"The banality of evil" has become a commonplace of our time. When Hannah Arendt looked at the figure of Adolf Eichmann standing in the dock in the Jerusalem courtroom, she did not see the cynical manipulator, the vengeful hater, the representative of Satan on this earth who laughs at human hypocrisy and convention, which her reading of Shakespeare had led her to expect. Instead, to her great disappointment, all she saw was the quintessential bureaucrat, the pen pusher, the small-minded opportunist looking for ways to please his superiors. Ever since then, historians, scholars, dramatists, and documentary filmmakers have devoted considerable energy to this "de-demonization" of evil.
Bureaucratic rivalries, struggles for power, misunderstood orders, emergency exigencies--notions we are all only too familiar with from our day-to-day existence--have repeatedly been invoked to explain the horrifying crimes of our century, be they committed by Nazis, Soviet Communists, or the Khmer Rouge. Where, a generation ago, Hitler and Stalin appeared to embody a human potentiality for evil unimagined by the great tragedians and historians of the past, recent scholarship has almost succeeded in the near-impossible feat of portraying them as more victims than villains--weak leaders unable to impose their authority on a bureaucracy running out of control. Never, it seems, have two men been so unjustly traduced by history.
The Final Solution
Of Course, if evil is banal, then one is inexorably led to the next step of the argument and the claim that the banal is also evil. In that case there is no such thing as evil, only banality; and needless to say, we are all equally guilty of banality--the perpetrators of the Holocaust along with everyone else, including perhaps its victims.
The Wannsee Conference, written by Paul Mommertz and directed by Heinz Schirk, clearly belongs to "the banality of evil" tradition. The setting of the film is the Berlin suburb of Wannsee, where on January 20, 1942, Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA) and, in effect, SS-boss Heinrich Himmler's second in command, convened a meeting of the representatives of the state and Nazi Party agencies. Thirteen people attended; the meeting lasted ninety minutes, and Adolf Eichmann wrote up the minutes afterward. The subject under discussion was the "final solution." Heydrich, then only thirty-nine years old, was the coming man of the regime. He had the charm, the education, the intelligence, the good looks and the powerful physique that the other leading Nazis so notoriously lacked. So greatly were his superiors impressed with him that he had been assigned the task of administering the "final solution."
On July 31, 1941, Hermann Goering sent Heydrich a directive stating: "I herewith commission you to carry out all necessary preparations with regard to organizational, substantive, and financial view-points for a total solution of the Jewish question in the German sphere of influence in Europe." Aside from being one of Hitler's closest confidants from the early days, Goering was also plenipotentiary for the Four-Year Plan and thus headed the state apparatus. Consequently, his order was immensely significant. On the one hand, he wanted to shift responsibility for the slaughter of the Jews onto the SS; on the other hand, he was making it clear in the directive that Heydrich could expect full cooperation from all ministries under his
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