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Mark Roseman

Mark Roseman is Professor of Modern History at the University of Southampton. Educated at Cambridge and Warwick, he has published widely on many aspects of German History. His work includes Recasting the Ruhr (1992), Generations in Conflict (1995), The Past in Hiding (2000) and The Villa, the Lake, the Meeting (2002). He lives in Birmingham with his three children.

The Past in Hiding was awarded the prestigious Fraenkel Prize in Contemporary History, awarded by the Wiener Library.

Mark Roseman’s The Villa, The Lake, The Meeting: Wannsee and the Final Solution, unravels the macabre mystery of the Wannsee conference in 1942. We spoke to Mark about the significance of the conference, and more …
This was a conference, under the stewardship of Reinhard Heydrich, the head of the German Security Police and Himmler’s deputy. At the meeting the elimination of over 11 million European Jews was calmly discussed in elegant surroundings by highly educated bureaucrats. After it was over the participants enjoyed a buffet, brandy and cigars. At the very least, the meeting thus epitomizes the Holocaust’s macabre combination of rational planning by cultivated men, and a ghastly program of murder. What is harder to evaluate – and one of the questions pursued in this book – is whether we can believe the conference’s claim that it was the crucial preparatory meeting prior to formulating the ‘final solution of the Jewish question’. After all, Nazi killings of Jews had started well before this meeting, a meeting that neither Hitler nor Himmler attended.

Weren’t the Nazis very careful about not putting anything in writing on their policy towards the Jews? How do we know that such a meeting took place?
In March 1947, US investigators stumbled across a copy of the minutes or Protocol of this meeting, and thus unearthed what has been dubbed the most shameful document in human history. Though various Holocaust deniers have tried to cast doubt on the Protocol, it is undeniably authentic, as were the other incriminating materials found at the same time in the files of the Foreign Office. Other Nazis too made references to the meeting, and both in interviews given in freedom and again at his trial Adolf Eichmann spoke a lot about the conference. It is one of the best-documented moments in the history of the Holocaust.

Yet Hitler wasn’t even there? Isn’t that a bit surprising given the grave nature of the meeting?
As extreme as his public rhetoric was, Hitler was extremely cautious about actual decision-making on Jewish matters and did not tie himself to policy pronouncements in front of large gatherings. Whatever decisions he made about genocide will have been made in much smaller meetings, probably in brief exchanges with Himmler.

The Wannsee conference was thus not the point at which Hitler and Himmler reached the conclusion that European Jews should be murdered. Many historians believe that that conclusion was reached in summer 1941 and thus cannot understand why at Wannsee, Heydrich should claim that decisions still needed to be made before the Final Solution could be put into place. But on the basis of recent work on developments in Eastern European, it now seems that the first killings there in the autumn of 1941 were carried out before a final decision that murder was the only outcome for Europe’s Jews.

My book argues that for a while in the autumn of 1941, the Nazis had not yet completely given up on the idea of (admittedly murderous) deportations, rather than outright killing all Jews. But by the end of November various indications suggest that ‘territorial’ solutions of the Jewish question had been abandoned. At precisely this moment, Heydrich called the Wannsee conference. Against this new timetable, Wannsee makes a kind of ‘sense’ – it was called by Heydrich once it had become clear that murder was now the policy and as part of a concerted action by Himmler and Heydrich to ensure the supremacy of the SS and security police over the civilian ministries in this area. True, the Wannsee Protocol itself uses the language of ‘evacuations’, but it is clear from other comments in the Protocol that it is murder, not evacuation, that is meant. And at one point Heydrich makes absolutely clear that all, even the most efficient workers, must be eliminated. This was clearly enunciated in the Protocol in part, I believe, to remind the other participants of the project they had implicated themselves in.

How far reaching were the consequences of the meeting?
The meeting was important in giving Heydrich and his henchman Eichmann confidence that they could begin ratcheting up the pace of German-Jewish and western European deportations without fear of serious obstruction from other agencies. Both men referred to the meeting in their subsequent communications to other officials to demonstrate the authority they enjoyed. Above all, Wannsee offers us a window onto the moment in Nazi thinking when the idea of deportations definitively gave way to murder. It did not end the need to take decisions about Jewish matters, however, above all where to draw the balance between keeping some Jews alive for a while for labour and whom to kill straight away. Himmler, in particular, was continually involved in such decisions – after Heydrich’s assassination in May 1942, he took an even more direct role than before.

Your last book, The Past in Hiding follows the extraordinary experience of a young Jewish woman, Marianne Strauss, in Nazi Germany during the war. How would the Wannsee Conference have affected Marianne, her friends and family?
They had almost been caught up in the first wave of deportations that took place before the Conference. But then they came under the protection of the Abwehr, the German Army’s intelligence service, and thus were protected from the new wave of deportations that followed the meeting. Ultimately, however, the decision that all German Jews were to be killed eventually led to the gassing of Marianne’s immediate family in Auschwitz.

