which only details and competencies are at stake is simply breathtaking." Finally, in a detailed review Peter Kümmel praised the film in Die Zeit as "great" and wrote how the production "has the effect of making its viewers ask themselves: 'Are circumstances conceivable under which I would have attended this conference?' One is so spellbound that one does not miss a word", concluding that "[t]elevision cannot be better than this".

Although the meeting itself lasted only around 90 minutes, its impact reverberates through modern German society, legal frameworks, and collective memory. The continuing significance of the Wannsee Conference lies not merely in its historical gravity but in its profound legacy on Germany’s post-war identity, its approach to Holocaust commemoration, and its enduring influence on legal, educational, and political spheres. This essay will explore the multifaceted legacy of the Wannsee Conference in contemporary Germany, demonstrating how the event has shaped modern German policies, identity, and historical consciousness, while drawing on the analyses of various scholars.
The memory of the Holocaust, symbolised by events such as the Wannsee Conference, plays a central role in shaping modern Germany’s national identity and policies. In post-war Germany, the emergence of the concept of *Vergangenheitsbewältigung* (the struggle to come to terms with the past) has been a critical aspect of the country’s effort to reconcile with its Nazi legacy. Scholars like Broszat and Friedländer have highlighted that the process of *Vergangenheitsbewältigung* is not simply about acknowledging historical facts, but involves a profound moral reckoning with the crimes of the Holocaust. In particular, Broszat has argued that German society’s confrontation with the Holocaust has driven a national ethos that seeks to uphold democratic values, human rights, and tolerance, as a direct response to the atrocities symbolised by the Wannsee Conference. This has led to the institutionalisation of Holocaust remembrance in Germany, including the establishment of numerous memorials, museums, and educational programmes dedicated to ensuring that the horrors of the Holocaust are not forgotten. The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, opened in Berlin in 2005, stands as a powerful testament to this commitment. However, this focus on memory and commemoration also reflects an ongoing struggle within German society over how to properly remember and learn from this dark chapter in its history, a theme explored by Friedländer in his analysis of post-war German memory culture.

My 2024 cohort engaged in a lecture in the room the conference was held. The legal and political ramifications of the Wannsee Conference are also of considerable significance in modern Germany. The conference not only coordinated the logistics of the Final Solution but also underscored the complicity of German state institutions in the genocide. Scholars such as Arendt and Hilberg have documented how the bureaucratic machinery of the Nazi state, represented at Wannsee by officials from various government ministries, became instrumental in carrying out the mass murder of six million Jews. In post-war Germany, the need to reckon with this complicity has had lasting legal consequences, most notably in the form of the Nuremberg Trials and subsequent war crimes prosecutions. The Nuremberg Trials, which prosecuted leading Nazi officials, set a precedent for international law and the prosecution of crimes against humanity. Arendt’s seminal work on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the key figures at Wannsee, emphasised the role of bureaucrats in facilitating genocide, an insight that has influenced subsequent German legal and educational frameworks.
Germany’s legal system has also undergone significant reforms in response to the legacy of Nazi crimes. The post-war Grundgesetz (Basic Law), adopted in 1949, enshrines principles of human dignity and equality, in stark contrast to the racial policies discussed at Wannsee. Legal scholar Neumann has argued that the Wannsee Conference serves as a constant reminder of the dangers of unchecked state power, which has influenced Germany’s commitment to constitutional democracy and the rule of law. Moreover, the prosecutions of Nazi war criminals continued well into the 21st century, with the 2011 trial of former concentration camp guard John Demjanjuk serving as a stark reminder of the enduring pursuit of justice for Holocaust perpetrators. This legal legacy underscores the enduring relevance of the Wannsee Conference to modern German society’s efforts to confront its past through judicial means.
The impact of the Wannsee Conference is also deeply embedded in Germany’s educational system. Since the 1960s, German schools have been required to teach the history of the Holocaust as part of the national curriculum, a reflection of the state’s commitment to ensuring that future generations understand the atrocities committed in their country’s name. Kershaw's pointed out that this emphasis on Holocaust education stems from a recognition of the moral responsibility Germany bears as the instigator of the genocide. The Wannsee Conference, as a key moment in the planning of the Holocaust, is often highlighted in textbooks and classroom discussions as a symbol of the systematic nature of Nazi crimes. In addition to formal education, programmes such as the Stolpersteine project, which places small brass plaques in front of the homes of Holocaust victims, help to personalise the history of the Holocaust and connect it to local communities across Germany. However, Kershaw and other scholars have noted that the challenge of Holocaust education lies not only in conveying the facts of history but also in combating rising trends of Holocaust denial and revisionism, which have gained traction in certain far-right movements within Germany. This ongoing battle over historical memory reflects the continuing relevance of the Wannsee Conference in shaping public discourse about the Holocaust.

The Wannsee Conference’s legacy extends beyond memorialisation and legal reform, influencing Germany’s foreign and domestic policies as well. Post-war Germany’s diplomatic relations have been heavily influenced by its Nazi past, particularly its relationship with Israel. Germany has consistently sought to atone for the crimes of the Holocaust through reparations and a strong commitment to Israel’s security. The Luxembourg Agreement of 1952, in which West Germany agreed to pay reparations to Holocaust survivors, marked the beginning of this policy, which continues to influence Germany’s stance in Middle Eastern geopolitics. Scholars such as Evans have highlighted the symbolic importance of Germany’s ongoing support for Israel as a reflection of its efforts to atone for the atrocities planned at Wannsee. Domestically, Germany’s immigration policies and debates over multiculturalism have also been shaped by the legacy of the Holocaust and the lessons learned from Nazi-era racism. The Wannsee Conference serves as a stark reminder of the dangers of exclusionary, ethnocentric policies, a lesson that has informed Germany’s post-war commitment to human rights and anti-discrimination laws.

Fabrice Le Hénanff presented a masterfully drawn graphic novel about the Wannsee Conference which, in terms of graphics, is based directly on the film Conspiracy. Unlike other graphic novels on the Holocaust which put the perspective of the persecuted in the foreground such as Art Spiegelman's Maus, Kichka's Second Generation or Joe Kubert's Yossel, the focus here is on the perpetrators and their criminal activities. With a few exceptions, the perpetrators, whom the draftsman masterfully reproduces in the few portraits of the fifteen participants in the Wannsee Conference, are not men who are directly involved in the murders in the East themselves. Most of them are so-called desk criminals who, in the quiet of their Berlin offices and on numerous business trips to occupied Europe, helped shape the Nazi dystopia of a racial “new order” in Europe. As in the movie, the start of the book begins with Heydrich flying over the house with a Fieseler Storch, taking off his pilot outfit and then be driven to Villa Am Großen Wannsee 56-58.

The park-like garden of the house is covered in snow. In fact, it is known from meteorological records that January 20, 1942 was extremely cold. Whilst these are images which can be clearly translated graphically, this becomes more difficult with the bureaucratic content of the conference, as evidenced by the minutes handed down in the Political Archives of the Foreign Office. The graphic novel does enable excursions that are limited to the narrative in the films and offer interesting contrasts to the discussion of the Wannsee Conference: for example pictures of Babi Yar, one of the largest massacres that took place in occupied Kiev in autumn 1941, or in a parallel scene in which the fate of a mouse that is caught by a cat - perhaps an homage to Art Spiegelman - dramatically symbolises the fate of the Jewish population in Europe in the last picture.  

My 2024 cohort on the right. In his most recent work, The European Civil War, 1917–1945, Ernst Nolte comes dangerously close to validating the deniers. Without offering any proof, he claims that more “Aryans” than Jews were murdered at Auschwitz. According to Nolte this fact has been ignored because the research on the Final Solution comes to an “overwhelming degree from Jewish authors.” He described the deniers’ arguments as not “without foundation” and their motives as “often honourable.” The fact that among the core deniers were non‑Germans and some former inmates of concentration camps was evidence, according to Nolte, of their honorable intentions. Nolte even advanced the untenable notion that the conference may never have happened, disregarding the fact that participants in that meeting have subsequently attested to it and that a full set of minutes survived. This suggestion implies that if Wannsee was a hoax, many other Holocaust‑related events that we have been led to believe actually happened may also be hoaxes. He suggests, in an argument evocative of Butz’s analysis, that the Einsatzgruppen killed numerous Jews on the Eastern Front because “preventive security” demanded it since a significant number of the partisans were Jews. While he acknowledges that the action may have been carried to an extreme, it remains essentially justified. Another of his unsubstantiated charges was that the documentary film Shoah  demonstrates that the ϟϟ units in the death camps “were victims in their way too.”

