Wannsee Conference: 70

From Deutsche Welle:
"German president says remembering Holocaust a 'national duty'"

Germany has marked the 70th anniversary of the Wannsee Conference, where Nazi officials planned the 'Final Solution.' Referring to a recent series of neo-Nazi crimes, President Christian Wulff vowed to fight xenophobia. Dignitaries from around the world gathered on Friday to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Nazi conference that planned the systematic murder of millions of Jews during World War II. Friday's ceremony was held at the villa on the Wannsee lake on the outskirts of Berlin, which is now a Holocaust memorial. It was there that 15 senior Nazi officials adopted the "Final Solution" on January 20, 1942 - a plan approving the organizational details of how to register and transport Jews from across Europe to be killed in concentration camps. President Christian Wulff referred to the plan as the "darkest chapter of German history" and called the memorial site, which opened as a museum in 1992, "a place of German shame." He assured visiting dignitaries, including Israeli minister without portfolio Yossi Peled, that modern Germany would come to the aid of Jews worldwide if they were facing persecution. Referring to the recent discovery of xenophobic crimes in Germany, Wulff promised that hatred towards foreigners would not be allowed to take root.

^ This is a somber anniversary - as most anniversaries dealing with Germany seem to be. It is widely known that the Germans were killing Jews, Gypsies, Gays, the Disabled, Communists and Soviet POWs long before the Wannsee Conference in 1942. I went to Babi Yar in Kiev and saw where the largest mass murder (around 33,000) of Jews in a single day of the Holocaust. At Babi Yar and at other sites throughout Eastern Europe the Germans and local collaborators shot each person. The Germans wanted a faster and "easier" way to kill people without having to shot them at close range. What makes the Wannsee Conference unique and horrific at the same time is that it was the first time in the history of the world that a government in power sat down and decided just how to kill millions upon millions of people in a short amount of time and in a cost-effective way. The result of the Conference is the second part of the Holocaust - the death camps. The idea of herding Jews into ghettos or labor camps and working them to death or shooting them at close range in a ravine was brushed aside as ineffective and the idea of large-scale gas chambers and crematoriums were put in their place. With all the German Government agencies (from the bottom - up) were involved in this process as the Wannsee Conference shows - so there is no doubt in my mind that the ordinary German did not know about the murder of the Jews and other "sub-humans." ^

http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,15681059,00.html