Friends of Padre Steve’s World,
We arrived in Berlin this afternoon after spending last night and this morning with our friends Gottfried and Hannelore in Eisenach. It was a wonderful time, we just spent time together catching up and enjoying our company. When we left the we set course for Berlin where will will remain until Wednesday morning.
We are staying at the Hotel Dietrich Bonhoeffer which is owned by the Evangelische Kirche, the Lutheran Church. It is very nice, the room is spacious and comfortable. We were able to stay here due to our friendship with the Bishop for the Lutheran Church’s military chaplains in Germany who we will meet again on Tuesday.
But on the way to the hotel today we went to the Wannsee House where Reinhard Heydrich chaired a meeting of 15 officials from various German government and Nazi Party agencies regarding the Final Solution of the Jewish Problem. The house is now a museum that deals with the history of anti-semitism in Germany, that of the Nazi Regime, and the policies of the Nazi State before and after Wannsee. To read the documents in German, to see the handwriting, personal notes, and the stamps of of the regime which marked the documents as official and their security classification in the very room that these officials met was sobering. To be where Heydrich, Adolf Eichmann, “Gestapo” Müller and a dozen lesser known functionaries debated and then followed Heydrich’s direction, that which he received from Herman Goering and Heinrich Himmler, directions that came from Hitler himself in December of 1941.
As I walked around the building and around the table on which the documents sat, which was where the table that these man gathered once was, I felt like I had been there before. Of course I had been there in my mind. I have read the accounts of the meeting, the documents preserved by the State Secretary for the Foreign Service, Martin Luther and found by the Allies after the war. I have read a number of biographies about Heydrich, Eichmann, and Müller, and from closer to 40 years of study I felt like I knew these men. They were all functionaries. Many had served in the military, a food number were police or law enforcement officials, and others lawyers, academics, or career bureaucrats who whether they were true believers in the Nazi cause and policies, nonetheless gave their willing support to them.
The meeting lasted only about 90 minutes and it really wasn’t a decision making meeting, it was intended by Heydrich to subordinate every other department of the Nazi State to the SS in regard to the Jewish Question. The fact was that the mass extermination of Jews by the SS Einsatzgruppen had been going on since June 1941 when Hitler’s armies invaded the Soviet Union. Likewise, massive extermination camps were already being constructed in Poland to eliminate every living Jew in Europe. These camps, Belzec, Soribor, Treblinka, and Auschwitz would become the main locations for the extermination of Jews. Estimates running from 2.3 to 2.7 million people, close to 90% Jews, were killed in these four camps between May of 1942 their closure as the SS Death’s Head, Totenkopfverbande tried to clean up and cover up its actions as the Red Army closed in on their empire of death. Of course that does not include the approximately 2 million people, including 1.3 million Jews murdered up close and personal by the Einsatzgruppen, or the numbers killed in the Concentration Camps in Germany and Western Europe, those killed in various pogroms orchestrated by the Nazi State and all of its government, police, military, and party organizations.
At Wannsee, Heydrich and his deputy Eichmann, turned the organization of mass murder into an administrative, logistical, and transportation exercise given a veneer of legality by them.
So it is late and I need to get some rest. Until tomorrow,
Peace,
Padre Steve+
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