The Wannsee Conference by Mark Roseman is an incredibly complex and ambiguous book. The book asks many questions, yet gives very few answers to major question. This is mostly because people do not know these answers. Conspiracy, the movie version of the book, fills in these questions, which seem to be left open by Roseman. Looking at these two works, The Wannsee Conference and Conspiracy, separately and together may help further our understanding of what really happened on January 20, 1942.
Roseman's views on the Wannsee Conference are quite evident throughout his writing. He discussed how the Conference was a place where matters were discussed about the Jews. "
preparing the final solution of the European Jewish question." This statement by Roseman makes it evident that the Jewish problem was being discussed, and they were looking for a solution. However, there is no evidence that the solution was going to be the mass killing of all Jewish people. With all this being said the realization is still that the mass killing of Jews still began to happen after this conference. Moreover, Roseman believes that the Wannsee Conference paved the way for the Holocaust. It did not cause it, but without it the Holocaust would never have existed.
Roseman does not believe that the Wannsee Conference reveals how the conference happened, but rather why it happened. The Nazi leaders all had a different idea on why the Jews needed to go, but the common assumption that they needed to be dealt with was there. By getting rid of the Jews then it would better the entire society or so they thought. "Hitler's decision on deportation was a significant radicalization of existing measures and moved him significantly closer to realizing his long-expressed desire to rid Europe of its Jews." At first it was just a deportation of the Jews, but that would not last long. The idea of just moving them was not good enough for everyone. More importantly it was not enough for Heydrich and Hitler. The deportation would soon turn into "evacuation" which was a fancier way of saying: kill all Jews. People often believe that the mass killing is horrible, which it is, but what people need to realize is that Europe truly thought they were going to improve themselves by killing the Jews.
Roseman believes that there is not a definite time in which the Holocaust started, but then the question arises: What can we take from the Wannsee Conference?
...upying Poland in 1939, the policy of forced emigration became untenable for the Nazi regime. It was simply unrealistic to make more than 3 million Polish Jews emigrate. This led to ambitious Nazi plans for a solution to the ’Jewish Question’.” The Nazis wanted to keep their place to themselves, and they disliked the Jews. They tried moving the Jews to another place, but the amount of time it would take was too long. Therefore, they thought of the Final Solution. They sent Jews to concentration camps, where they killed many Jews. They though that this solution would keep their place to themselves, not to share with any other race. This reminds me of the Rwandan Genocide, because both genocides wanted to remove a specific group or race. In the Holocaust, they wanted to remove all Jews, and in the Rwandan Genocide, the Hutus wanted to wipe the whole Tutsis population.
At the start of Adolf Hitler’s reign of terror, no one would have been able to foresee what eventually led to the genocide of approximately six million Jews. However, steps can be traced to see how the Holocaust occurred. One of those steps would be the implementation of the ghetto system in Poland. This system allowed for Jews to be placed in overcrowded areas while Nazi officials figured out what to do with them permanently. The ghettos started out as a temporary solution that eventually became a dehumanizing method that allowed mass relocation into overcrowded areas where starvation and privation thrived. Also, Nazi officials allowed for corrupt Jewish governments that created an atmosphere of mistrust within its walls. Together, this allowed
A single telegram ended the peace. This small piece of paper meant the death of thousands of people. It was the Nazis declaration of war on the Netherlands. One of the most anti-Semitic regimes in recent history now occupied a country who had housed Jews for the last few centuries. Critics have blamed the large amounts of Jewish deaths on the lack of Dutch resistance to the Nazis. However, it was not the lack of moral responsibility amongst the non-Jews, but the insufficient finances and food supplies that caused the decimation of horrific amounts of Dutch Jews during World War II. The gentiles attempted to save the Jews, but the cost of hiding them was too extreme, leaving no choice other than letting the Jews be deported.
Under President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration the atomic bomb was being developed. After Roosevelt died, his vice president Harry Truman was appointed President of the United States. Truman was never informed about the bombs development until an emergency cabinet meeting (Kuznick 9). Truman had to make the fatal decision on whether the bomb was to be dropped on Japan. With the idea of going to war, Truman had to think about the lives of the thousand American soldiers. The American soldiers had begun using the method of island hopping, because the bomb was not available. The idea of dropping a bomb was that the war itself could possibly end in its earliest points. The dropping of the atomic bomb could also justify the money spent on the Manhattan Project (Donohue 1). With a quote by Franklin D. Roosevelt “This will be a day that will live in infamy”, Pearl Harbor was a tragic day for Americans. The United States had lost many soldiers, which they had claimed that they will eventually get revenge. The alternates of dropping the bomb was also discussed at the Interim Committee. The American government was trying to get an invitation response from the Japanese government. If the United States did not drop the bomb and ‘Operation Downfall’ ha...
