Article for Monday (including editors): Discuss the banality of evil (the idea that great evil is possible because each actor in the machine is able to persuade himself that his actions are not so bad—just filling out forms that happen to send millions to their death, just putting in the electrical system for an electric chair, just paying taxes in a state engaged in genocide). In your discussion, reference both personal, historical, and literary experiences.

Focus your notes on the following:

How and why various members bend to Heydrich's will (what arguments/pressure is brought to bear)

How law and bureaucracy are used to first limit and then strengthen the push for extermination

What does the experience of the Einsatzgruppen show about the nature of the Holocaust and the Nazis?

Does this meeting support or undermine Hannah Arendt's argument about the “banality of evil”?

“Conspiracy”

Summary: The Wannsee Conference was a meeting of senior officials of the Nazi German regime, held in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee on 20 January 1942. The purpose of the conference was to inform heads of German Government Departments that had responsibility for various policies relating to Jews of Heydrich's appointment as the sole executor of the "Final solution to the Jewish question", and to obtain their agreement to subordinate their policies to him. In the course of the meeting, Heydrich presented a plan, approved by Hitler, for the deportation of the Jewish population of Europe to German-occupied areas of the Soviet Union, and the use of those Jews fit for labour on road-building projects; that plan was never fully implemented, owing to the failure to achieve final victory over the Soviet Union, and most of the Jews of German-occupied Europe were sent to extermination or concentration camps, or killed where they lived.

The cast of the fifteen participants of the conference were as follows:

  • Kenneth Branagh — SS-ObergruppenführerReinhard Heydrich (Chief of the Security Service and the SD)
  • Stanley Tucci — SS-ObersturmbannführerAdolf Eichmann (Chief of the Amt IV B 4, RSHA)
  • Brian Pettifer — Gauleiter Dr Alfred Meyer (State Secretary, Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern territories)
  • Ewan Stewart — Reichsamtleiter Dr Georg Leibbrandt (Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern territories)
  • Colin Firth — Dr Wilhelm Stuckart(State Secretary, Reich Ministry for the Interior)
  • Jonathan Coy — Erich Neumann (Director, Office of the Four Year Plan)
  • Owen Teale — Dr Roland Freisler (State Secretary, Reich Ministry of Justice)
  • Ben Daniels — Dr Josef Bühler (State Secretary, Government of the General Government)
  • Kevin McNally — Martin Luther (Under Secretary, Foreign Office)
  • Ian McNeice — SA-Oberführer Dr Gerhard Klopfer (Deputy Director, Party Chancellery)
  • David Threlfall — Ministerialdirektor Friedrich Wilhelm Kritzinger (Reich Chancellery)
  • Nicholas Woodeson — SS-GruppenführerOtto Hofmann (Chief of Race and Settlement Main Office of the SS)
  • Brendan Coyle — SS-Gruppenführer Heinrich Müller (Chief of Amt IV (Gestapo) of the RSHA)
  • Peter Sullivan — SS-Oberführer Dr Karl Eberhard Schöngarth (SD, assigned to the General Government)
  • Barnaby Kay — SS-Sturmbannführer Dr Rudolf Lange (Commander of the SD for Latvia)