Wannsee

The Road to the Final Solution

By: Peter Longerich

Narrated by: Antony Ferguson

The complete story of the Wannsee Conference, the meeting that paved the way for the Holocaust

On January 20, 1942, fifteen men arrived for a meeting in a luxurious villa on the shores of the Wannsee in the far-western outskirts of Berlin. They came at the invitation of Reinhard Heydrich and were almost all high-ranking Nazi Party, government, and SS officials.

The exquisite position by the lake, the imposing driveway up to the villa, culminating in a generously sized roundabout in front of the house, the expansive, carefully landscaped park, the generous suite of rooms that opened on to the park and the lake, the three-level terrace that stretched the entire garden side of the house, and the winter garden with its marble fountain, all give today’s visitor to the villa a good idea of its owner’s aspiration to build a sophisticated, almost palatial structure as a testament to his cultivation and worldly success.

But the beauty of the situation stood in stark contrast to the purpose of the meeting to which the fifteen had come in January 1942: the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question.” According to the surviving records of the meeting, items on the agenda included the precise definition of exactly which group of people were to be affected, followed by a discussion of how upwards of eleven million people were to be deported and subjected to the toughest form of forced labor and, following on from this a discussion, of how the survivors of this forced labor as well as those not capable of it were ultimately to be killed.

The next item on the agenda was breakfast.

©2021 Pantheon Verlag, a division of Verlagsruppe Random House GmbH, München, Germany. First published as Wannseekonferenz: Der Weg zur ‘Endlösung’ by Siedler Verlag © 2016 by Peter Longerich (P)2023 Blackstone Publishing

The clarity and research

The narrators accent was deliberately accentuated at times and it made me crazy. Also his pace was so fast that I had trouble digesting the material at times and when you consider the context of this book, it deals with some very serious topics.

A story that needs to be retold over and over

Mostly a story about “numbers” and “places”. My head was spinning from the recounting of the number of people moved from place to place, over and over. On a positive note, the book’s story was surprising to me and just how organized, vast and widespread throughout Europe the program of murdering Jews was…how was this tolerated?