The Wannsee Conference was a secret meeting on January 20, 1942 in a villa on theGreat WannseeinBerlin. Fifteen high-ranking representatives of theNational Socialist Reich governmentand theSS authoritiescame together under the chairmanship ofSS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrichin his function as chief of theSecurity Police(SiPo) and theSecurity Service of the Reichsführer SS(SD) to organize theHolocaustof the Jews in detail and to coordinate the cooperation of the authorities involved.   Villa of the Wannsee Conference,Am Grosser Wannsee56/58 (2014)  Hermann Göring's order to Reinhard Heydrich dated July 31, 1941  Secret Reich matter: Minutes of the Wannsee Conference of January 20, 1942, Berlin  A document from the Wannsee Conference; Here is the prepared list of the Jewish population in Europe. Contrary to popular belief, the main purpose of the conference was not to decide on the Holocaust – this decision had already been made with the mass murders that had been taking place in areas occupied by the German Reich since thenattack on the Soviet Union(22 June 1941) – but to organize the deportation of the entire Jewish population of Europe to the East for extermination and to ensure the necessary coordination. [ 1 ] The participants set the timetable for further mass killings, increasingly expanded the groups of victims to be targeted and agreed on cooperation under the leadership of the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA), which was led by Heydrich.  Heydrich was commissioned byHermann Göringon July 31, 1941, to organize the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question ." In December 1941, Heydrich invited secretaries of state from various Reich ministries and the General Government, aministerial directorof theReich Chancellery, and senior officials from theMain Office of the Security Police, the Security Service, and theParty Chancelleryto the conference. The scribe was SS-ObersturmbannführerAdolf Eichmann, Heydrich'sadvisor for "Jewish affairs. "  The term "Wannsee Conference", which was only coined after theSecond World War, came from the venue of the conference, the guest house of the Security Police and Security Service ,Am Grossen Wannsee56/58. The former Villa Marlier inBerlin-Wannseewas built in 1914/1915 according to plans byPaul Otto August Baumgarten . Today the house is a memorial to the Holocaust.  Table of contents prehistory National Socialist “Jewish policy” Anti-Semitismwas one of the central components of National Socialist ideology, which determined Nazi policy. In his workMein Kampf, Adolf Hitlerpropagated ideas aimed at the extermination of the Jews.  On January 30, 1939, Hitler announced for the first time in a Reichstag speech that “the extermination of the Jewish race in Europe” would be the result of war. Propaganda MinisterJoseph Goebbelsreferred to this in an article forDas Reichon 16 December 1941: [ 2 ]  "We are currently witnessing the fulfillment of this prophecy and Judaism is fulfilling a fate that is hard but more than deserved. Pity or even regret is completely inappropriate."  In 1942, Hitler spoke publicly five times about his threat and its realization, most recently on November 8, 1942: [ 3 ]  "You will still remember the Reichstag session in which I declared: If Jewryimaginesthat it can bring about an international world war to exterminate the European races, then the result will not be the extermination of the European races, but the extermination of Jewry in Europe. You have always laughed at me as a prophet. Of those who laughed then, countless numbers no longer laugh today, and those who are still laughing now will perhaps not do so in a while either."  The intended goals and results of National Socialist policy towards the Jews were therefore obvious. Nevertheless, details of the decision-making process that ultimately led to the Holocaust are insufficiently documented. The exact course of this process within the Nazi regime is still unclear in many details and continues to be intensively discussed inHolocaust research.  The decision on the Holocaust Among the documents that have been preserved is Göring's order to Heydrich to draw up an "overall plan" regarding costs, organization and implementation for the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question". It was issued on July 31, 1941, five weeks after thatattack on the Soviet Unionon June 22, which brought millions of Jews within the reach of the National Socialist regime. [ 4 ]  In the first months of theGerman-Soviet War,leading officials of the Nazi regime made several statements that suggested thatgenocidewas being planned. This is seen as an indication that the final decisions that led to the Holocaust must have been made in the autumn of 1941. On December 12, 1941, Hitler gathered theReich and Gau leadersof theNSDAPin his private rooms in the Reich Chancellery. Goebbels noted this in his diary:  “With regard to the Jewish question, the Führer is determined to come clean. […] World War is here, the annihilation of Judaism must be the necessary consequence.” [ 5 ]  Four days later, on December 16, 1941, Goebbels published the above-quoted article in Das Reich . [ 6 ]  Some historians consider the Gauleiter meeting with Hitler on December 12th to be the latest date on which the decision to systematically exterminate the Jews was made. [ 7 ] Others doubt that there was even a specific point in time at which such a decision was made and a correspondingFührer orderissued. They cite a quote from the minutes of the Wannsee Conference: Instead of forcing people to emigrate, "the evacuation of the Jews to the East, after prior approval by the Führer" was the possible solution. This did not constitute a formal decision for genocide, the murder of all Jews; Hitler was reluctant to commit himself and was only a "legitimizing authority" in a radicalization process that was still progressive gradually and which accumulated through local initiatives, self-inflicted supposed constraints and eliminatory anti-Semitism. [ 8 ]  However, most historians conclude from the sources that a decisive step in the decision-making process for genocide was taken in late autumn 1941. [ 9 ] At that time, the failure of the war against the Soviet Union, which had been started asa blitzkrieg , was becoming apparent. This shattered the last half-baked plans to deport the Jews far to the east, after the resettlement projects to NiskoandMadagascarhad already been shelved as unfeasible.  A clear written order from Hitler to murder all Jews in the German sphere of influence has not yet been found. It is probable that no such formal order existed. However, letters and orders from high-ranking Nazi leaders refer several times to verbal orders from the leader to exterminate the Jews. These orders were apparently mostly heavily worded, as were Heydrich's orders for specific mass murder operations. What was actually ordered only became clear when the measures were implemented. However, these could only be initiated and carried out with Hitler's express consent. On this point, all specialist historians agree, despite all other different interpretations. [ 10 ] Based on the public statements of Hitler, Goebbels,Himmlerand other high-ranking Nazi officials, any commander - for example theSD task force- could assume this consent for murder operations against Jews.  Deportations and mass murders until the end of 1941 The National Socialist approach against the Jews became more radical after 1933 through exclusion, disenfranchisement, forced emigration, physical persecution and expropriation. Since the beginning of the war, ghettoization, deportations and mass murders were added in militarily occupied areas of Eastern and Southeastern Europe. However, these steps did not take place everywhere in a chronological and planned sequence, but in some cases in constant alternation and sometimes chaotically alongside one another.  With theinvasion of Poland in 1939, mass murders of civilians in Poland began. A task forceformed "for special purposes" underUdo von Woyrschshot around 7,000 Jews by the end of the year, [ 11 ] [ 12 ] but was strongly criticized by some army commanders, such as the commander-in-chief of the General Government,Johannes Blaskowitz. In 2002, the historianHans Mommseninterpreted these murders as haphazard individual initiatives. [ 13 ]  From June 22, 1941, four task forces set up in May systematically and on a large scale shot state officials,partisansand - preferably Jewish - "hostages" behind the entireEastern Frontof the GermanWehrmacht. Partly with them, partly without them, units of theOrdnungspolizeiand theWaffen-SSunderHans-Adolf Prützmann,Erich von dem Bach-ZelewskiandFriedrich Jeckelnmurdered Jews in large numbers in the same area. [ 14 ] With the massacre of Hungarian and Ukrainian Jews inKamenets-Podolsk at the end of August 1941, mass shootings affected tens of thousands for the first time and thus reached a new dimension. The Babyn Yar massacrein September/early October 1941, in which more than 33,000 Jewish residentsof Kievwere murdered, is the best known of such mass shootings. The mass murders increasingly moved towards the indiscriminate murder of all Jews.  In the overcrowded ghettosset up by the National Socialists, Jews died every day from malnutrition, infectious diseases and arbitrary violence by their guards. The "extermination through forced labor," which the conference protocol called a method of the "final solution," had already taken place: for example, during the construction of an important "through road IV" fromLembergto the Ukraine. [ 15 ]  In October,mass deportations of German Jewsfrom the Reich began. On Himmler's orders of September 18, signed byKurt Daluege , 20,000 Jews and 5,000 " gypsies" were deported toŁódźby November 4. [ 16 ] On October 23, 1941, Himmler banned all Jews in the German sphere of influence from emigrating. [ 17 ]  "At the Führer's request", another large concentration camp was to be built nearbyRiga . [ 18 ] On 8 November 1941,Hinrich Lohse,Reich Commissionerfor the occupied Baltic states, learned that 25,000 "ReichandProtectorate Jews" were to be deported toMinskand Riga. In order to accommodate the latter, Jeckeln had a total of 27,800 residents of the Riga ghetto shot on Himmler's personal orders from 29 November to 1 December and on 8 and 9 December 1941. [ 19 ] [ 20 ] Among the victims was the first transport of 1,053Berlin Jews, who were shot immediately after their arrival on November 30th. Himmler's veto against this on the same day came too late. The historianRaul Hilbergsuspects that it was only intended to appease Lohse's expected protests anyway. [ 20 ] According to Dieter Pohl's interpretation , Himmler feared that a lack of news from the deportees would quickly lead to rumors in Germany about their liquidation. [ 21 ] On 25 and 29 November, 5,000 Jews from the Reich and the Protectorate who were actually destined for Riga were shot nearbyKaunas. [ 22 ]  TheBelzec extermination camphad been under construction since November 1941; its firstgas chambers,with a small capacity, were intended for the murder of Jews who were unable to work. Preparations for construction also began for theSobibor extermination campand theMajdanek concentration camp in the Lublindistrict . From the beginning of December 1941, gas vans were used to kill Jews inKulmhof (Chelmno) . All four task forces now had access to them.  By the time the Wannsee Conference was convened, the murderers, with Hitler's approval, had killed around 900,000 Jews from Germany,Polandand the Soviet Union in the areas occupied by the Wehrmacht. [ 23 ] Now, as a final escalation stage, the systematic murder of all Jews in the German sphere of influence was to be organized.  Conference preparations  On January 8, 1942, Heydrich invites Undersecretary of StateLutherfor January 20, 1942. The Wannsee Conference was originally scheduled for 9 December 1941 at 12 noon at the office of theInternational Criminal Police Commission (ICPK), Am Kleiner Wannsee No. 16. [ 24 ] Since August 1940, Heydrich had served as chairman of the IKPK. A few days later, Heydrich's office corrected the meeting location to the guest house of the Security Police and the SD, Am Grosser Wannsee 56–58. Heydrich's invitation to a "meeting followed by breakfast" was sent by Adolf Eichmann on November 29th. He emphasizes the "extraordinary importance" of a comprehensive solution to the Jewish question and enclosed Göring's authorization letter to Heydrich dated July 31. He also confirmed that Jews from the Reich territory, Bohemia and Moravia had been "evacuated" since October 15, 1941, meaning that the deportations had long been underway. As head of Gestapo Department IV B 4, Eichmann was responsible for "Jewish and evacuation matters" and later organized most of the deportations of Jews from Germany, France, the Netherlands, Hungary and other occupied territories to the labor and extermination camps. He also provided Heydrich with templates and figures for his introductory speech and prepared the minutes of the conference.  Other Nazi ministries also prepared the meeting. On December 8, Undersecretary of StateMartin Lutherreceived a compilation of the "wishes and ideas of theForeign Officefor the proposed overall solution to the Jewish question in Europe". This recommended the deportation of all Jews of German nationality living in the German Reich, as well as Serbian,statelessand Hungarian Jews. The governments of Romania, Croatia, Bulgaria, Hungary and Slovakia should be offered the deportation of Jews living in their countries to the East. Furthermore, pressure should be put on all European governments to enact Jewish laws based on theNuremberg Laws . [ 25 ]  After Japan'sattack on Pearl Harboron December 7, 1941, Hitler invited the Reichstag to meet on December 9 to announce thedeclaration of war against the USA . Some of those invited to the Wannsee Conference and Heydrich himself were members of the Reichstag; therefore, Heydrich had the conference cancelled at short notice. [ 26 ] A note from the meeting, which spoke of a postponement "because of the Reichstag session", confirms his reason for cancellation. [ 27 ] On January 8, 1942, he had new invitations sent out for January 20, 1942. [ 28 ]  By then, important preliminary decisions had already been made on individual points discussed at the conference. Hinrich Lohse had askedGeorg Leibbrandtin a letter to theReich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories(RMfdbO) “Subject: Execution of Jews” on November 15, 1941:  "Should this be done without regard to age and gender and economic interests (eg the Wehrmacht's interest in skilled workers in armaments factories)? Of course, the cleaning of theEastof Jews is a priority; however, its solution must be brought into line with the needs of thewar economy . I have not been able to find such an instruction either in the orders on the Jewish question in the ' brown folder' or in other decrees." [ 29 ]  Otto Bräutigamof the RMfdbO replied on 18 December 1941: "The Jewish question should now be clarified through oral discussions. Economic concerns should not be taken into account in the settlement of the problem . In addition, any questions that arise are requested to be settled directly with thesenior SS and police leader. On behalf of the groom." [ 30 ] On 16 December 1941 , Hans Frankspoke at a government meeting of the intention to make the General Government "free of Jews" and referred to the upcoming "big meeting in Berlin" with Heydrich. [ 31 ]  It is unclear why the conference was postponed for a full six weeks. The historianChristian Gerlachinterprets Hitler's declaration of December 12, 1941, that the extermination of the Jews was a necessary consequence of the World War that had now broken out, as a decision for the Holocaust. This created a new situation that required fundamental changes to the plans proposed by Heydrich. [ 32 ] This interpretation is shared by only a few professional historians.  The conference Participant  Wannsee Protocol: The first page of the list of participants At Heydrich's invitation, 15 people attended the conference: members of the SS, who had already begun the mass murder in organizational and practical terms, as well as high-ranking representatives of the NSDAP, the civil administration in the occupied territories of Poland and the Soviet Union, and some Reich ministries: [ 33 ]  Reinhard Heydrich(SS-Obergruppenführer, keynote speaker and chairman) Adolf Eichmann(SS-Obersturmbannführer, Secretary of the Minutes) Josef Bühler(State Secretary in the Office of theGovernor GeneralinKrakow) Roland Freisler(State Secretary in theReich Ministry of Justice, later President ofthe People's Court) Otto Hofmann(SS-Gruppenführer, Chief of theRace and Settlement Main Office of the SS) Gerhard Klopfer(SS-Oberführer, Ministerial Director in the NSDAPParty Chancellery , Head of Constitutional Law Department III) Friedrich Wilhelm Kritzinger(Ministerial Director in theReich Chancellery) Rudolf Lange(SS-Sturmbannführer, Commander of the Security Police and SD for Latvia in representation of his commanderWalter Stahlecker) Georg Leibbrandt(Reich Office Director,Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories) Martin Luther(Under Secretary of State in the Foreign Office) Alfred Meyer(State Secretary in theReich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories, Gauleiter Westphalia-North) [ 34 ] Heinrich Müller(SS-Gruppenführer, Head of Office IV (Gestapo) of the Reich Security Main Office) Erich Neumann(State Secretary in the Office of the Commissioner for theFour-Year Plan) Karl Eberhard Schöngarth(SS-Oberführer, Commander of the Security Police and the SD in the General Government) Wilhelm Stuckart(State Secretary inthe Reich Ministry of the Interior) In addition, other representatives of ministries and authorities were invited, but they declined to attend.Leopold Gutterer, Secretary of State in theReich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, for example, cited scheduling reasons, but asked to be informed of all subsequent appointments. [ 35 ] The only woman present at all meetings was Eichmann's stenographer and secretary,Ingeburg Werlemann, but her name is not mentioned in the minutes. [ 36 ]  Because of their shared responsibility for the Holocaust, only six of these people were prosecuted after the war: Schöngarth was executed in theBritish occupation zonein 1946 , Buehler inPolandin 1948, and Eichmann in 1962 after histrial in Israel. Kritzinger and Stuckart were imprisoned for a short time, Hofmann for several years, but he was released early in 1954. Five other participants died before the end of the war: Heydrich just a few months after the conference in anassassination attempt in Prague, Freisler and Müller as a result of the war, Lange and Meyer by suicide. Luther died immediately after the end of the war. Klopfer, Leibbrandt and Neumann remained largely unmolested. Klopfer, the last living active participant, died in 1987, and his secretary Werlemann died in 2010. [ 36 ]  Contents The conference was intended to clarify who was responsible for the deportation and extermination operations that had already begun, to coordinate the measures for their implementation and to determine the spatial and temporal sequence of events. Finally, the groups of Jews who were to be deported and thus exterminated were defined here. [ 37 ] This required the cooperation of many institutions that had not previously been informed about the “Final Solution.”  In the minutes of the Wannsee Conference, Heydrich had noted that he had been appointed by Göring as "Commissioner for the Preparation of the Final Solution to the European Jewish Question" and that the lead role lay with the "Reichsführer SS and Chief of the German Police", i.e. Himmler. At this meeting, he wanted to coordinate with the central authorities directly involved.  Heydrich reported on the emigration of around 537,000 Jews from the “Old Reich”, Austria, Bohemia and Moravia, which was to be replaced by the “evacuation of the Jews to the East” after “prior approval by the Führer”. Around eleven million Jews would be considered for the “final solution to the European Jewish question”. This number also included “religious Jews” from the unoccupied part of France, England, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey and other neutral or enemy states outside the German sphere of influence. [ 38 ] The protocol continued:  "In large work columns, separated by gender, the Jews who are able to work will be led to these areas to build roads, whereby a large proportion will undoubtedly die out through natural attrition. The remaining stock, as it is undoubtedly the most resilient part, will have to be treated accordingly, since it represents a natural selection and, when released, will be seen as the nucleus of a new Jewish development."  When it was implemented, "Europe would be combined from west to east"; this would begin because of "socio-political necessities" and to free up living space in the Reich. First, the German Jews would be transported totransit ghettosand from there further east. Jews over the age of 65 and Jews with war injuries or recipients of theIron Cross Iwould be sent to theTheresienstadt ghetto. This would "eliminate the many interventions in one fell swoop."  After mentioning possible difficulties in the "evacuation operation" in the "occupied or influenced European territories", the question of how to deal with "Jewish half-breeds" and "mixed marriages" was addressed. According to the protocol, the Nuremberg Laws were to form the basis "in a sense". But in fact, the proposals put forward by Heydrich went far beyond this:  As a rule, “first-degree mixed-race people” (“half-Jews”) were to be treated like “full Jews” regardless of their religious affiliation. Exceptions were only made for those “mixed-race people” who were married to a partner of “German blood” and who were not childless. Other exceptions were to be granted only by the highest party authorities. Every “first-degree half-breed” who was allowed to remain in the German Reich was to besterilized. “Mixed-race people of the second degree” (“quarter Jews”) were, as a rule, to be treated the same as “German-blooded people”, unless they could be classified as Jews due to their conspicuous Jewish appearance or poor police and political assessment. In the case of existing “mixed marriages” between “full Jews” and “German-blooded people,” the Jewish part was to be either “evacuated” or sent to Theresienstadt if resistance from the German relatives was to be expected. Further regulations were addressed for “mixed marriages” in which one or both spouses were “mixed race”. These detailed proposals were rejected as impractical by State Secretary Stuckart, who had been involved in drafting the Nuremberg Laws in 1935. He proposed making compulsory divorce of "mixed marriages" mandatory by law and sterilizing all "first-degree half-breeds." Since no agreement could be reached on these points, these detailed questions were postponed to subsequent conferences.  Joseph Buehler,Hans Frank'sSecretary of State in the Office of the Governor General, urged Heydrich at the conference to begin the measures on Polish territory in the "General Government" because he saw no transport problems there and wanted to "solve the Jewish question in this area as quickly as possible." In any case, the majority of these Jews were unable to work and "posed an eminent danger as carriers of disease."  Follow-up conferences  Invitation to the follow-up conference on March 6, 1942  List of participants in the meeting on the final solution to the Jewish question in the Reich Security Main Office on March 6, 1942 The first follow-up conference took place on January 29, 1942, nine days after the Wannsee Conference. 