Podcast: Wannsee. Looking at the International Dimensions of the Holocaust
The Memorial and Educational Centre is launching a new format in 2024. We are producing an English-language podcast aimed at introducing our work to an interested international audience and engaging in dialogue with experts. In our first episode, we spoke with the American historian Professor Michael A. Meyer about Leo Baeck.
How did Jews in Europe react to the rise of antisemitism in the 1920s? How did they act towards the Nazi leadership beginning in 1933? How did Jews in Belgium defend themselves against the murderous policies of the Germans? What role did Polish mayors play during the Holocaust? And how did the Turkish state react to the desperate refugees arriving at its borders?
These are some of the questions we wish to explore in our new podcast, “Wannsee. Looking at the International Dimensions of the Holocaust.” We are interested in looking at this “European project” initiated by the Germans from various national perspectives. After all, antisemitism existed throughout Europe and the murderous Germans found willing helpers everywhere. We will also examine resistance to these plans for murder, which was also prevalent in Europe. The situation in Belgium differed from the Netherlands; Italy differed from Hungary. This raises questions that are still relevant today. What circumstances favored or hindered the mass murder of Jews and others?
To discuss these issues, we will be inviting experts to present the Holocaust research that they have conducted in different European countries. Our interest focuses on the societies that fell under German occupation and their Jewish communities rather than on the German perpetrators.
Judith Alberth and Jakob Müller are the podcast hosts and Hauke Jacobs is in charge of recording, editing and production. Judith Alberth has been a research volunteer at the House of the Wannsee Conference Memorial and Educational Site since 2023. She is a historian specializing in women’s and gender history as well as contemporary history. For the Jewish Museum in Augsburg, she produced the podcast “Let's Talk, Sisters*!” which explores Jewish identity and feminism. Jakob Müller is a research assistant and wrote his doctorate on the German occupation of Belgium during the First and Second World Wars. Hauke Jacobs oversees the digital collections of the Joseph Wulf Library, where we record the episodes. He studied history with a specialization in European and Latin American contemporary history.
Why are we making a podcast in English?
More than any other site, the House of the Wannsee Conference represents the international dimensions of the Holocaust. This is underscored by the many foreign visitors we receive, most of whom do not speak German. Because it is a memorial and educational site with a strong international appeal, we wish to build on this interest by producing a podcast in English. Transcripts of the broadcasts are also available, allowing the text to be searched for keywords. When one clicks on the search term, the cursor will jump to the relevant point in the conversation.
Our English-language discussion format lets us look beyond our own backyard. We thus chose a title that is straightforward in English but possibly confusing to German listeners – but hopefully in a positive way: in Germany, “Wannsee” is primarily associated with the Berlin district and the local recreational areas there. Places like Strandbad Wannsee, Berlin’s largest public bathing beach, which Conny Froboess sings about in her 1951 hit “Pack’ die Badehose ein” (Pack Your Swim Trunks). Outside of Germany, however, people tend to associate Wannsee almost exclusively with the Wannsee Conference and the plans to murder European Jews.
Unlike in our permanent exhibition, on the show we use the term “Holocaust” because that is how the murder of European Jews is most commonly referred to in English.
The International Dimensions of the Holocaust – Michael A. Meyer speaks about Leo Baeck
In our first episode, we focus on Germany. We spoke with Prof. Michael A. Meyer, who experienced the Nazi persecution of Jews personally. Born in 1937 in Berlin, he was able to emigrate to the United States with his parents in 1941. Meyer taught for over fifty years at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, specializing in German-Jewish history. He is probably best known for his four-volume series “German-Jewish History in Modern Times,” which remains a standard work to this day.
In 2021, Michael A. Meyer published a biography of Leo Baeck, arguably the most important theologian of 20th-century liberal Judaism. Many are familiar with his name from the Leo Baeck Institute, which has branches in London, Jerusalem and New York. There is a street named after him in Zehlendorf in Berlin and the offices of the Central Council of Jews in Germany are located in the Leo Baeck House on Tucholskystrasse. This is where the “Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums,” a rabbinical seminary largely shaped by Baeck, was located until 1942. Last year marked the 150th anniversary of Baeck’s birth. Yet few people know who Leo Baeck was.
In the podcast, Meyer describes Baeck as a committed theologian, who, parallel to his academic work, was also actively engaged in society. He spoke out against antisemitism during the German Empire, served as a Jewish military chaplain during World War I and was on the board of the Centralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens (Central Association of German Citizens of Jewish Faith) during the Weimar Republic. After the Nazis took power, Baeck became chairman of the Reichsvertretung der deutschen Juden (Representative Council of German Jews). This association, which was born of necessity, consisted of various political and religious organizations. It was tasked with representing the interests of German Jews to the new rulers. The Reichsvertretung was a democratic “anomaly” under National Socialism.
“It was an amazing thing. Here we have a dictatorship with a Fuhrer at the top, with no rights for the average citizen. And within that German Nazi state, there was a democracy called the Reichsvertretung, in which the representatives were duly elected, in which there were different factions expressing their views in which there was exactly the kind of society, that the Nazis didn't allow for Germany as a whole.”
As the head of an institution that fulfilled an increasing number of social functions, Leo Baeck was a figure of integration who was accepted by all Jewish factions. The association had to provide for a Jewish population impoverished by persecution. It had to organize schools for children who had been banned from state schools and, most importantly, it had to prepare and organize the emigration of Jews from Germany.
In the beginning, the Reichsvertretung was tolerated by the Nazis, but later it did little more than receive orders regarding the persecution policies. After the November pogrom of 1938, the Nazis replaced the Reichsvertretung with the Reichsvereinigung der Juden in Deutschland (Association of Jews in Germany), which all Jews in Germany were required to join. The board was left unchanged, however, and Baeck continued to head the Reichsvereinigung until his deportation to Theresienstadt in 1943. Compiling deportation lists and notifying the people who had been selected was one of the horrible tasks that the association had to carry out on orders of the German authorities. Although Baeck probably knew that deportees were frequently murdered upon arrival, he decided against warning the victims. He was sharply criticized for this after the war.
“So why did he not tell people about this in Germany and in Theresienstadt? And I think the following are answers to that question. Number one: The suicide rate had already gone up very sharply in the course of the 1930s. And he was concerned that, if the Jews in Berlin or in Theresienstadt knew what their fate would be, they would choose to kill themselves rather than to live on. Their hope would have disappeared. That was one reason. Secondly, he considered that even those that were transported might survive. And if they chose to take their own lives, obviously they would not. And there were individuals who, after the war, said to Baeck: ‘I am glad that you did not tell us, because I might well have taken my life and this way I survived.’ And finally, I would say this: In those days, it was the common practice not to tell patients who were suffering from a fatal illness that they would die within three months. Now, today we think differently.”
Baeck survived the Theresienstadt Ghetto and joined his family in London after the war. He remained one of the leading figures of liberal Judaism until his death in 1956.
Given his breadth of work and that the “science of Judaism” was continued primarily outside Germany after the Holocaust, Baeck as a figure was a good place to start considering the international dimensions of the Holocaust. In the upcoming episodes, we will explore how people responded to Germany’s policies of murder in Belgium and Poland.
Author: Dr. Jakob Müller, Memorial and Educational Site House of the Wannsee Conference, Department of Education and Research
