In Europe

The shop windows were full of empty biscuit boxes and wine bottles filled with water. The enormous map of Russia in front of the Wertheim deparment store, where the progress of the German troops had been charted each day, was taken down. Gloves, wool caps and fur coats were collected for the front. By the end, at least 100,000 German soldiers literally froze to death there.
    Soviet prisoners of war were brought to Berlin to work in the factories, some 300,000 in all. Before the eyes of the townspeople, they were treated like animals. Half of them died of hunger or perished in the bombardments.
    Unnoticed, the city developed into a new kind of nerve centre: Berlin became the administrative heart of the German extermination industry. At the ministry of agriculture and food supply, careful calculations were made of the number of calories to be allotted to each concentration camp, taking into account the projected ‘cancellations’ due to illness and the gas chambers. At the offices of the
Reichsbahn
, the state railway, civil servants wrote thousands of invoices for the Jewish rail transports, all of them at the price of a single ticket.
    Wolf Siedler was sent to boarding school, first in Weimar, then to the northern coastal island of Spiekeroog. Of the group of fourteenand fifteen-year-old boys in his class, four did not live to be eighteen. His mother had been mistaken: they were not too young for this war. Just before Siedler left for the front, in summer 1944, the family sat together in the garden of the Dahlem villa for the last time. There was homemade pie and – a rarity by then – real coffee. Suddenly it began snowing, ashes from the burning inner city floated down on the table, everyone rushed inside, poisonous yellow clouds came drifting in.
    Today, on this warm July afternoon, the cafés along the shores of the Wannsee are full and the water is covered in pretty sailboats. I ask the bus driver about the monument.‘What monument?’‘For the Wannsee meeting.’ ‘What meeting?’ He drops me off at Biergarten Sanssouci, where the Detlev Becker Trio is playing this weekend – a spectacle he says I must not miss.
    Am Grossen Wannsee 56/58: it was in this villa, with its civilised Prussian arches and its tranquil view of the water, that a meeting of top government officials seemingly like any other was held on 20 January, 1942; one of those informal brainstorming sessions to be followed, as the invitation has it, by a light dinner. The conference room is now a museum, and the most important documents of that meeting are displayed on its walls. Visitors file quietly by, everything is neat and tidy, no scream is heard, no tear is shed.
    The topic of the meeting was the ‘Jewish question’. Some historians have claimed that the mass murder of the Jews was part of Hitler's master plan from the very start, that it was part of a clear and conscious strategy. In reality, the road that ultimately led to the Holocaust was far more circuitous than that.
    ‘The essence of Europe is not geographical,’ Hitler once said, ‘but racial.’ In other words: the Nazis did not think in terms of nations, but of peoples, and Europe was to be reorganised according to that principle. Legal borders, international agreements concerning minorities, the equality of states, the League of Nations, none of that mattered to them: nation and people had to coincide.
    While, for example, the French, English, Belgian, Dutch and Scandinavian concepts of the state were based on the will of every citizen, the German concept of state was based on blood, descent, race. ‘Blood is stronger than any passport’ was the core of their ideology. The German minorities in Poland, Czechoslovakia, the Ukraine and elsewhere were ‘the racial friends’ of the Third Reich, badly in need of ‘liberation’ by their ‘fellow people’.
    At the same time, the importance of racial doctrine among the Nazis was reinforced by a notion of ‘purity’ with which all European culture had been imbued since 1900. Bacteria as the source of countless ills, the importance of hygiene, freshness and purity; all these new discoveries had left their mark on the thinking of innumerable intellectuals since the turn of the century. Yet the notion of purity had an impact that went much further than medical science alone. No citizen of the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries would ever had raised ‘clean’ or ‘dirty’, ‘healthy’ or ‘ill’ to the status of