On January 20, 1942, high-ranking members of the Nazi party met at Wannsee, right out side of Berlin, to begin the implementation of the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question.” Reinhard Heydrich tasked Adolf Eichmann with organizing the conference, since Eichmann was a director of Jewish Affairs. Hannah Arendt, in Eichmann in Jerusalem, describes the discussion of the Wannsee Conference as focusing “first on ‘complicated legal questions,’ such as the treatment of half-and quarter-Jews — should they be killed or only sterilized?” Following this, the discussion moved to various methods of killing; “the Final Solution,” Arendt writes, “was greeted with ‘extraordinary enthusiasm’ by all present.” The Wannsee Conference ushered in this mass, industrial-scale murder we typically think about with the Holocaust at sites such as Auschwitz, Treblinka, Majdanek, and elsewhere. However, it did not start there. It started long before January 1942. It started in 1933, expanded in 1935, expanded in 1938, and expanded even more with the mobile death-squads (Einsatzgruppen) who mass murdered individuals on the Eastern Front with the start of the war in 1939.

While Rolf Hochhuth’s The Deputy, A Christian Tragedy (1963) does not focus on the Wannsee Conference, there are a couple of moments in the play that dive into the thinking of Eichmann and others as they formulated the “Final Solution.” As they party at a bowling alley, Nazi officials talk about the war and how to implement the mass murder of Jews in occupied Eastern Europe specifically. At one point, Eichmann has Kurt Gerstein (an SS officer who alerts the Church and others about Nazi atrocities) tell Professor Hirt about testing the use of Zyklon B at Belzec. When Hirt says that he thought they were using carbon monoxide, Gerstein tells them, “Why, Colonel Eichmann, I myself have seen the people waiting in the chambers for almost three full hours before the Diesel motors got started. And then — its inconceivable — it took another half hour from them to die!” Eichmann stands there “horrified, speechless,” and Hirt implores them to “[d]o it humanely!” and suggests shooting them like the Russians. The disconnect here is extraordinary because any such murder, whether by mass-firing squad or gas is not humane, but Hirt, a professor who has skulls of Holocaust victims sent to him for study, views himself as an intellectual and does not want to know how this happen.

To Hirt’s comments, Eichmann responds by telling him about the psychological trauma of shooting masses of people and the impact that the act has on member of the Einsatzgruppen. Eichmann details the process, telling Hirt, “You try shooting at forty railroad cars full of a naked, screaming horde! Although, in fact, they seldom scream.” Eichmann asks Hirt to think about looking the victim in the eye, staring at them from the barrel of the gun and you pull the trigger and doing this over and over and over again countless times, piling the bodies of the victims in mass graves. He says, “Most of them stand fatalistically before the pits, only their eyes show shock that this is actually done to them . . . That’s even worse.” The tangible act of murder in this manner, the “intimateness” of it, psychologically scars the members of the Einsatzgruppen.

Eichmann continues by asking Hirt to envision the victims. He tells Hirst, “But still, just picture it: the grandmother, her grandson in her arms; the teenage girl calling to mind the first date you undressed. And then the pregnant ones!” Eichmann, in this moment, humanizes the victims because he asks Hirt to think about their fear, their suffering. For all of the bluster of Jewish inferiority, he knows the victims are human just as himself and the other perpetrators of violence. He continues, “The toughest rifleman can’t stand that sort of thing for long, not even when he’s doused himself with schnapps so this his blood is ninety percent alcohol. No — shooting is impossible.” It is “impossible” because it causes guilt in the shooter, no matter the shooter’s ideology. When one takes the life of another in such a manner, guilt follows.

Along with the constant guilt, Eichmann also tells Hirt that it would be logistically impossible to continue shooting individuals because they have “eight million to process in Europe, and we must finish it before the war in over.” Hirt’s imploring for a “humane” way to kill individuals has nothing to do, ultimately, with guilt over mass murder. Like Eichmann, it has to do with the psychological impact it has on the perpetrator who must stare into the eyes of the victim, see the grandmother, the grandson, the pregnant woman . . . Eichmann informs Hirt of the Zyklon B tests at Auschwitz where they tested it “on six hundred Russians.” He says, “We sealed the windows of the penal block hermetically with mud, and tossed the cystals through the door.” Some Russians survived, and Eichmann chalks that up to the fact that it “was a first experiment!”

While the move from mass-killings on the Eastern Front would have eventually led to the industrialized killings in extermination camps, part of the movement centered on the psychological impact those mass-killings had on the perpetrators. They could not seal the door and stand outside, ignoring the cries and screams. They could not walk away as the gas did its work. No, they had to stand, face-to-face, with their victims, sharing, however brief or terrified, a moment, connecting them together for decades to come. I’m reminded of Lillian Smith, who speaking with campers at Laurel Falls Camp for Girls following the bombing of Hiroshima, told the girls, “We’d find it hard to have enemies if we cared about what happened to them. War makes us cut a lot of bridges we’ve been spinning all our life.” Seeing the grandmother, the grandson, the pregnant woman, the young child, the father, the mother, the cousin, the daughter, the son . . . caused, on some level, “care.” It caused, on some level, thoughts of the perpetrator’s own familial and filial ties. It caused a form of connection that became severed with the industrialized killing in the camps. The camps made it easier to “stomach” because one did not see the murder. They saw the before and the after, but not the act itself.

All of this fed into the construction of an enemy, the narratives of dehumanization. It made it easy to say, “Our soldiers can’t stomach this so lets think of something more huamane so we can help them. We must complete the task.” When we make an enemy, when we frame them in such a manner that they become not human, we make it easy to say this, thinking about those we consider to be “us” while continuing to subjugate those where are “not us” to violence, just removing that violence from our field of view. We must not let that happen. None of this is humane. None of this is right. When we refuse to see a 10-year-old US citizen with brain cancer, who needs constant treatment, deported because her parents are undocumented, we cannot turn away. When we see Mahmoud Khalil, a green-card holder whose US wife is eight months pregnant, detained with threats of deportation because of his First Amendment right to free speech, we cannot turn away. When Camila Muñoz, returning from her honeymoon in Puerto Rico, was detained by ICE because she is not a US citizen yet even though she married a US citizen and they are working on paperwork, we cannot turn away.

We do not face victims eye-to-eye, but what we see happening today has precedent, and we must be aware and vigilant. We must not do things “humanely.” We must fight for justice and what is morally right. We cannot turn a blind eye as the door closes. We cannot walk away. When we do that, we become complicit. Just see what the Wannsee Conference wrought. Watch the 2001 film Conspiracy which details the conference.