The 2001 BBC film Conspiracy can be viewed on YouTube. The film opens servants preparing a great feast in an elegant mansion. Next, we see a snowy scene, looking down upon a forested lakeside villa The date of this gathering is January 20, 1942.
Black cars roll up to the front door of an elegant mansion. Out of those cars step dignified middle-aged European men who appear to be bankers or diplomats. They look sober and occupied in thought in their heavy topcoats and snap-brim fedoras.
Inside, the kitchens, halls, and conference room are being prepared. Tapestries and fine paintings line the walls, richly woven Oriental rugs are rolled out for the distinguished guests.
Liveried servants put out cut flowers—a festive touch for the dead of winter. At first, this film would appear to yet another episode of the popular PBS series Downton Abbey, with maids and butlers and footmen polishing the silver, placing name cards at each seat of the conference table. The best of salmon, meats and cheeses, caviar, wines and liqueurs are provided for the conferees.
A small plane circles above, preparing to land on the lake. On its wings we see Swastikas. This will be no party at a grand English country home. No, this is Wansee, a fashionable district in Berlin. As yet, this section on the outskirts of Hitler’s capital has not suffered bomb damage from nightly air raids by the Royal Air Force.
They are soon followed by an assortment of men in uniform. All the Mercedes have swastika flags. Out of these vehicles steps an assortment of men in military uniforms. Most are trim and fit. These are the notorious SS, the elite Nazi force with the Death’s Head on their high-peaked caps. Others of the conferees are fat and swinish. These are the Nazi party hacks.
British actor Kenneth Branagh, one of that nation’s greatest dramatic stars, plays SS General Reinhard Heydrich. Branagh makes no attempt at a German accent. But within minutes, he is Heydrich.
Slick, blond, affecting a hail-fellow-well-met manner, he moves the meeting along with Teutonic efficiency. Soon, very soon, it becomes clear what these men mean by the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question in Europe.” They are there to plan mass murder of the Jews.
One of the participants, the tall and courtly civilian, Dr. Friedrich Wilhelm Kritzlinger, is the Deputy Chief of the Reich Chancellery. He alone is troubled enough by what he is hearing to get up from the table and walk into the hallway. He comes back into the meeting, pale and shaken.
“That we have determined to systematically annihilate all the Jews of Europe—that possibility has been explicitly denied to me by the Führer,” he says, expecting that Hitler’s personal assurances will stop the trains on their way to Auschwitz.
Heydrich does not miss a beat. Smiling benevolently, he says: “And it will continue to be.
Holocaust denial is born in that Wanseekonferenz—the same room in which the mass murders are planned in chilling detail.
We will outfit Auschwitz with “shower rooms.” They victims will be herded into the gas chambers, told they are there for de-lousing. They will be gassed and their bodies burned at the rate of 2500/hour. Sixty thousand innocent men, women, and children will be killed every day at Auschwitz.
Heydrich thanks the Americans—whom it is noted—have just come into the war against Germany. He notes with ironic detachment that American techniques of mass production—the assembly line invented by Henry Ford—will be used to effect genocide.
“At 60,000 a day, we will advance the human race in a space of time so short Charles Darwin would be astonished,” says the grinning Heydrich. At his elbow is the ever eager to please SS Lt. Col. Adolf Eichmann. This conference is Eichmann’s project. So will be the Final Solution.
Agreeing grimly is a familiar face. Playing the part of SS Chief, Gen. Heinrich Müller is Brendan Coyle, known now to millions as John Bates, Lord Grantham’s faithful valet in the Downton Abbey series.
As Müller, he unsmilingly repeats Heydrich’s evolutionary message: Charles Darwin would be astonished.
Is there any one of these conferees who doubts that Darwin’s description of all Nature as a struggle for “the survival of the fittest” applies as well to the Nazis’ war on the Jews?
Within months, Heydrich will be known as the Butcher of Prague in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia. In June, 1942, Heydrich was assassinated by Czech resistance fighters parachuted in by the British. In reprisal, the entire Czech village of Lidice will be wiped off the face if the earth, even pets.
That leaves Eichmann to carry out the mass murder of the Jews.
All of this ended long ago. Threescore and ten years ago. Surely, the world wants no more of this kind of thing. Surely, the Liberation of Auschwitz on this date in 1945 means that the entire world has pledged “Never Again.”
Today, President Obama is in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. He joins Saudi rulers who allow no Jews to live in their country. They are in mourning for King Abdullah, who refused to let the U.S. question Madani al-Tayyib in 1998. Al-Tayyib was the finance chief of al Qaeda. He might have helped us unravel the 9/11 plot before it occurred. Abdullah refused the urgent request of then-Vice President Al Gore. Abdullah’s refusal is documented on p. 122 of the 9/11 Commission Report.
Did President Obama know of this refusal to help us when he bowed to King Abdullah in London in 2009? Does he know that the Saudis are funding Islamist extremist throughout the world with their petrodollars?
King Abdullah was only upholding a family tradition in his refusal to help us or to even recognize the possibility of a Jewish state in the Mideast. Abdullah’s father was Abdul Aziz, the founder of Saudi Arabia. Abdul Aziz fathered all the kings of Saudi Arabia until today.
When President Roosevelt met with King Abdul Aziz on February 14, 1945, just a few weeks after the Liberation of Auschwitz, he pleaded with the Arab ruler to agree to let desperate Jews settle in their ancient homeland in Palestine. Nothing doing, the king told the president. But, millions of Jews have been murdered by the Nazis in Poland and Germany, FDR told the king, appealing to his humanitarian instincts.
Then there should be plenty of room in Poland and Germany to settle the remainder of the Jews, the Saudi king told Roosevelt. So much for humanitarian.
From that date until this—seventy years later—the official position of Saudi Arabia and virtually every member of the Arab League is their own translation of the Nazis’ call:
Juden raus. Jews get out! U.S. policy in the Mideast might be more successful and more honorable if we recognized that basic fact.
Appeasement of Hitler did not stop the trains rolling into Auschwitz. Appeasement of Islamists—whether of the Saudi or Iranian stripe—will not stop war or genocide now.
The most admired man in the Muslim majority lands is Hassan Nasrallah. This leader of Hezbollah in Southern Lebanon is armed and paid by Iran. He wants Jews to gather in Israel. But only so it will save him the trouble of “hunting them down.”
Is it any wonder Mr. Obama’s Mideast policy is in shambles?