16 participants came to this meeting in the rooms of the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories (RMfdbO) in Berlin's Rauchstrasse. The RMfdbO itself was represented by a total of 8 participants, includingOtto Bräutigam,Erhard Wetzel,Hermann WeitnauerandGerhard von Mende. [ 39 ] In addition, subordinate representatives of ministries (RSHA, Ministry of Justice), theParty Chancelleryand theOKWtook part, includingFriedrich Suhr(RSHA),Bernhard Lösener(Ministry of Justice), Albert Frey (OKW) andHerbert Reischauer(Party Chancellery). The meeting was chaired by Otto Braut. [ 40 ]  The aim of this meeting was to flesh out the resolutions made at the Wannsee Conference and to make them legally more precise. [ 40 ] The central theme of this conference was who should henceforth be considered a "Jew" and thus to determine exactly who should be exterminated. The RMfdbO did not want the term "Jew" to be defined "too narrowly" and stressed that the regulations in force up to that point in the occupied territories were not sufficient anyway and would have to be "tightened" so that in future "mixed-race" people would also have to be considered "full Jews". These proposals were implemented at the end of the meeting. The conference participants agreed that in future all members of the Jewish religion would be considered "Jews" in all occupied territories, as well as legitimate and illegitimate children from relationships in which one partner was Jewish (ie children from so-called mixedmarriages), as well as non-Jewish wives of Jews. [ 40 ] The necessary decisions on the ground should, according to the resolution, be made by the "political-police organs and their experts in racial issues". [ 40 ] This conference took place when the first deportations to theTheresienstadt concentration campbegan; [ 41 ] and one day before Hitler announced in his speech in the Berlin Sportpalast: "We are clear that the war can only end with either the extermination of the Aryan peoples or the disappearance of Judaism from Europe." [ 42 ]  Two further follow-up conferences took place on March 6 and October 27, 1942 in Adolf Eichmann'sDepartment IV B 4 at Kurfürstenstrasse115/116 in Berlin.  According to a note by the "Jewish Advisor"in the Reich Foreign Ministry,Franz Rademacher, Stuckart's proposal was discussed on March 6. [ 43 ] He had argued for theforced sterilizationof all "first-degree Jewish half-breeds" and for the forced divorce of all "mixed marriages". Since sterilization in hospitals was not currently feasible, this measure was to be postponed until the end of the war. General legal objections and "propaganda" reasons were put forward against a forced divorce. [ 44 ] This meant foreseeable resistance, particularly from theCatholic Church,and an intervention by theVatican. It was also difficult to assess the reactions of the "Jewish-related" spouses. As it turned out in 1943 during thefactory actionat theRosenstrasse protest, the supposed threat of deportation of Jewish spouses actually led to public expressions of solidarity from "German-blooded" relatives.  On October 27, 1942, the demand for forced divorce of "mixed marriages" was discussed again. [ 45 ] However, there were apparently indications from the Reich Chancellery that the "Führer" did not want to make a decision during the war. [ 46 ] In October 1943,Otto Thierackfrom the Ministry of Justice agreed with Himmler not to deport "Jewish half-breeds" for the time being. [ 47 ] The SS in the occupied eastern territories were not required to show such consideration for the mood of the population: Jewish spouses from "mixed marriages" and "Jewish half-breeds of the first degree" were included in the genocide there. [ 48 ]  The assessment of the role that Stuckart played with his proposals remains controversial. According to his subordinatesBernhard LösenerandHans Globke,Stuckart made the compromise proposal for mass sterilization with the background knowledge that this would not be feasible, at least during the war. In doing so, he prevented the deportation and murder of German "first-degree half-breeds". On the other hand, his proposal for a forced divorce for "mixed marriages", which would have resulted in the death of the Jewish partner, could have been quickly implemented. [ 49 ]  Heydrich's intention, mentioned in the protocol, to prepare a “draft on the organizational, factual and material concerns with regard to the final solution of the European Jewish question” and to submit it to Göring, was not realized. [ 50 ]  Historical processing Discovery history The minutes of the meeting, which were written by Eichmann using shorthand, were revised several times by Müller and Heydrich. A total of 30 copies of the final version were issued, which were stamped as "Secret Reich Matters" and then sent to the participants or their departments. [ 51 ] Of these, only the 16th copy, that of conference participant Martin Luther, has been found to date. Apparently it only escaped destruction because Luther had been imprisoned in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp for an intrigue against foreign ministersJoachim von Ribbentrop, which is why his department was dissolved and the files were stored away. [ 52 ] Parts of the archive were initially taken to Marburg Castle by Americans , and then further examined in February 1946 at the Telefunken factory in Berlin-Lichterfelde , where the Wannsee documents were also microfilmed for the first time. [ 53 ] In the summer of 1948, the entire collection was brought to safety at Whaddon Hall in Buckinghamshire , where it was filmed again and returned to the Political Archives of the Foreign Office in Bonn at the end of the 1950s; [ 54 ] the document has been in Berlin since the Political Archives moved. [ 55 ] It is accessible on the Internet. [ 56 ]  Robert Kempner(deputy of the American chief prosecutorRobert H. Jackson) states that the discovery of the minutes of the Wannsee Conference was reported to him by an employee in March 1947 during the preparations for the "Wilhelmstrasse Trial ". [ 57 ] The invitation letter forOtto Hofmannhad already been found in August 1945 and it was therefore known that a conference on the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question" was planned. [ 58 ]  The protocol as a source Theminutes of the Wannsee Conferencewere used in the opening statement in thetrial against the Race and Settlement Main Officeand were cited a few weeks later in the indictmentWilhelmstrasse trial. [ 59 ]  Although there was no implementable overall plan for the "Final Solution" at this time, the protocol is considered a key document for the organization of the genocide.Holocaust denierstherefore claim that it is a forgery. To do this, they often resort to a book by Robert Kempner, in which he mixesfacsimileswithtranscriptsin a questionable manner , but nevertheless reproduces the text itself correctly. [ 60 ] The historiansNorbert Kampeand Christian Mentel have refuted these allegations of forgery. [ 61 ]  On August 7 and 13, 1941, Eichmann asked theReich Association of Jews in Germanyto provide statistical information on the Jews in Europe. [ 62 ] His department IV B 4 compared these figures with information from the occupation authorities and subtracted the victims of theHolocaust in Lithuania,LatviaandEstonia, which was described as "free of Jews". The obviously inflated number for the unoccupied part of France, which led to speculation about the inclusion of the Jews of North Africa in the extermination plans, [ 63 ] was explained byDan Michmanas a typo; [ 64 ] Ahlrich Meyertraced it back to an estimateby Theodor Dannecker. [ 65 ]  According to Eichmann's statements at histrialinJerusalemin 1961, the conference minutes are an "accurate representation of the content of the conference". Heydrich was keen to ensure that all essential details were recorded so that the participants could later rely on them. Only the discussion after the conference, which was also recorded in shorthand, was not recorded. Eichmann contradicted the minutes on some points at the time, particularly with regard to his own importance at the conference. However, the total duration of the conference recorded in the minutes, around one and a half hours, as stated by him, is undisputed.  Classification The surviving text of the minutes documents the intention to murder all European Jews, the agreement in principle and the effective participation of the National Socialist state apparatus in the genocide. The phrase "treated accordingly" in Eichmann's reproduction of Heydrich's introductory speech is seen by some historians as a typical cover phrase for the murder of Jews who survived forced labor, as the context allows no other conclusion (cf.special treatment).Hans Mommsencontradicts this : it was by no means a cover phrase; Heydrich had actually planned to exterminate a large proportion of the Jews through work, but the final solution to the Jewish question was only a long-term goal, and before it could be achieved the surviving Jews would still have to be transported further east. Here the settlement or solution was renewed, as it had been shown in the years 1939 to 1941, among others in theNiskoandMadagascar plans, which "can hardly be seen as a more humane alternative". [ 66 ]  According to Eichmann's testimony at his trial, the actual language was unambiguous: “They spoke of killing and eliminating and destroying.” [ 67 ]  Which killing variants were discussed is a matter of dispute among professional historians. From the extermination campaigns that had already begun and the conference protocol itself, most people deduce that a decision had been made at the highest level to expand the killing campaigns into a systematic genocide, to which all European Jews were to fall victim without distinction. [ 68 ] The figures for the overall included planning Jews from England and Spain: their inclusion was unrealistic given the unfavorable development of the war at the time for the National Socialists.  The historianPeter Longerichconclusions that even after the conference there was no fixed plan as to when and by what means the genocide was to be carried out. However, it can be proven that after that "the deportations were extended to the entire German area" and a "comprehensive forced labor program" began to take effect. [ 69 ]  Thomas Sandkühlerpoints out that the decisive effect was that up until the conference inEastern Galicia, Jews who were classified as “unfit for work” were murdered. Only after that did the murder order apply to all Jews except for the very few Jews who were declared indispensable in the oil industry. [ 70 ]  The Wannsee Conference was a bureaucratic clarification of the responsibilities of the bodies involved and the group of people to be murdered: This already required some kind of decision on the "final solution to the Jewish question". Such a decision could not be made by subordinate persons, but only at the highest level. Only then was the leadership of the Reich Security Main Office to be established and cooperation and coordination of the bodies involved to be ensured. According to the British historianMark Roseman,the Wannsee Conference was not very important for the actual course of the Holocaust. In retrospect, it was of outstanding importance only because its minutes were preserved. His text provides insight into a moment "in which continent-wide murder had already emerged as a political goal, the possibility of worldwide extermination was at least being considered, and the exact balance between direct extermination and short-term exploitation through forced labor had not "yet been established." [ 71 ]  The memorial and educational center “House of the Wannsee Conference” describes the widespread assumption that the Europe-wide genocide was decided here as “an almost irreversible error of historiography and journalism”. Nevertheless, the conference is of great historical importance: it was here that the ongoing genocide was coordinated and brought to the attention of the highest officials of all important ministries, where numerous people subsequently provided organizational support as “desk criminals ”. [ 72 ]  Criminal prosecution after 1945 A third of the conference participants did not survive the war. Heydrich died on June 4, 1942 as a result of anassassination attempt in Prague, Roland Freisler was killed in abombing raid, Rudolf Lange and Alfred Meyer commit suicide. Martin Luther died in the spring of 1945 as a result of his imprisonment in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Heinrich Müller was considered missing.  Even before the Wannsee Conference minutes were discovered, two participants were executed forwar crimes. Eberhard Schöngarth was sentenced to death by theBritishmilitary court in 1946 and executed because he had personally ordered the shooting of a prisoner of war. Josef Bühler was sentenced to death inKrakowin 1946. Wilhelm Kritzinger died in 1947 before the Wilhelmstrasse Trial began, and Erich Neumann died in 1948.  If there were any convictions at all, then other facts than participation in the conference were cited in the verdict. The cases of Georg Leibbrandt (1950) and Gerhard Klopfer (1962) were dropped. Both were released from custody in 1949. Otto Hofmann was sentenced to 25 years in prison in theNuremberg follow-up trial against the SS Race and Settlement Main Officein 1948, but was released fromLandsberg Prisonin 1954. Wilhelm Stuckart was sentenced to three years and ten months in the Wilhelmstrasse trial, but was released in 1949 because his time in internment was taken into account.  Adolf Eichmann fled to Argentinaafter the war , but was kidnapped there by a commando of the Israeli secret serviceMossad, brought to Israel and executed in 1962 after asensational trial in Jerusalem.  The conference building as a memorial  Logo of the “Memorial and Educational Site – House of the Wannsee Conference” The Berlin architectPaul Baumgartenplanned and built the upper-class villa, then Große Seestraße 19a, in 1914–1915 for the manufacturerErnst Marlier. [ 73 ] The building was considered his most luxurious construction and belonged to thecommunity of Wannsee, today a district of theSteglitz-Zehlendorf district. In 1921 Marlier sold the property toFriedrich Minoux, then general director of theStinnes Group(hence the name "Minoux Villa"). In 1929, when the street was renumbered, it was given the house number 56/58. Since April 8, 1933, the street has been calledAm Großen Wannsee. Minoux was arrested for fraud in May 1940. [ 74 ] From prison, he sold the villa and the property at the then market price of 1.95 millionReichsmarksto theNordhav Foundation, which handled property transactions for the SS Security Service (SD). [ 75 ]  From 1940, the SS had the villa's grounds maintained byforced laborersin a "closed Jewish labor force" or later byEastern European forced laborers . The house was used as a guest house for the security police; high-ranking SS officers, leaders of task forces or friendly foreign intelligence chiefs stayed here. At the beginning of February 1943, the Nordhav Foundation sold the property to the German Reich (Security Police Administration) with the contractual agreement (§4) to "continue to use it as a comradeship and leader's home for the security police". [ 76 ] In October 1944, the domestic SDunderOtto Ohlendorfand, towards the end of the war, Gestapo chiefHeinrich Mülleralso moved its headquarters to the villa. [ 76 ]  After the end of the war, according to unconfirmed reports, the property was temporarily used by theRed Armyand later by theUS Army . It stood empty for a time, so the furnishings have not been preserved. In 1946, the property became the property of the Greater Berlin magistrate. In December 1946, the magistrate rented it to the BerlinSPD, which housed an educational and recreational center there, as well as a library of the "August Bebel Institute" foundation, which had been founded in March 1947 by five social democratic publishers. [ 77 ] After the decision was made in autumn 1951 to give up the house for financial reasons, the property was leased to theNeukölln districtin January 1952, which used the villa asa school camp. [ 78 ]  In 1966 the historian Joseph Wulf, who had survived theAuschwitz concentration camp, founded the association "International Documentation Center for the Study of National Socialism and its Aftermath". The building was to be converted into a documentation center and used by the association. Wulf was able to attract donors and prominent support from abroad, for example fromNahum Goldman . Initially, Governing Mayor Willi Brandtwas also in favor of the project, but after his departure for Bonn it lost the goodwill of the Berlin Senate. Brandt's successor,Klaus Schütz(SPD), was opposed to the establishment of a memorial, citing concerns that it could encourage anti-Semitism. In general, German society in the 1960s lacked awareness of the guilt it had arisen under National Socialism. Accordingly, Wulf's initiative was received primarily as an internal Jewish project. Preventing the memorial would thus make it possible to repress one's own guilt. After the Senate approved the establishment of a memorial on December 20, 1967, but rejected the use of the villa on the Wannsee for this purpose, numerous donors withdrew. The association finally dissolved in 1973. [ 79 ]  It was not until 1988 that the villa and garden were reconstructed according to monument preservation principles and for use as a memorial site. In 1992, the memorial and educational center - House of the Wannsee Conference was opened in the rooms of the villa; it bears Joseph Wulf's name. On the ground floor of the house, the permanent exhibition "The Wannsee Conference and the Genocide of the European Jews" informs about the process of exclusion, persecution, expulsion, ghettoization and extermination of the Jews in the German sphere of influence between 1933 and 1945 . After reconstruction and revision, a new permanent exhibition was opened in January 2006. In 2020, the permanent exhibition was revised again. It now bears the title "The Meeting at Wannsee and the Murder of the European Jews". [ 80 ]  Artistic processing Novels In Fever,Leslie Kaplan describes the significance of the conference for Eichmann's rise in fictional form. According to her, Eichmann imagined that sitting down with Heydrich was a career boost for him. In the novel, the hopes-for professional advancement is an important reason why Eichmann participated in the mass crimes of the Holocaust. These were therefore murders without any real motive.  In his novelFatherland,Robert Harris paints a vision of Germany winning the Second World War and ruling over all of Europe. The Jews have disappeared from the entire sphere of influence and their existence is a fading, unspoken memory among the population. A few days before Hitler's 75th "Führer birthday", a series of murders of former Nazi leaders begins. Little by little, the investigatingpolice officeruncovers that the murder victims are the surviving accomplices to the hushed-up disappearance of the Jews. The novel particularly sheds light on the secrecy of the conference and the few remaining pieces of evidence.  Acting Paul Mommertzwrote the play The Wannsee Conference in 1984. He used the Eichmann Protocol, statements made by Eichmann during his trial and written documents to create dialogues that were as realistic as possible. The play lasts - like the conference - 90 minutes and derives its effect from the technocratic coldness with which those involved negotiate the planned mass murder of 11 million people as a purely logistical problem.  The play premiered at theVolkstheater in Vienna; further performances were given, for example, under the direction ofPeter SodanninHalle (Saale) . In September and October 2003, the play was staged by Isolde Christine Wabraas part of the state exhibition "Value of Life" and was performed ten times in theHartheim Castle learning and memorial site.  The play also served as the screenplay for the film of the same name.  Feature films The Wannsee Conference is the subject of several feature films. In 1984, a television version of the play by Paul Mommertz was first released under the direction ofHeinz Schirk:The Wannsee Conference.Dietrich Mattauschplayed Heydrich andGerd Böckmannplayed Eichmann. The film won numerous international awards, including theAdolf Grimme Prize. The cinema version followed in 1987. [ 81 ]  Frank Piersondirected the English-language film Conspiracy (USA/GB, 2001, in German asThe Wannsee Conference). Like the historic meeting, this feature film also lasts 85 minutes and is based on its minutes. However, as these do not reproduce verbatim speech, the dialogues are reconstructed and therefore not historically verified. The documentary character originally intended by Pierson's production was not achieved because the implementation was dramaturgically revised. References to unsubstantiated details by the memorial, which had the script before filming began, were not used. In the film adaptation, which was shot at the location of the conference, Kritzinger is portrayed as a doubter: This does not correspond with the historical facts handed down.  In addition to these film adaptations, the Wannsee Conference was depicted in a scene in the four-part TV seriesHolocaust – The Story of the Weiss Family, but only with the participants Heydrich and Eichmann.  On January 24, 2022,ZDF broadcast the 105-minute film The Wannsee Conferenceby directorMatti Geschonneck,which has won multiple national and international awards and featuresPhilipp HochmairasHeydrich.  Documentaries On January 27, 2018, from 8:15 pm to 9:00 pm, Phoenix broadcast a film entitled Mysterious Places - At Wannsee about the history of the villas at Wannsee. The house of the Wannsee Conference is discussed in this film. The documentary film The Wannsee Conference. The Documentary. was shown onZDFon January 24, 2022 following the feature filmThe Wannsee Conference; Holocaust survivorMargot Friedländerwas among those featured. literature Hans-Christian Jasch, Christoph Kreutzmüller (eds.): The Participants. The Men of the Wannsee Conference . Metropol-Verlag, Berlin 2017, ISBN 978-3-86331-306-7 . Memorial and Educational Center House of the Wannsee Conference (ed.): The Wannsee Conference and the Genocide of the European Jews. Catalog of the permanent exhibition. Berlin 2006, ISBN 3-9808517-4-5 ; (Facsimile of all exhibits and commentary). English version, ibid. The Wannsee Conference and the Genocide of the European Jews , ISBN 3-9808517-5-3 . Christian Gerlach: The Wannsee Conference, the fate of the German Jews and Hitler's fundamental political decision to murder all of Europe's Jews. In: the same: War, nutrition, genocide. German extermination policy in the Second World War . Pendo, Zurich / Munich 2001, ISBN 3-85842-404-8 , pp. 79-152 (first published inWerkstatt GeschichteH. 18, 6th year, November 1997), review by Götz Aly. Michael Haupt: The House of the Wannsee Conference. From the industrialist's villa to the memorial. Bonifatius, Paderborn 2009, ISBN 978-3-9813119-1-4 , 200 pages with 131 - partly colored - photos/documents. Wolf Kaiser: The Wannsee Conference. SS leaders and ministerial officials agreed on the murder of European Jews. In:Heiner Lichtenstein, Otto R. Romberg (ed.): Perpetrators - Victims - Consequences. The Holocaust in History and the Present. 2nd edition, Bonn 1997, ISBN 3-89331-257-9 , pp. 24–37. Norbert Kampe,Peter Klein(both editors): The Wannsee Conference on January 20, 1942. Documents, state of research, controversies. Böhlau Verlag, Cologne 2013, ISBN 978-3-412-21070-0 , 481 pp. (Anthology, table of contents (PDF; 24 kB) available from the publisher). Gerd Kühling: School camp or research center? The debate about a documentation center in the house of the Wannsee Conference (1966/67) , in: Zeit historical research/Studies in Contemporary History 5 (2008), pp. 211–235. Peter Longerich: The Wannsee Conference of January 20, 1942. Planning and beginning of the genocide of the European Jews. Edition Hentrich, Berlin 1998, ISBN 3-89468-250-7 . Peter Longerich: Wannsee Conference. The Road to the “Final Solution” . Pantheon-Verlag, Munich 2016, ISBN 978-3-570-55344-2 . Kurt Pätzold,Erika Schwarz: Agenda for the Murder of the Jews. The Wannsee Conference on January 20, 1942. Metropol, Berlin 1998, ISBN 3-926893-12-5 . Mark Roseman: The Wannsee Conference. How the Nazi bureaucracy organized the Holocaust. Ullstein, Munich 2002, ISBN 3-548-36403-9 . Johannes Tuchel: Am Großer Wannsee 56–58. From the Villa Minoux to the House of the Wannsee Conference (Series: Publications of the Memorial “House of the Wannsee Conference” Vol. 1), Edition Hentrich, Berlin 1992, ISBN 3-89468-026-1 . Peter Klein: The Wannsee Conference at Zeitgeschichte-online. The participants. The Men of the Wannsee Conference, Memorial and Educational Center House of the Wannsee Conference (ed.) Metropol Verlag Berlin, 2024 