"History of the Holocaust - An Introduction." Jewish Virtual Library - Homepage. American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise. Web. 8 July 2010. .
It was a Sunday morning, on December 7, 1941 when Pearl Harbor, US naval base located on Hawaii, was attacked by the Japanese. They caught unguarded the whole nation, and for that, this attack is considered one of the top ten failures of the US intelligence. The Japanese were able to attack Pearl Harbor by surprise because of the mindset of US officials, whom they saw Japanese as a weak enemy, who wouldn’t risk attacking US territory, caused by a supremacy factor; As well as the not good enough US intelligence efficiency to encrypt Japanese codes, and the handling of such information. After the negotiations between the Japanese and the United States ended, there was no doubt that they would make an attack, but they didn’t know the target of it.
Hitler’s anti-Semitism grew out of anger because the germans lost the war. He blamed the Jews for Germany’s defeat in the war. Hitler also used the Jews as an excuse for all the problems that Germany was facing. To get the jews to get deported, Hitler and his nazis made the jews think that they were moving to a better, happier place, when in reality, they were moving to concentration camps, or death camps. They were deported on packed trains. Many people died on the trains from hunger, disease, thirst, and suffocation. The jews could be on the trains for months at a time.
The Holocaust was a terrible time. This terrible time was all a plan, led by Adolf Hitler. Adolf Hitler was sent to prison for treason. Even after he got out, he worked with the government of Germany. He even rose to be the Dictator of Germany, with the luck of the last leader's passing. He blamed others for his "struggle." He passed laws, to make it legal to descriminate and to single out groups of people, races, and religions.
...the time of the Holocaust, as described by Breitman, Feingold, and the other authors. The articles, essays, and chapters included in the book went into detail about how FDR could have and should have responded differently to the Holocaust. The book is a series of essays based on the original conference, and because they were written to inform and not entertain, it left the book dry and confusing. As a student who is studying this time period in history, I found it difficult to understand what the different sources were referring to. I believe that this book would be great as a reference, source for differing opinions, and provision of new information of FDR and the Holocaust for an academic scholar. For me, the scholarly reading level that the book was written in was at times overwhelming and I would not recommend it to the average reader interested in the topic.
First of all, to get a proper understanding of the events in my book, I did some research to paint a picture of the holocaust. The reason that the Germans started the holocaust a long time ago was because they believed that the Jewish people were minions of the devil, and that they were bent on destroying the Christian mind. Many Christians in Germany were also mad at them for killing Jesus in the Bible. Throughout the holocaust, Hitler, the leader of Germany at the time, and the Nazis killed about six million Jewish people, more than two-thirds of all of the Jewish people in Europe at the time. They also killed people who were racially inferior, such as people of Jehovah's Witness religion, and even some Germans that had physical and mental handicaps. The concentration camp that appears in this story is Auschwitz, which was three camps in one: a prison camp, and extermination camp, and a slave labor camp. When someone was sent to Auschw...
Levi, Neil, and Michael Rothberg. The Holocaust: Theoretical Readings. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2003. Print.
Dwork, Deborah, and R. J. Van Pelt. Holocaust: a History. New York: Norton, 2002. Print.
Grossman, Clara. Clara Grossman Audio Testimony Midwest Center for Holocaust Education. 26 August 1999. Audio.
"The "Final Solution"" United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. United States Holocaust Memorial Council, n.d. Web. 16 July 2016.
The Holocaust is an event that will live forever in infamy in the minds and hearts of everyone that knows its story and of the suffering the victims experienced. The victims of what was mainly Jewish descent were persecuted against by the Nazi regime Because of their anti-Semitic views that led to the largest and most famous Genocide in the history of mankind. The story of the Holocaust spread and was spread around the globe until over time a few facts became mixed or misinterpreted. These misinterpretations gave anti-Semitics and Neo-Nazis what they needed to stir up controversy on the subject to pull blame away from the Nazi Regime. These ideals are wrong but have led to debates over what is right and wrong on the subject and the people who tell the lies need to be proven wrong.