Brochure of the conference marking the 20th anniversary of the Wannsee meeting, West Berlin, 1962

Conference brochure

Video Gebärdensprache

Audio Text

In 1962, twenty years after the Wannsee Conference, the Protestant Evangelische Akademie Berlin also held a conference at the Wannsee lake. At that time, the trial of Adolf Eichmann before an Israeli court had received wide coverage in many countries – not least due to the daily live reports on television. Many people only became aware of the systematic murder of European Jews through Eichmann’s trial, which had just ended with his death sentence. The meeting at Wannsee in January 1942 was mentioned in Eichmann’s trial. Now dubbed the Wannsee Conference, it suddenly became far more widely known.

The Evangelische Akademie Berlin had already organised many events on the development of National Socialism and approaches to dealing with this part of Germany’s history. The speakers at the Protestant academy’s conference in January 1962 not only included pastors and historians, but also survivors of persecution, such as Eleonore Sterling and Léon Poliakov. In 1951, Poliakov published one of the early works on the Holocaust. Sterling spoke on such topics as society’s complicity in the Third Reich and, even though a Jew, included herself in that complicity as well. Poliakov, who was also involved in some of the publications shown in the display above, traced a trajectory from far in the past, showing parallels in the persecution of Jews since the Middle Ages.

The 70 participants at the Protestant academy’s conference were said to include – quote – ‘a gratifyingly large number of young people’. Evidently, they belonged to those who, as early as the 1960s, were critically exploring the role of their parents’ and grandparents’ generations in Nazi crimes.