Next to the House of the Wannsee Conference is this 1874 zinc copy of the Flensburg lion (or more properly the Idstedter lion) I'm standing beside which became the symbol of the so-called Alsen colony around Wannsee. The war club "Alsen" took care of the preservation of the lion in Wannsee. The original had been created by the sculptor Wilhelm Bissen as a reminder of the victory of the royal Danish troops over the Schleswig-Holstein troops in the battle of Idstedt on July 25, 1850. In 1864 Bismarck had it brought to Berlin and initially installed in the Zeughaus. After the war ended in 1945, it was brought to Copenhagen by the American army. For some time after the war, many Danish politicians had hoped that Schleswig and Holstein would now return to Denmark. When it became clear that this would not happen, they put forward the idea of ​​returning the lion to Flensburg which was, again, owned by Germany which sounds paradoxical; perhaps the logic was that since the Danes themselves could not yet return, the lion at least would. Finally by 2011 the lion was brought to Flensburg and placed in the Danish military cemetery.

 In 1874, a zinc copy of the monument was erected here in Wannsee in a public park near the Colonie Alsen association of war veterans. This monument was paid for by banker Wilhelm Conrad. A path leading up to the statue was fittingly dubbed the Straße zum Löwen, i.e. the Road to the Lion. This copy has replaced the reliefs of the four Danish officers with a single image of the German officer Prince Frederick Charles of Prussia, in effect reversing the meaning of the original monument. In 1938, the Danish press reported the existence of the copy of the historic monument and, after the Danish embassy complained about the poor condition of the lion which by then had become overgrown by trees and bushes, it was moved to its present location on Heckeshorn (right next to the memorial site where it can be seen behind my 2017 cohort sitting in the garden of the Haus der Wannsee-Konfernz, looking at towards the lake). Since then, the "Straße zum Löwen", which ended at the old location, no longer leads to the memorial. 

Nearby is the Liebermann-Villa, the former summer residence of German painter Max Liebermann (1847-1935), shown today and in his 1918 painting Mein Haus in Wannsee. In 2006 the villa and its garden opened permanently to the public as a museum. Liebermann had been co-founder and chairman of the Berlin Secession and president of the Prussian Academy of the Arts from 1920 until 1933 when he was replaced and ostracised by the Nazis. In 1940, five years after his death, his widow Martha was forced by the Nazis to sell the villa to the Reichspost at far below market value;  an insultingly informal letter with the "offer" to sell the villa to the Reichspost and other documents of extortionate exclusion are displayed on the ground floor. The ridiculously low selling price was never paid out to her. From 1944 the villa was used as an hospital. Martha Liebermann herself committed suicide in 1943 in order not to be deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp. A stumbling block in front of Liebermann's former city villa which is today's Max-Liebermann-Haus of the Brandenburg Gate Foundation on Pariser Platz (right next to the Brandenburg Gate), is a reminder of their fate. Even after the war the villa was still used as a hospital until 1969. The heirs in the United States through daughter Käthe Riezler got the villa back after the war.

The Reichsluftschutzschule (Reich Air Protection School) down the road at Am Grossen Wannsee  77/80 shown during a ceremony on Hitler's birthday in 1939 and me in front today, virtually unchanged. The building was designed by the architect Eduard Jobst Siedler in 1938-1939. Air raid guards from all over Germany were trained here. For camouflage, the Reich Air Defence School was not built in the style of a typical barracks, but rather like a dignified housing estate. What is remarkable about the building complex is how much consideration was given to the existing forest landscape in the planning. In order to maintain the natural level of the area, especially the valley basin lined with trees, large buildings typical of barracks were, with the exception of a high bunker, prohibited. Instead, two-storey houses for accommodation, school and lecture halls, administration facilities and garages were distributed on the spacious 490,000 m² property in a loosely scattered form. The paths were laid out so as to follow the contour curves. Hermann Göring inaugurated the site with a pompous celebration in May 1939. For the facades of the buildings, Siedler used reddish-brown clinker, which blended well with the landscape. Each house received a restrained brick ornamentation with cornice strips and protruding brick strips. At the entrance one can still see clinker bricks in the form of triangles that are raised across the ashlar, decorative elements reminiscent of expressionism. After the war, a sanatorium for tuberculosis sufferers was built in the intact buildings , which later became the Heckeshorn Lung Clinic (now the Helios Clinic Emil von Behring). The pulmonologist Karl Ludwig Radenbach, a pioneer of tuberculosis research, worked here.

