Prelude

“This is a lovely villa, Heydrich.  Look at the beach.  Ah, I would like to go down and swim.”

“Josef, don’t be silly.  We have work to do. Gather the rest; they are all in the dining room looking at your beach.  We must get going.”

“We’re coming, we’re coming,” called one of the group.  “But where is Karl?  He is supposed to take the minutes.”

“That little mischling?” laughed Heydrich.  “He must be on JST.”

“What is that?  Some kind of drug?” another man asked.

“No, no – an American – a sympathizer – told me the expression.  Jewish Standard Time.  It means always being late.”

“Karl is not – he is not -- a mischling, really, is he?”

“Of course not.  But his complexion; his looks in general – the kids used to tease him back in Linz.”

“Oh, here he comes.  It’s about time, Karl.  We have to start the meeting, and you are to take the minutes.”

“Do not call me Karl.   I dropped that name long ago.  And the meeting starts when I say it does, when I put pen to paper.”

“All right, settle down,” said Heydrich. “I will open the meeting.  You start.”

And Adolf Eichmann began to take the minutes of the Wannsee Conference.

The Wannsee Conference, held in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee on January 20, 1942, was the meeting at which the “Final solution to the Jewish question” was planned.  Thirteen high-ranking Nazis attended.  The conference lasted 90 minutes. The result of the meeting, which had been arranged in advance, was to confirm the principle of deportation to what eventually would become the camps where the mass murders of more than six million  Jews took place.  Eichmann’s minutes were found in 1947 in the papers of one of the participants. Two films have been made of the Conference, one in Germany, one in England.  The English film, “Conspiracy,” was made for television in 2001, stars Kenneth Branagh, and is available for viewing.  It lasts the length of Eichmann’s minutes.


(c) Marisa Samuels, February 2012