Stable defense

Scene from the feature film “Wannsee Conference” (Heinz Schirk, 1984)

Scene from the feature film “Wannsee Conference” (Heinz Schirk, 1984)

One of the most instructive things that can be learned about the psychology and practice of the Third Reich can be found in Heinz Schirk's forty-year-old film adaptation of the "Wannsee Conference" (available on YouTube, script: Paul Mommertz), which is definitely preferable to the more recent one by Matti Geschonneck (2022). The cognac, the joviality, the manly roundness - here sits the German man in all his glory, half beast, half official; and you immediately believe that the most notorious of all conferences were as “normal,” as concentrated and tidy as people who have no reason not to be at peace with themselves and their work.

The head of the Reich Security Main Office, Reinhard Heydrich, who chaired the conference, died as a result of the assassination attempt carried out on him by Czech resistance fighters in the following summer of 1942; Roland Freisler, later the strident president of the People's Court, died in an air raid near the end of the war. Of the victors, three participants were executed - Eichmann after his spectacular kidnapping from Argentina - and by the way, Chat GPT wasn't the only one left spitting: "This is actually one of the most frightening aspects of the Wannsee Conference: A large number of the men who were involved in coordinating the Holocaust there survived the war and spent decades in freedom afterwards."

"The general pattern of behavior after 1945 was by no means a more or less unconscious 'repression' of the past, but rather an active defense against it by not discussing it, concealing it, trivializing it, reinterpreting it or denying it." Klaus-Dietmar Henke, historian 

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