Villa Oppenheim at Am Großen Wannsee 43-45 was built between 1907 to 1908 by architect Alfred Messel for Franz Oppenheim, General Director of Agfa, and his second wife Margarete, an illustrious art collector. After they died their heirs emigrated to Switzerland and England before the Nazi persecution and sold the property to the Reich Main Security Office for a fraction of its value.  The institution, which was generally referred to as the “Wannsee Institute”, was officially run under the cover name “Institute for Antiquity Research”. The Wannsee Institute had already moved into the building in 1938, which now served secret service purposes and war preparation in Eastern Europe. The Gestapo had brought a large library of literature on the Soviet Union from Breslau to Berlin, where it formed the basis for a secret East Research Institute. The materials were brought to Villa Oppenheim. On behalf of Reichsführer-SS, Heinrich Himmler, the institute prepared expert opinions and monthly reports on the Soviet Union, its economy and the nationalities living there. In 1940 the institute was placed under the foreign intelligence service. Part of the park of the former Villa Oppenheim on the property at Zum Heckeshorn 16/18 also belonged to the institute, from which Soviet radio traffic and radio broadcasts were presumably tapped. In 1937 Franz Alfred Six, head of the SD Office, brought the Georgian agricultural expert Michael Achmeteli to Berlin,where he took over the management of the newly created "Wannsee Institute". With the help of Six, Achmeteli had become a professor at the Berlin University, where he recruited, trained or helped some of his institute staff to obtain a doctorate. From 1938 the institute produced monthly reports and a number of expert opinions and reports on specific questions such as those concerning the state of the Red Army or the Soviet coal industry.

Franz Alfred Six (1909 - 1975)

 With the anschluss with Austria and the break-up of Czechoslovakia, the institute received “special orders”. During the attack on Poland, the special knowledge of some employees who were assigned to SD task forces or who were involved in the organisation of “resettlements” from the Baltic States was used. In the course of these "resettlements" the ϟϟ murdered not only Jews but also patients in psychiatric clinics in order to make room for the resettled people. The employees of the institute were accepted into the SA and wore the uniform of the security service. Many of them were Germans abroad, often from the Baltic States or other parts of the former Russian Empire and assigned to the task forces of the SD in the east. After the institute was relocated to Plankenwarth Castle near Graz in 1943, another type of "Eastern work" took place in the villa on Wannsee: maps for warfare were drawn and target documents for air raids were produced. Sabotage actions against the Soviet Union were also prepared here. Under the cover name “Company Zeppelin” agents were trained at Wannsee whose task it was to organise uprisings behind the Soviet front.

After the war the villa became part of the Wannsee Hospital together with other neighbouring villas until it was closed in 1971. From 1990 to 2009 the Tannenhof Berlin-Brandenburg association operated the villa as a drug therapy centre. The International Montessori School is now using the building since a renewed renovation in accordance with its status as a listed building. 

The Schweden-Pavillon was an exhibition building that the founder of the Alsen villa colony, Wilhelm Conrad, had moved to Wannsee from the Vienna World Exhibition in 1872-1873. Up until the 1930s, the Swedeish Pavilion was a first-class restaurant, which Max Liebermann also frequented. In 1940 the Foreign Office acquired it.
Disguised as a "broadcast technical research institute", special antennae were installed and the largest and most important radio monitoring system in Germany was built. Strictly shielded from the public as listening to "enemy broadcasts" was forbidden under threat of death, the "Special Service Seehaus" recorded broadcasts in 36 languages ​​from 1941 onwards and employed around five hundred people. To the annoyance of Reich Propaganda Minister Goebbels, who was also sitting in the Sweden pavilion with his "Interradio" staff, the reports from the Propaganda Ministry were exposed as lies by the information it gathered on the war situation. Therefore efforts were made to keep the messages received there as secret as possible. The monitoring system gained an important strategic importance especially towards the end of the war. Today there are apparently apartments in the house, which has been renamed the Sweden Pavilion again after renovation and remodeling.

The Villa Herz on Am Großen Wannsee 52-54 was built in 1892 by Wilhelm Martens, a student of Martin Gropius, and named for the merchant Paul Herz who had come from an old Jewish merchant family. The chocolate manufacturer Nelson Faßbender bought it in 1926 and had a riding arena built on the property. In honour of Adolf Hitler, he planted an oak in the garden of the Villa Herz in the early 1930s. Faßbender sold the property in 1936 to the German Labour Front (DAF) and in 1937 moved into the "Aryanised" Villa Czapski on Zum Heckeshorn 1-3. Faßbender himself resumed the production of his chocolates in Villa Czapski in 1945. After the end of the war, the Red Cross quartered refugees here until the American Army set up a café there. In 1950 the regional authority of Greater Berlin took over the property, turning it into a guest house. The building and part of the garden were later used as a youth rest home for the Berlin-Tiergarten district. In 1972 the Zehlendorf district office leased part of the property to the Alsen sailing club. Villa Herz has been privately owned for several years and is often used as a backdrop for film and television productions such as the 1985 film "Didi und die Rache der Enterbten with Dieter Hallervorden as well as the 1964 West German film De Gruft mit dem Rätselschloß directed by Franz Josef Gottlieb and starring Harald Leipnitz, Eddi Arent, Siegfried Schürenberg and Klaus Kinski,based on the 1908 novel Angel Esquire by Edgar Wallace, previously made into a British silent film.

Waldhof am Bogensee, former weekend retreat of Josef Goebbels north of Berlin near Lanke. It was a gift to Goebbels from the city of Berlin back in 1936 for his 39th birthday. “What a jewel the house has become, so idyllic, romantic, and peaceful,” he would later write of it, using it as an illicit 'love nest.'

 With the Russians now so close, on the last day of January 1945, Goebbels had sent Schwägermann out to Lanke, his lakeside mansion on the Bogensee, to evacuate Magda, their six children and two governesses into the air raid shelter at Schwanenwerder. The next day he declared Berlin a ‘fortress city.’ Surrounded by her brood, Magda was in a world of self-delusion. From Berthe the milliner’s she purchased a green velvet hat, a black turban, and a brown hat trimmed with fur; she  mentioned that ‘when things calmed down’ she’d like to have a brown hat remodelled. ‘The news you’ll be hearing isn’t rosy,’ she wrote to Harald, now in British captivity, on February 10. ‘We’re all sound in heart and health; but as the whole family belongs together at times like these we’ve shut down Bogensee and we’ve all moved back into Berlin. Despite all the air raids our house is still standing and everybody here—including your grand-mother and the rest of the family—is well housed. The children find it splendid that there’s no school and, thank God, they’ve noticed nothing of the seriousness of the hour.’ ‘Papa and I,’ she concluded, ‘are full of confidence and we’re doing our duty as best we can.’

Irving (885-886), Goebbels, Mastermind of the Third Reich 

My 2024 Bavarian International School cohort at the so-called Bridge of Spies, the Glienicke Bridge, over the Havel connecting the Königstraße in Wannsee with the Berliner Straße in the Berlin suburb of Potsdam and as it appeared as part of the border between East and West Berlin during the Cold War. The half-timbered bridge was opened at the end of 1907 as the fourth structure at this location under the name Kaiser Wilhelm Bridge, but this name didn't catch on. 

During the last days of April 1945, during the fighting between the Wehrmacht and the Red Army in the area of ​​the Berlin suburbs of Potsdam, the Glienicke Bridge was destroyed. Contrary to reports, it wasn't intentionally blown up by either the Wehrmacht or the Red Army, although explosive charges had been attached to all of the pillars. The engineer who was to blow it up was stationed in one of the last houses on the Potsdam side. An intentional blow-up would have completely destroyed the bridge as an attack by the Red Army from the Berlin side was expected. However, as Red Army troops from the Potsdam town centre approached the bridg, Soviet tanks fired on it and hit two explosive charges that destroyed part of the bridge; all other detonators remained intact. 

My students at the site marking the political sitiutation at the time the Berlin wall was about to fall as we make our way on foot to the site of the Potsdam Conference at Cecilienhof Palace. For the Allied conference participants, some of whom came via Berlin, Soviet pioneers installed a pontoon bridge over the Havel in place of the destroyed Glienicke Bridge. Reconstruction of the bridge began on November 3, 1947. Construction manager Hans Dehnert had the collapsed steel structure lifted and reinserted into the remaining parts of the bridge in their original form. However, repairs to the supporting structure reduced the bridge's load-bearing capacity. For this reason, the previously cantilevered footpath consoles were relocated inwards, reducing the roadway width from 13 to 11 metres. The bridge was reopened on December 19, 1949, in the attendance of high-ranking DDR officials, such as the then-Transport Minister Hans Reingruber. A cabinet decision by the state government of Brandenburg determined that the structure was to be renamed the Bridge of Unity. A white line was drawn exactly in the middle of the bridge, marking the border between the DDR and West Berlin. The temporary wooden structure disappeared in 1950. Since then, the bridge has had a different paint job with the eastern part of the bridge somewhat darker. From 1952, the bridge was closed to private traffic as West Berliners and West Germans could only cross with a special permit. DDR citizens could continue to cross until 1961, but were checked. Soviet military checkpoints were set up for members of the military liaison mission, having heir headquarters in West Berlin and their official locations in the immediate vicinity of Potsdamer Seestrasse (Britain) and in Sacrow (US). From there they could, in accordance with thePotsdam Agreement, make inspection trips to military installations in the DDR. 

Between 1962 and 1986, high-ranking agents from both military camps were exchanged three times on the Glienicke Bridge. Among others, the spies Rudolf Ivanovich Abel and Francis Gary Powers were exchanged on February 10, 1962. From 1963, members of the military missions of Czechoslovakia, Poland and Yugoslavia based in West Berlin (and some of their family members) were also allowed to cross the bridge with the appropriate identification papers. In 1973, this regulation was extended to employees of the USSR General Consulate, which had been based in West Berlin since June 1973. 

The East German authorities closed the bridge on November15, 1984 for security reasons, leading to new talks between visiting representatives of the Berlin Senate and the DDR government. This resulted in the West Berlin Senate declaring that it would cover the estimated repair costs of two million marks. Although the paints came from the same West Berlin factory, different shades (DB 601 and D 603) were used, so that the two-tone design was retained in 1985. On March 11, 1988, at around 2 am, three refugees from Potsdam broke through the barriers on the bridge to West Berlin in a stolen standard W50 truck.

Tempelhof aeroport

The Nazi eagle, shorn of its swastika, still remains. Amongst the first projects the Nazis undertook with the reconstruction of Berlin was the planned renovation of Berlin's Tempelhof International Airport, which began in 1934. Tempelhof was dramatically redesigned as the gateway to Europe, and became the forerunner of today's modern airports. Indeed, the airport halls and the neighbouring buildings are still known as the largest built entities worldwide, and Tempelhof has been described by British architect Sir Norman Foster as "the mother of all airports". The building complex was designed to resemble an eagle in flight with semicircular hangars forming the bird's spread wings. A mile long hangar roof was to have been laid in tiers to form a stadium for spectators at air and ground demonstrations. However, although under construction for more than ten years, it was never finished because of the war. Tempelhof was one of Europe's three iconic pre-war airports, the others being London's now defunct Croydon Airport and the old Paris–Le Bourget Airport. It acquired a further iconic status as the centre of the Berlin Airlift of 1948–49.  

 The Nazi enlargement of Berlin's Tempelhof aeroport grandiosely demonstrated their aims at enlarging Germany's influence in Europe. The airport's eagle design clearly conveys that "the Eagle of Germany" would again take to the skies, to fly higher than ever before. Coupled with other Nazi architectural accomplishments, like the 1936 Olympic Stadium, and Nuremberg Zeppelin Tribune, were assuredly profound propaganda victories for the Nazi regime.

In the 1930s, Tempelhof was at the forefront of European air traffic with its traffic volume, ahead of Paris, Amsterdam and even London. The limits of the technical possibilities were soon reached, and in January 1934 the first planning work for a new building for a large airport on the Tempelhofer Feld began. In July 1935, the architect Ernst Sagebiel received the planning order for the new building from the Reich Aviation Ministry, which reflected both the new urban planning ideas and the monumental architecture under the Nazis and had to anticipate the development of aviation for a longer period of time. The airport was planned to handle up to six million passengers a year. The facility was intended not only for air traffic, but also serve for events such as the Reichsflugtag and provide a seat for as many aviation-related agencies and institutions as possible. This new building also met all the requirements of a military airfield at the time.

 

Hitler and Göring at Tempelhof, 1932 

The early Nazi concentration camp Columbia, which was opened on December 27, 1934, was located directly at the new building and had operated until November 5, 1936 and demolished in 1938. A 1994 memorial designed by Georg Seibert and the Friends' Association for the commemoration of Nazi crimes on and around the Tempelhofer Flugfeld eV commemorates the existence of the Columbia concentration camp since 1994.

 

From January 1940 until early 1944, Weser Flugzeugbau assembled Junkers Ju 87 "Stuka" dive bombers; thereafter, it assembled Focke-Wulf Fw 190 fighter planes in the still unfurnished main hall and hangars 3 to 7 of the new terminal, which were supplied by a railway and trucks via a connecting tunnel.[16] Hangars 1 and 2 were not used to assemble aircraft as these were already used by Luft Hansa for its own planes. Aircraft parts were brought in from all over the city while complete aircraft engines were trucked to Tempelhof. Once the airframes were complete and the engines had been installed, the finished aircraft were flown out. The Luftwaffe did not use Tempelhof as a military airfield during the war, except for occasional emergency landings by fighter aircraft.

