Some tales of tragedy move us with their uncompromising first-hand accounts of events, or with fictionalised new perspective on the horror. Others—like Mark Roseman‘s The Wannsee Conference and the Final Solution—instead have the power to chill us with their dispassionate, rigorous analysis of how events unfolded. First published in 2002, The Wannsee Conference was issued in 2012 by the Folio Society to commemorate the 70th anniversary of that infamous gathering of Nazi bureaucrat-criminals. Here I’ll be taking a closer look at this Folio Society edition.
The book is presented in a slipcase covered with buff paper and printed with an imitation rubber stamp reading Geheime Reichsſache—secret Reich affairs. Within is a volume three-quarters bound in khaki buckram with a Modigliani-paper covered front board bearing a black and white photograph of a corridor at the Wannsee villa. The title and author’s name are printed on the spine. It’s worth mentioning that this edition was offered at the lower end of Folio’s price scale and it’s nice to see the features like a printed slipcase and buckram binding were not sacrificed. At first glance, the combination of khaki buckram and a fairly sterile black and white photograph might seem whimsical, but I think the design gels quite nicely.
The book has a sewn binding with black and white end bands. Khaki endpapers enclose 153 pages of Folio Society’s standard Abbey Wove paper. It is slightly off-white and a good performer for an affordable edition such as this. Principal typography is in Palatino, which is an attractive modern take on old style type design. The typesetting is fairly dense on the page, but not in a way that seriously compromises legibility. Display elements are set in an unnamed sans serif face; this includes a fairly austere title page that faces a frontispiece photograph of the conference room. The other design feature that merits note is that each chapter starts with a title page set in the style of a rubber stamp.
Besides the cover and frontispiece, there are eleven photographic plates. These are printed as a single group on a series of glossy photographic pages bound into the middle of the book. The conference itself was shrouded in secrecy and no known contemporary images survive, but we have images of the participants, related documents, the venue, and the broader context of Nazism within which the meeting took place. All are featured here.
Although the book is ostensibly about the Wannsee conference, the historical record has left us with relatively little evidence—some deliberately vague minutes and the dubious first-hand testimony of known war criminals—to support an intimate account of the meeting itself. But that day on 20th January 1942 serves as the fulcrum around which Roseman constructs a careful analysis of just how the Nazi regime descended from the rhetoric of hate into full-blown industrial genocide. As is often the case, the path was neither straightforward nor linear, and key questions, such as when the decision to systematically murder Europe’s Jews was taken, prove more complicated in reality than is perhaps the case in the public imagination. But Roseman lays before us the competing arguments and conflicting evidence. It’s hard to know what’s more alarming: that the Nazis seem to have almost improvised their way from persecution into genocide, or the fact that, once this path was embarked upon, it was pursued with such ruthless and determined zeal. In either case, Roseman gives us a cautionary tale of what can happen when society is unable to check the mad impulses of a tyrannical minority with the reigns of power.
Concluding the book is an appendix with the translated text of the protocol agreed at the meeting, and extensive endnotes. ■
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