20 January 2020 was the 78th anniversary of the so-called Wannsee Conference. This meeting of senior Nazis, chaired by Reinhard Heydrich and his faithful assistant Adolf Eichmann, took place in a graceful villa on the shore of Lake Wannsee just outside Berlin. Thanks to one surviving copy of the minutes (which the participants were supposed to have destroyed), it has gone down in history as one of the most significant moments in the decision-making process for the ‘Final Solution of the Jewish Question in Europe’: the Nazis’ genocide of the Jews.
What does this have to do with the contemporary radical right? Apart from the ‘eliminationist’ drive which remains at the heart of radical right rhetoric, especially on its wilder fringes as exemplified by recent mass murderers in Norway and New Zealand, whose ‘manifestos’ are echoes of Nazi ideology, what was discussed at Wannsee reminds us of the fears, paranoia and fantasies of the radical right.
For some years after World War II, the meeting at Wannsee, which was postponed from its original date in December 1941 because of the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor and the entry of the US into the war, was regarded as the moment when the decision was taken to kill all the Jews of Europe. Seeming to back up that interpretation was the existence, in the minutes of the meeting, of a table listing all the countries of Europe and the estimated number of Jews in each.