A decapitated reichsadler in front of the aeroport with how it originally appeared on the roof with victorious Red Army soldiers, May 1945 below. When the front approached at the end of April 1945, the airport was to be defended. The airport commander at the time, Colonel Rudolf Böttger, and some senior Lufthansa employees circumvented this order, however, by having the weapons provided and setting up a field hospital. This did not lead to a defence of the airport, which could have led to its complete destruction. According to Wikipedia, Böttger evaded Adolf Hitler's extermination order to blow up the entire complex by suicide. However, according to other sources he was called upon by an officer of the Waffen ϟϟ for insubordination and shot. In fact, the concrete floor of the main hall was blown up, so that it fell onto the luggage level below and the main hall became unusable. On April 29 1945 Red Army troops occupied the Tempelhof district and the airport. The new buildings were largely spared from destruction, but there were several fires that also severely damaged the steel structure of the hall buildings. The buildings of the old airport were completely destroyed and the airfield was littered with impacts. The underground bunker with the film archive also burned down completely, and all films were destroyed in the process. 

On July 2, 1945, the Red Army left the airfield so that it could be taken over by the Americans (473rd Air Services Group) before their official arrival on July 4. 

 The airport was given a new meaning in 1948 when, along with the Gatow airfield and later Tegel Airport, it served to transport food and goods for Berlin by plane during the blockade of West Berlin through the valiant efforts of the RAF and USAAF. A large part of the cargo consisted of fuel. The vital supply through the Berlin Airlift between various West German cities and Berlin lasted from June 26, 1948 to May 12, 1949. In Tempelhof, the planes took off and landed at roughy ninety-second intervals. The American pilot Gail Halvorsen popularised the dropping of candy during the approach to Tempelhof with parachutes made of handkerchiefs from the cockpit windows, which was adopted by other pilots and gave the aircraft the legendary name of raisin bombers.  The southern runway was built for the smooth operation of the airlift. 

Tempelhof Airport closed all operations on October 30, 2008, despite considerable protest. The former airfield has subsequently been used as a recreational space known as Tempelhofer Feld. In September 2015 it was announced that Tempelhof would also become an emergency refugee camp.

The swastikas return to allow Tom Cruise to make his movie Valkyrie

Nearby, Volkssturm along Hermannstrasse. Beevor (302) writes of how

The remnants of his `Norge' and `Danmark' regiments were waiting impatiently by the canal for motor transport, which was having difficulty getting to them through the rubble-blocked streets. Just as the trucks finally arrived, a cry of alarm was heard: `Panzer durchgebrochen!' This cry prompted a surge of `tank fright' even among hardened veterans and a chaotic rush for the vehicles, which presented an easy target for the two T-34s that had broken through. The trucks that got away even had men clinging on to the outsides. As they escaped north up the Hermannstrasse, they saw scrawled on a house wall `SS traitors extending the war!' There was no doubt in their minds as to the culprits: `German Communists at work. Were we going to have to fight against the enemy within as well?

 Treptower Park

The site on May 8, 1956 during a wreath-laying ceremony on the anniversary of the German day of defeat in Treptow and standing at the site in 2021. In the morning hours of May 8, 1956, the eleventh anniversary of the defeat of Germany by the allies, members of the government of the German Democratic Republic, the Central Committee of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany, the Diplomatic Corps and delegations from mass organisations and factories laid wreaths at the Soviet Memorial in Treptow. Shown here is a view of the honorary formation of the National People's Army in front of the Soviet memorial. This is the most impressive monument to the Red Army is the vast war memorial and military cemetery in Berlin, built between 1946-1949 to commemorate the 20,000 Soviet soldiers who fell in the battle of Berlin in April-May 1945 in the heart of Treptower Park close to the former East Berlin's embassy quarters. In fact, it remains perhaps the only public display of a swastika in Berlin, albeit in the process of being smashed (although it is illegal to display any Nazi symbol here in Germany, even for anti-fascist purposes). It thus serves not only as a memorial but as a military cemetery. Completed in May 1949, it was built on the instructions of the Soviet military administration in Germany to honour the soldiers of the Red Army who died in the war they helped initiate through the Nazi-Soviet Pact of August 1939. Over 7,000 of the soldiers who died in the Battle of Berlin are buried here. The colossal statue belonging to the monument is thirty metres high with hill and base.
During my 2021 Bavarian International School class trip and as it appeared in a photograph taken in 1955 by Estella Burket, a teacher at Deseronto Public School, Deseronto, Ontario, in the Dominion of Canada. After the war, four Soviet memorial sites were created by the Red Army in the urban area of Berlin. These sites are not only monuments to the victory over Germany, but also serve as Soviet war grave sites in Germany. The central monument is this, the complex in Treptow Park. The memorial in the Schönholzer Heide, the memorial in the Tiergarten and the memorial at Bucher castle grounds were also built for this purpose. A contest had been organised by the Soviet Command for the design of the memorial in Berlin-Treptow, to which 33 drafts were submitted. From June 1946, the proposal of a Soviet creator collective, designed by the architect Jakov S. Belopolski, the sculptor Yevgeny Wuchetich, the painter Alexander A. Gorpenko, and the engineer Sarra S. Walerius, was implemented. The sculptures and reliefs were manufactured in 1948 by the Lauchhammer art foundry. The memorial was built on the site of a large play and sports meadow in the area of the "New Lake", which was created during the Berlin trade exhibition of 1896 and completed in May 1949.

The construction of the monument was marked by the beginning of the Cold War. Although there was a lack of living space in post-war Germany and the construction sector had almost come to a standstill due to the lack of planning, labour and material shortages, Soviet propaganda demands took priority over housing construction. This site was to express two ideas: on the one hand, an appreciation of Soviet occupation power so that the scale of the area should be "a witness of the greatness and the insuperable power of Soviet power." East German politicians like Otto Grotewohl, on the other hand, saw in the memorial on May 8, 1949, the fourth anniversary of the end of the war, a sign of gratitude to the Soviet army as a liberator. In the following decades, the Treptower site was the scene of mass events and state rituals of the DDR, which sometimes completely superimposed the original intention of being the victory mark and cemetery of the Second World War. In 1985, on the 40th anniversary of the end of the war, the representatives of the youth movement of the DDR organised a torchlight procession at the Treptower Memorial. There they took the "oath of the youth of the DDR" on their behalf. 

 At the site with my students holding one of my wartime Soviet flags and the same spot on May 8, 1956 with an honorary formation of the National People's Army in front of the Soviet memorial. The memorial’s significance goes beyond its architectural grandeur or the scale of loss it commemorates. It has long been a site of political symbolism. In the immediate post-war years, as the Soviet Union consolidated its control over East Germany, the memorial became a focal point for the GDR's official historical narrative. Through state-sponsored ceremonies and school visits, it was promoted as a site of pilgrimage, representing both the brotherhood of Soviet and East German socialism and the eternal debt owed by East Germany to the Soviet Union. This close association with Soviet power made the memorial not just a symbol of victory over fascism but also a potent marker of Soviet dominance in Eastern Europe. Consequently, for many East Germans, it came to embody the contradictions of their national identity, simultaneously representing liberation and subjugation. Scholarly interpretations of the memorial reflect this duality. Sebestyen argues that the Soviet-designed war memorials across Eastern Europe, including Treptower Park, were intended as much to intimidate as to commemorate. The massive scale, militaristic iconography, and positioning of such memorials were, according to Sebestyen, reminders of Soviet control rather than simply tributes to wartime sacrifices. This perspective sees the memorial as a tool of Soviet soft power, particularly in the years following 1945 when the Soviet Union sought to solidify its ideological and military presence in the region. The deliberate evocation of Soviet heroism, portrayed in such grand terms, was integral to the GDR’s legitimisation strategy, binding the country closer to Moscow and reinforcing the Soviet Union’s role as a paternal protector of the socialist bloc.

Yet, the post-Cold War era has complicated this narrative. Following the reunification of Germany in 1990 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the memorial has faced a re-examination within the context of German historical memory. Initially, there were calls from some segments of German society to dismantle Soviet-era monuments, seen as relics of foreign occupation and dictatorship. However, Treptower Park's significance as a grave for thousands of soldiers has largely preserved it from such fate, unlike other Soviet statues removed from public spaces across Eastern Europe. In Berlin, where the history of the Second World War and its aftermath looms large, the memorial has retained a certain sanctity, protected in part by the treaties between Germany and Russia, which guarantee its preservation. As such, it remains a space where annual commemorations are held, not only by Russian and German officials but also by anti-fascist groups, who view the site as a symbol of the defeat of Nazism. However, the memorial's legacy is not without its tensions. Whilst it continues to serve as a site of remembrance, it is also a point of contention, particularly among those who view it as a vestige of Soviet oppression. The Red Army’s actions during the occupation of Germany, including widespread evidenced reports of looting, rape, and destruction, complicate the narrative of liberation that the memorial seeks to promote. Naimark highlights the Soviet occupation's dark legacy in Berlin, noting that whilst the Red Army’s role in ending Nazi tyranny can't be discounted, its occupation policies left deep scars on the German populace, particularly in the immediate aftermath of the war. For those who suffered under Soviet rule, the Treptower Memorial serves as a painful reminder not of liberation but of subjugation and violence. As such, the site remains contested, with some viewing it as an essential symbol of anti-fascism and others as a monument to Soviet tyranny. The Treptower Soviet Memorial thus exists within a web of competing historical interpretations, serving as both a commemoration of wartime sacrifice and a flashpoint for the unresolved historical traumas of the 20th century. Its continuing significance today is a testament to the complexities of post-war memory in Germany and the broader question of how societies reckon with the legacies of occupation, war, and dictatorship. The careful preservation of the site reflects a broader consensus within Germany to acknowledge the contributions of the Soviet Union in defeating Nazi Germany while simultaneously confronting the darker aspects of Soviet rule.The entrance, 200 metres long and an hundred metres wide leads to six bronze-cast wreaths measuring around ten metres in diameter. During the fall of the Wall on December 28, 1989, strangers smeared the stone sarcophagi and the base of the crypt with anti-Soviet slogans. The SED-PDS suspected that the perpetrator or perpetrators came from the right-wing extremist scene and organised a mass demonstration on January 3, 1990, in which 250,000 citizens of the DDR took part. Party chairman Gregor Gysi took this opportunity to call for “protection of the constitution” for the DDR. He was referring to the discussion of whether the Office for National Security, the successor organisation to the Stasi, should be reorganised or wound down. Historian Stefan Wolle therefore considers it possible that behind the graffiti were Stasi employees who feared for their posts. The Soviet war memorials were an important negotiating point on the Russian side for the two-plus-four treaties for German reunification. The Federal Republic therefore undertook in 1992 in the agreement of December 16, 1992 between the Government of the Federal Republic of Germany and the Government of the Russian Federation on War Graves Care to permanently guarantee their existence, to maintain and repair them. Any changes to the monuments require the approval of the Russian Federation.On August 31, 1994, the military ceremony for the withdrawal of Russian troops from Germany was held at the Soviet Memorial in Treptower Park. After a ceremony in the Schauspielhaus on Gendarmenmarkt, 1,000 Russian soldiers from the 6th Guards Mot.-Rifle Brigade and six hundred German soldiers from the Guard Battalion at the Federal Ministry of Defense came together to commemorate the dead. They formed the framework for the wreath-laying ceremony, accompanied by short speeches, by Chancellor Helmut Kohl and President Boris Jelzin. Since 1995, a memorial rally has been held at the memorial every year on May 9th with the laying of flowers and wreaths, which is organised by the “Bund der Antifaschisten Treptow e. V. "is organised. The motto of the event is “ Liberation Day ” and corresponds to Victory Day, the Russian holiday. On the night of May 8-9 1945 in Berlin-Karlshorst the unconditional surrender of the Wehrmacht by three leading German military men, that of the last Reich President Karl Dönitz in the special area Mürwikwere authorised to do so, and signed by four Allied representatives. On May 9, 2015, around 10,000 people visited the memorial to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the end of the war - among them were members of the Night Wolves, a Russian motorcycle and rocker club. The bikers' trip to Berlin caused a sensation when some members were initially refused entry to Germany. On September 2, 2015, the inscriptions on a memorial plaque were destroyed by arson. On May 4, 2019, there was another incident in which the statue "Mother Homeland" was doused with a dark liquid.

In October 2003, the statue of the Red Army soldier was restored in a workshop on Rügen, brought back to Berlin via ship and has been on its base since May 4, 2004.

One enters the memorial either coming from Puschkinallee or from Am Treptower Park , each through a triumphal arch made of grey granite shown here on July 12, 1957 when members of the district association of Greater Berlin, together with the delegations from the CSR, from China, North Korea and Vietnam, attended the 7th party congress and during one of my class visits An inscription on this honours the soldiers “who died for the freedom and independence of the socialist homeland”. Following the path you come to a kind of forecourt with a three metre high statue of a woman, an allegory of the “Mother Homeland” mourning for her fallen sons. From here the line of sight of the main monument opens up. A broad, gently sloping path lined with sloping birch trees leads along the central axis to the main field of the complex. This is marked by two large, stylised flags made of red granite, which lean towards the path on either side. At the front of each is the sculpture of a kneeling soldier in full gear and armed with a machine gun. There is an older soldier on the left and a younger soldier on the right. From here a few stairs lead down to the symbolic burial ground, which forms the centre of the complex. These graves, greened with grass and small hedges, are marked by five square stone slabs, each with a laurel wreath (the real graves are more likely to be found on the sides of the complex under the plane trees and under the burial mound).
In the following decades, the Treptow site was at times completely superimposed on mass events and state rituals of the DDR. In 1985, on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the end of the war, the representatives of the DDR's youth movement organised a torchlight procession at the Treptow Memorial. There, they represented the "oath of youth of the DDR".  In the time of the invasion on 28 December 1989 strangers smeared the stone carcass and the base of the crypt with anti-Soviet slogans. The SED-PDS suspected that the perpetrators would come from the right-wing extremist scene and organised a mass demonstration on January 3, 1990, involving 250,000 citizens of the DDR. On this occasion, Gregor Gysi, party chairman, demanded "constitutional protection" for the site; historian Stefan Wolle therefore considers it possible that Stasi employees were behind the vandalism, fearing their positions upon re-unification. 

The Soviet war memorials were an important point of negotiation on the Russian side for the two-plus-four treaties on German reunification. The Federal Republic therefore committed itself in 1992 in the agreement of December 16, 1992 between the Government of the Federal Republic of Germany and the Government of the Russian Federation on war grave security to ensure its existence permanently, and to maintain and repair it. Any changes in monuments require the approval of the Russian Federation. In 1994, the military ceremonial was held for the withdrawal of Russian troops from East Germany at the Soviet Memorial. Since 1995 a memorial service has been held every year on the 9th of May with flowers and wreaths, including the "Union of Antifascists Treptow e. V." The event is under the motto "Day of Liberation" and corresponds with the day of the Victory , the Russian holiday. On May 9, 2015, about 10,000 people visited the memorial to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the war.

I'm standing beside one of sixteen white sarcophagi of limestone that stand along the outer boundary of the field leading to the statue, this one displaying Lenin; all display war scenes and historical moments through reliefs from the history of the Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Peoples on the two long sides. On each of these is a quote from Stalin on the narrow side facing the central field; in Russian on the left (northern) and in German on the right (southern). This one shows Lenin on a red banner that flies behind the Soviet Red Army with a quote on the side embossed in gold by Stalin. These sarcophagi are marked on the two longitudinal sides with reliefs from the history of the Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Peoples, bearing quotations from Joseph Stalin in Russian on the left and in German on the right. The individual sarcophagi have specific themes: the attack by the Germans, the destruction and suffering in the Soviet Union, the sacrifice and abandonment of the Soviet people and support of the army, the suffering of the army, victory, and heroic death. Oaulk Stangle (225) writes

More problematic is the portrayal of Soviet innocence, which lacks validity due to the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact's program for the future division of Europe between Germany and the Soviet Union, subsequent Red Army participation in the invasion of Poland in 1939, and the Soviet invasion of Finland in 1939-1940. Claims that the German invasion disrupted the Soviet Union's peaceful development ignored the forced collectivisation of agriculture and the Great Purge in which 19 million Soviet were arrested, a majority of whom either were executed or died in labour camps. Stalin, responsible for these atrocities and the disastrous lack of preparedness for the German invasion, was omitted from the narrative. 

Geographical Review , Apr., 2003, Vol. 93, No. 2

 The last two sarcophagi dedicated to the heroic dying stand in line with the central location of the complex, an artificially created burial mound. This is dominated by the sculpture “The Liberator” by Yevgeny Wutschetich standing on a double conical base. The figure shows a soldier who carries a sword in his right hand and a protective child on his left arm; a swastika is bursting under his boots. This memorial to the liberator as part of geographic memorial triptych with his mother on Mamayev Hill in Volgograd (1967) and the worker behind the front in Magnitogorsk (1979) a  showing the forged sword in Magnitogorsk, the raised sword in Volgograd and the lowered sword in Berlin. Here it serves as a mausoleum on which a ten to twelve metre high bronze statue is placed depicting a bareheaded, heroic, Soviet soldier wielding a sword and standing on a smashed swastika, into which the sword is deeply cut. On his left arm he is carrying a child while staring out over the plaza. This sculpture, "Der Erreer" by Jewgeni Wuchetich, stands on a double conical base 12 metres high and weighing 70 tonnes. The statue rises above a walk-in pavilion built on a hill. In the dome of the pavilion is a mosaic with a circulating Russian inscription and a German translation. This mosaic was one of the first important orders in the post-war period for the August Wagner company which combined workshops for mosaic and glass painting in Berlin-Neukölln . The hill itself is modelled after a "Kurgan" (mediæval, Slavic tombs on the Don plain), often found in Soviet memorials such as those at Volgograd, Smolensk, Minsk, Kiev, Odessa and Donetsk. On top marks the outstanding endpoint of the 10-hectare complex.  The sculptor himself emphasised in several interviews that the representation of the soldier with a child saved had a purely symbolic meaning and not a precise incident. However, in the DDR the narrative of sergeant Nikolay Ivanovich Massov, who had brought a little girl near the Potsdamer bridge to safety on April 30, 1945 during the storming of the Reichskanzlei, was widely circulated. In his honour, a memorial plaque was erected on this bridge over the Landwehrkanal and for a long time he was regarded as the model of the Treptow soldier. The model for the bronze figure was the Soviet soldier Ivan Odartschenko. Another version claims that the monument is modelled on the heroic deed of the Soviet soldier and former worker of the Minsker Radiowerkes T. A. Lukyanovich, who paid for the salvation of a little girl in Berlin with his life. The source for this version is the book Berlin 896 km by Soviet journalist and writer Boris Polewoi.

 

The Heereswaffenmeisterschule dating from 1935 at Treptower Park then and now

 

Schöneweide

During the Nazi era, Niederschöneweide in Treptow developed quickly into an important location for the armaments production thanks to its metal and chemical industry. A new building was built for Hasselwerderstraße in the Hasselwerderstraße, where, among other things, the departments of inheritance and race care, infant care, Schularzt and Schulzahnklinik were housed. At the end of the Sedanstraße (today: Bruno-Bürgel-Weg), a building was built for the SA-Stand 5 "Horst Wessel", which at the same time served as an HJ-Heim for Niederschöneweide. In 1933, the crossing area in front of Schöneweide train station was redesigned and the main road system was expanded. Because of the intensified consignments from 1941 personnel shortages in the factories arose. In order to maintain production, more and more forced labourers were employed. In 1943 Albert Speer erected a barrack camp for more than 2,000 forced labourers between the Britzer, Sedan and Grimaustrae. The barrack camp is now under monument protection. A partial area of this was made available to the public in the summer of 2006 as a documentation centre for Nazi forced labour under the sponsor "Topography of Terror". On April 16, 1945 the last great battle of the war in Europe began around Berlin. On April 24, just after German rear groups had blown the Kaisersteg and the Treskow Bridge, Niederschöneweide was in the hands of the 8th Garde Army of the First Belarusian Front.

 

At the last well-preserved former Nazi forced labour camp is located in Schöneweide, located at Britzer Straße 5, Berlin-Schöneweide. During the war it served as one of the more than 3,000 mass housing sites dispersed throughout the city for forced labourers. The camp was ordered to be built for two thousand workers by the “General Building Inspector for the Reich capital” (Generalbauinspektor für die Reichshauptstadt) in close proximity to large armament industries. It included thirteen stone barracks for housing. Civil forced labourers and forced labourers of various nationalities, Italian military internees as well as female concentration camp prisoners lived here. A well-preserved residential barrack referred to as ”Barrack 13” has been open for tours since the end of August 2010. In 2000 a compensation program was set up to help out the 2.3 million surviving forced labourers, which is probably both too little and too late.

Website: http://www.ns-zwangsarbeit.de

Oranienburg-Sachsenhausen

The camp was used between 1936 to the end of the Third Reich in 1945, and then used by Russians in the Soviet Occupation Zone as an NKVD camp until 1950. It now operates as a museum.  The camp was established in 1936 and was located 22 miles north of Berlin, giving it a primary position amongst the German concentration camps: the administrative centre of all concentration camps was located in Oranienburg, and Sachsenhausen became a training centre for Schutzstaffel (SS) officers (who would often be sent to oversee other camps afterwards). Originally planned to accommodate six thousand inmates, Sachsenhausen generally had a population of between ten and fifteen thousand, rising to about thirty-five thousand in the final months of the war. The blocks were arranged in a fanlike configuration in a semicircle around the Appellplatz, which had a radius of about a hundred meters. The camp as a whole therefore was similar to an isosceles triangle: at the base, the semicircle of the parade ground, then the blocks in four concentric rings, and at the apex the nursery and pigpen. Executions took place at Sachsenhausen, especially of Soviet prisoners of war. Among the prisoners, there was a "hierarchy": at the top, criminals (rapists, murderers), then Communists (red triangles), then homosexuals (pink triangles), Jehovah's Witnesses (purple triangles), and Jews (yellow triangles). During the earlier stages of the camp's existence the executions were done in a trench, either by shooting or by hanging. A large task force of prisoners was used from the camp to work in nearby brickworks to meet Albert Speer's vision of rebuilding Berlin. Sachsenhausen was originally not intended as an extermination camp—instead, the systematic murder was conducted in camps to the east. In 1942 large numbers of Jewish inmates were relocated to Auschwitz. However the construction of a gas chamber and ovens by camp-commandant Anton Kaindl in March 1943 facilitated the means to kill larger numbers of prisoners.

At the main entrance. The Main gate or Guard Tower "A", with its 8mm Maxim machine gun, the type used by the Germans in the trenches of World War I, housed the offices of the camp administration. On the front entrance gates to Sachsenhausen is the infamous slogan Arbeit Macht Frei ("work makes (you) free"). About 200,000 people passed through Sachsenhausen between 1936 and 1945. In Sachsenhausen,

some 6,500 were confined at the outbreak of the war. Shortly thereafter, in September 1939, 900 Polish and stateless Jews from the Berlin area were taken to the camp; at the beginning of November, 500 Poles were interned. At the end of that month, 1,200 Czech students were added, and approximately 17,000 persons, mainly Polish nationals, were admitted as inmates in the period from March to September 1940. Despite the high number of new inmates, the camp population here too stabilised at the level of roughly 10,000 prisoners. That was because of the high mortality rate as well as the transfer of large numbers of Poles to Flossenbürg, Dachau, Neuengamme (in the Bergedorf section of southeastern Hamburg), and Groß-Rosen.

Sofsky (35) The Order of Terror

Observation points then and now; since the torching of a barracks by neo-Nazis, security cameras have been installed throughout the site. Despite this, the site has been vandalised by Neo-Nazis several times. In September 1992 for example, barracks 38 and 39 of the Jewish Museum were severely damaged in an arson attack. The perpetrators were arrested, and the barracks were reconstructed by 1997.

The mortuary and infirmary, showing the autopsy table. The brick pathology building with a large basement mortuary was constructed in spring 1941 and was involved in the storage, examination, abuse and disposal of the bodies of deceased prisoners. Before this the bodies of deceased prisoners were stored in a wooden shed and in the cellars underneath barracks R I and R II of the sickbay. The growing number of inmates exposed to the increasingly unhuman conditions led to a rapidly rising death rate, especially after the outbreak of war in September 1939. The relevant ϟϟ administration body therefore approved construction of a mortuary and pathology department on November 12, 1940. On this day alone, eight prisoners died in Sachsenhausen concentration camp. According to Harry Naujoks a former political prisoner in the camp, 

In 1941 Dr. Lewe came to Sachsenhausen from the Buchenwald camp to take charge of the pathology department. Being camp senior, I was told that blocke seniors had to report inmates with unusual tattoos. This report was passed onto the roll call leader. Eventually, each of the tattooed inmates was ordered to come to the sickbay. Soon after we'd receive a death notice. Several times I went to the pathology department while Dr. Lewe wasn't there and in his room saw pieces of skin and body parts with these tattoos, which were kept in jars of alchol lining the walls. In the drawers too, prepared sections of skin were kept. I have held such sections of skin with my own hand.

The Russians, accompanied by Polish soldiers, chanced upon Sachsenhausen concentration camp as they moved to invest Berlin. The camp was in Oranienburg, and the fall of that former royal borough brought it home to Hitler that his days were numbered. There were just 5,000 prisoners left in Sachsenhausen of a population that had reached 50,000. The rest had been taken on 'death marches.’

MacDonogh (58) After the Reich - The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation

More and more Berliners had been taking the risk of listening to the BBC on the wireless and even dared to discuss its news. But power cuts were now creating a more effective censorship of foreign broadcasts than the police state had ever achieved. London had little idea of the great Soviet offensive, but its announcement that Sachsenhausen- Oranienburg concentration camp had been liberated just north of Berlin gave a good idea of Red Army progress and its intention to encircle the city. The indication of the horrors found there was also another reminder of the vengeance which Berlin faced. This did not stop most Berliners from convincing themselves that the concentration camp stories must be enemy propaganda.

Beevor (274) Berlin: The Downfall 1945

The 140-metre tall Tower of Nations behind me during my 2011 Bavarian International School class trip and in the 1970s, representing what Caroline Wiedmer describes as an “antithesis of the Nazi architecture of the camp” and a “design in which the triumph of anti-fascism could be made visible.” At the top of each of the three sides of the obelisk are eighteen red triangles representing the ones political prisoners were forced to wear on their uniforms to designate  their identities in the camps. This arrangement of triangles suggests the multinational political prisoner population at the camp. 

This representation speaks to the importance of international unity — a cornerstone of communist ideology — but lacks regard for any victim groups that were persecuted so harshly at the camps. There is no implied or overt reference to Jews, Sinti or Roma, homosexuals, Slavs, women, or Jehovah’s Witnesses, though all of these groups suffered explicit mass murders in the camp at Sachsenhausen based singularly on these identities. Indeed, many of these captives may have been Communists, but unless they identified as such, they were excluded from memory at the Tower of Nations.

Bookheimer (12) The layers of memory at Sachsenhausen: from the GDR to contemporary Germany

Directly in front of the tower is Rene Graetz’s Liberation, added to the site in 1961, consisting of three figures standing atop a stone block. Inscribed on the face of the block are the countries from which prisoners at the camp came from, serving as a written representation of the implied meaning of the red triangles on the obelisk. Certainly, the communist struggle was important to the East German regime as a defining point in the shaping of a new national identity and to promote the idea of the ideological and moral victory of the communists that had recently chased fascism from not only the borders of Germany, but also the entire the European continent.

In front of Professor Waldemar Grzimek's bronze sculpture, Pietá, depicting three figures who are supposed to symbolise resistance and awareness of victory, mourning and death and as it appeared in 1961 before being given an English inscription. This memorial was limited to the area of ​​the former prisoner camp and only covered around five percent of the area of ​​the former concentration camp. Only “Station Z” and the firing trench, originally part of the industrial courtyard, were integrated into the memorial by relocating the camp wall. The figures are notably more skeletal in nature than those at the obelisk, offering a much truer representation of what inmates would have looked like after significant time in the camp. Two of the prisoners are helping a fallen comrade, carrying him in a blanket. The bronze cluster still speaks to the GDR message of camaraderie, but in a more subdued and less overtly nationalist tone.Station Z is a relevant place for mourning, and the statue group reflects this, but allowed for a distinct and deliberate division between areas of celebration and sorrow at the memorial site. This is where the cremation ovens were located, where around 13,000 to 18,000 Soviet prisoners of war were murdered in the shot in the neck and their corpses were then cremated.  

Grzimek’s Pietá is not, however, without its limitations on historical representations. Though all the figures clearly are prisoners, and do depict a more historically accurate prisoner representation than those in Liberation, the man in the rear of the cluster, though wearing a look of grief on his face, stands tall, gaze fixed on a far off point, chest out and prideful. This is in contrast with many traditional representations of Pietá in which Mary is shown cradling the dead body of Jesus. Generally, the Pietá form is undeniably sorrowful. Mary has her head down, or tilted slightly up in supplication, and does not evoke any sense of physical strength or pride. Grzimek’s Pietá represents quite a different take on the classic form.

Bookheimer (15)

Stalin's son Yakov Dzhugashvili served as an artillery officer in the Red Army and was captured on 16 July 1941 in the early stages of the German invasion of the USSR at the Battle of Smolensk. The Germans later offered to exchange Yakov for Friedrich Paulus, the German Field Marshal captured by the Soviets after the Battle of Stalingrad, but Stalin turned the offer down, allegedly saying "I will not trade a Marshal for a Lieutenant". According to some sources, there was another proposition as well, that Hitler wanted to exchange Yakov for his nephew Leo Raubal; this proposition was not accepted either. Until recently, it was not clear when and how he died. According to the official German account, Dzhugashvili died by running into an electric fence in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where he was being held. Some have contended that Yakov committed suicide at the camp, whilst others have suggested that he was murdered. Currently, declassified files show that Dzhugashvili was shot by a guard for refusing to obey orders. Whilst Dzhugashvili was walking around the camp he was ordered back to the barracks under the threat of being shot. Dzhugashvili refused and shouted, "Shoot!" The guard shot him in the head.

The NKVD’s interrogation of the camp commander Colonel Kainel confirmed that Senior Lieutenant Dzugashvili had been held three weeks in the camp prison and then, at Himmler’s directive, was transferred to the special camp, consisting of three barracks surrounded by a brick wall and high-voltage barbed wire. The inmates of barrack number 2 were allowed to walk in the early evening in the area outside their barracks. At 7:00 p.m., the ϟϟ guards ordered them to return to their barracks. All obeyed except Dzhugashvili, who demanded to see the camp commander. The guard’s repeated order went unheeded. As the ϟϟ guard telephoned the camp commander, he heard a shot and hung up. Dzhugashvili, in a state of agitation, had run across the neutral zone to the barbed wire. The guard raised his rifle ordering him to stop, but Dzugashvili kept on going. The guard warned that he was going to shoot; Dzhugashvili cursed, grabbed for the barbed-wire gate, and shouted at the guard to shoot. The guard shot him in the head and killed him. Clearly the unauthorised shooting of none other than Stalin’s son set off great apprehension in Sachsenhausen. He had been transferred in by Himmler himself, who hoped to use him as a pawn of some sort. Now, Stalin’s son was dead, and no one knew what the consequences would be. Dzhugashvili’s body lay stretched across the barbed wire for twenty-four hours while the camp awaited orders from Himmler. The Gestapo sent two professors to the scene who prepared a document stating that Dzhugashvili was killed by electrocution and that the shot to the head followed. The document stated that the guard acted properly. Dzhugashvili’s body was then burned, and the urn with his ashes was sent to the Gestapo headquarters. Indeed, it seemed irrelevant whether Yakov was killed by electrocution or by the bullet. Either way, it was he who committed suicide.

Paul Gregory (65-66)  Lenin's Brain

Inside the ruins of the crematorium. The first crematorium at Sachsenhausen was built at Station Z in April 1940 and construction on the new crematorium began on January 31, 1942; it was completed and opened for use on May 29, 1942. It had two rooms where Russian POWs, who were Communist Commissars, were executed with a shot to the neck.

Station Z included a Genickschußanlage, a shooting pit, a gas chamber, and a multiple gallows with block and tackle. The structures had been kept low intentionally so as to block visibility and prevent anyone from looking in over the wall. The first provisional gas chambers in Birkenau were outside the camp, set up in former farmhouses. But the modern crematoria were built in close proximity to the camp. They were surrounded by barbed-wire fences and shielded from view by barriers of willow trees. Flower beds lent the facilities an innocuous air. The zones of death were disguised areas beyond the round of everyday camp routine. No one had access to them except the Sonderkommandos—the corpse carriers and oven stokers. The zone of death was taboo, a place of mystery where the power to kill could unfold unhindered.

 In 1953, the crematorium building was deliberately blown up by the East German government, and today nothing is left except the ruins of the ovens. When the former Sachsenhausen camp was made into a Memorial Site in 1961, the brick wall separating the Industrial Yard from the camp was moved so that Station Z could be located inside the memorial.

At the UFA film studios with students. Universum Film AG began as a major German film company headquartered in Babelsberg, producing and distributing motion pictures from 1917 through to the end of the war. In 1925, financial pressures compelled UFA to enter into distribution agreements with American studios Paramount and MGM to form Parufamet. UFA's weekly newsreels continued to contain reference to the Paramount deal as shown on the left until 1940, at which point Die Deutsche Wochenschau ("The German Weekly Review") was consolidated and used as an instrument of Nazi propaganda.  In March 1927, Alfred Hugenberg, an influential German media entrepreneur and later Minister of the Economy, Agriculture and Nutrition in Hitler's cabinet, purchased UFA and transferred it to the Nazi Party in 1933. Under the Nazis UFA experienced a new commercial boom, not least due to the regime's protectionist measures which freed the company from bothersome domestic and foreign competition. Additionally, the Nazis provided UFA with new sales markets, as well as placing distribution outlets in such "neutral" countries as the United States. This economic boom made it possible to further expand the so-called "star system," which had already been developed in the silent film era; its highest paid UFA stars during the Nazi era were Hans Albers and Zarah Leander with Veit Harlan its highest-earning director. 

Hitler and Goebbels visiting UFA's Neubabelsberg studios in 1935 during the making of the film "Barcarole." As a result of the nationalist German spirit that already dominated the company, UFA was perfectly suited to serve the goals of Nazi propaganda in film. Hugenberg had been named Reich Minister of Economics immediately following the Nazi takeover of January 30, 1933, and made UFA openly available for Joseph Goebbels' propaganda machine, even though Hugenberg was removed from his post shortly thereafter (June 1933) under pressure from Hitler. In an act of anticipatory obedience to the Nazi regime, UFA management fired several Jewish employees on March 29, 1933. In the summer of 1933, the Nazi regime created the Film Chamber of the Reich, which adopted regulations officially excluding Jewish filmmakers from all German studios. 

In March 1937, using precisely the methods that he had previously branded as Jewish, Goebbels took over the major Ufa film company for the Reich. As a warning to Ufa he had instructed the press to trash its latest production; the film flopped disastrously, and the company agreed to sell out. ‘Today we buy up Ufa,’ recorded Goebbels, ‘and thus we [the propaganda ministry] are the biggest film, press, theatre, and radio concern in the world.’ Dismissing the entire Ufa board, he began to intervene in film production at every level, dismissing directors, recommending actresses (like the fiery Spaniard, Imperio Argentina), forcing through innovations like colour cinematography, and rationalising screen-test facilities for all three major studios, Ufa, Tobis, and Bavaria. Depriving the distributors of any such in such matters he created instead artistic boards to steer future film production. Suddenly the film industry began to surge ahead. Blockbuster films swept the box offices. With a sure touch, Goebbels stopped the production of pure propaganda and party epics, opting for more subtle messages instead—the wholesome family, the life well spent. 

Irving (414-415) Goebbels

Beside a replica of the Maschinenmensch (Machine-Person) from the classic 1927 film Metropolis, "a brilliant eroticisation and fetishisation of modern technology" in the words of Peter Bradshaw. On January 10, 1942, UFA officially became the subsidiary of UFA-Film GmbH (to distinguish it from the old Ufa studio), into which all German film production was merged. Other companies were dissolved or integrated into UFA at the time, including Bavaria Film, Berlin-Film, Terra Film and Tobis AG, which became additional production units. On hindsight, this step can be interpreted as either the culmination of a step-by-step approach to the intended administrative centralisation and ideological monopolisation of cinema production, or as an upshot of the extraordinary circumstances produced by the transition from peacetime to ‘total’ war. Profits reached 155 million Reichsmarks in 1942 (equivalent to €550,730,149 in 2009) and 175 million Reichsmarks 1943 (the equivalent to €606,035,189 in 2009).At this point, the UFA staff hierarchy was reorganised according to the Nazi Führer principle. The coordination of individual sub-groups of the UFI Corporation was the job of the newly appointed Reich Film Director-General. The production heads worked for the administrative director general and were responsible for the overall planning of annual programming and content design all the way up to the actual shooting of the film: these heads were also responsible for giving instructions to the film line producers and directors. It was subsequently fully nationalised in mid-1944.

In late April 1945, the UFA ateliers in Potsdam-Babelsberg and Berlin-Tempelhof were occupied by the Red Army. After Germany's unconditional surrender the following month the Military Government Law No. 191 initially halted and prohibited all further film production. On July 14, 1945, as a result of Military Government Law No. 52, all Reich-owned film assets of UFI Holding were seized. All activities in the film industry were placed under strict licensing regulations and all films were subject to censorship. The Soviet military government, which was in favour of a speedy reconstruction of the German film industry under Soviet supervision, incorporated the Babelsberg ateliers into DEFA, subsequently the DDR's state film studio, on May 17, 1946. Murderers Among Us was the first German feature film in the post-war era and the first so-called "Trümmerfilm" ("Rubble Film"). It was shot here in Babelsberg. Additionally, the Soviets confiscated numerous UFA productions from the Babelsburg vaults and dubbed them into Russian for release in the USSR; and simultaneously began importing Soviet films to the same offices for dubbing into German and distribution to the surviving German theatres. In contrast, the main film-policy goal of the Allied occupying forces, under American insistence, consisted in preventing any future accumulation of power in the German film industry. Here I'm beside the statue based on the Portaprima Augustus for the execreble 1997 film Prince Valiant. 

 

Fort Hahneberg

After the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871, four forts were planned to protect the Spandau Armaments Center as part of the citadel at Spandau. In the end only one of them was built, as the development of artillery, especially the introduction of explosive grenades, made such types of fortification useless. Fort Hahneberg was thus completed in 1886 and put to use two years later serving, among other things, as a barracks and central archive for military medicine until 1945. In 1903  it served as a training center for the infantry. During the so-called Buchrucker putsch on October 1, 1923 when an attempt by the Black Reichswehr to overthrow the German government after it had ended passive resistance to the occupation of the Ruhr on September 26, 1923 occurred, the fort and the Spandau Citadel were briefly occupied by putschists who had to surrender to regular Reich defence units. From 1924 to 1934 the Flugtechnische Verein Spandau used some structures of the fort in order to build gliders there. With the establishment of the Wehrmacht in 1935, the fort became a training location again and was expanded. After the war parts of the brick walls and structures were broken up to make the fort unusable as a military installation by blowing up the moat defences. The rubble was transported away as building material for the reconstruction of Berlin as residents were given permission to demolish the Escarpemauer and other components for material extraction for the repair of destroyed buildings or for the construction of new houses.  Before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the fort was located at the border crossing point on Heerstraße and was only been accessible to the public again since 1990. The Nazi eagle above the entrance has been allowed to remain. 

 The fort and area around were used as the hideout forest for the Inglorious Basterds. As an aside, the title of the movie has to have the swastika removed because the display of Nazi iconography is illegal in Germany. The "Offizielle deutsche Website" has been censored too. Under the German law there are exceptions which allow the use of "unconstitutional symbols" for artistic and educational purposes but Universal Pictures obviously didn't find it worth the effort.