The Villa, The Lake, The Meeting was published in the UK, Germany, Italy and Spain simultaneously to mark the 60th anniversary of the Wannsee conference. Did you think the book was received differently on the continent to in the UK?
There has long been an extremely open and well-informed debate about the Nazi past in Germany, so I did not think there was any great reluctance to confront the contents of this book there than anywhere else. I think there remains everywhere in western Europe a horrible fascination in trying to understand how educated young men, from cultured backgrounds, could so calmly have sat round a table to talk genocide.

Mark Roseman explains how a chance meeting with a remarkable woman led to his compelling and unusual account of survival, bravery, memory - and forgetting.

What initially aroused your interest in Marianne Ellenbogen's story?
Two things. First, the few details of her story which I already knew from her publication in the 1980s and our brief interview in 1989 were remarkable; it was an incredible survival story and it hinted at aspects of the Third Reich which ran counter the received wisdom. Secondly, Marianne, despite her illness, was an intriguing individual: charming, formidable but also in a way vulnerable - certainly anxious about what the historian's gaze might do to her story. This combination drew me to her as a person, and also made more plausible the idea that she could indeed have survived such an ordeal.

Why did you decide to write a Holocaust memoir about one person?
It wasn't a cleverly thought-out strategy to approach the Holocaust. It began simply as an exercise in recording Marianne's life and gradually took on shape there.

What do you think were the characteristics which allowed Marianne to survive the war as a Jew without papers in Nazi Germany?
Any survivor will tell you that the predominant characteristic was luck. Marianne had many very close shaves. She was also very lucky in the people she met. She was lucky too in that her father's ability to obtain protection in the early years of the war meant that Marianne herself had to go on the run only at a relatively late stage (1943) and this, too, helped her. But beyond such circumstances over which she had no control, she herself contributed substantially to her own fate. Above all her courage and coolness were absolutely vital in living her double life. Her beauty and engaging personality were very helpful in making the world around her well-disposed to her. Her ability to take on the identity in public of those whom she was pretending to be, and her ability in private to identify with her (non-Jewish) helpers, were probably also crucial in maintaining her equanimity.

As a historian, what do you think are the most remarkable aspects of the story?
The single most remarkable thing is the quality and range of documentation that survives, and the opportunities that it offers to juxtapose testimony and record. These open up issues of survivor memory that are rarely, if ever, on view. Marianne's life on the run is extremely unusual, as is the character of the Bund. The possibilities revealed here for movement and communication in Nazi Germany, including movement and communication to and from the ghettos and concentration camps, are remarkable and quite unexpected. Similarly, Marianne's experience reveals a remarkable and very little-known aspect of BBC broadcasting. Finally, the Abwehr's role in protecting some Jews is still a very little-known fact, and has seldom been so well-documented as here.

What did you learn about the group that kept Marianne alive during the war?
They were (and in a few cases are) a remarkable group of people, inspired both by the personalities of Artur and Dore Jacobs, and by the idea of moral commitment, to act in a most heroic way. Many felt that alone they would never been heroes. But bolstered and pushed by the group ethos they risked their own lives to help others. Many of those who played such a heroic role were women, who found in the 'Bund' a place where they could develop their talents and where their thoughts and contribution were taken seriously. It was vital for the group that even before 1933 once of its fundamental principles had been to seek to create a better society not just at the level of high politics but also at the level of every-day life; they were used to making moral choices in their ordinary lives and to risking conflict for the sake of higher principles. Because they were an informal group, and because a principal group activity for many was rhythm and movement, they did not look like a classical resistance organisation. This helped them elude the Gestapo. But it also meant they did not get the recognition that was their due after the war. I am continuing to research into the Bund.

You met many interesting people whilst researching the book, many of whom had conflicting stories. As a historian, how do you ascertain the truth?
Historians have no magic ingredient for getting at the truth. Like any other normal observer, I would find myself thrown one way and then the other by different witnesses and by different source materials. Sometimes, one concluded that the differences represented alternative ways of seeing and that it would be wrong to try and reconcile them, or to label one as false. But sometimes, where two or more different kinds of record independently corroborated each other, and challenged elements of other testimonies, it became clear that errors of fact were contained in some of the testimony. I did not assume, as a matter of principle, that memory was flawed and the written record always true. But it is obvious that written records are by and large not amended by time, or the evolution of the subject, in the way that memory can be. One some areas, memories of different people added up to a strong suggestion that the written record - both of the time, and subsequent historical accounts - was wrong; the clearest example of this was the very widely-shared memory of Gestapo corruption which has not yet been properly document and which, understandably enough, does not figure in the Gestapo files.

What did you learn about memory and the processes of remembering?
No historian has a 'science' of memory. Anyone who turns to the scientific literature on memory discovers how much we have yet to understand. So I felt I gained insights but not certain truths. I learned that with a good witness, such as Marianne, it is always worthwhile investigating even the most outlandish-sounding claim. All of Marianne's seemingly far-fetched propositions turned out to be true. At the same time, I learned that apparently indelible recollection of traumatic events are in fact subject to change. Changes in such memories are more striking than normal errors one makes in recollection, partly because the vividness and seeming certainty of the accounts makes them more unexpected, partly because such traumatic memories appear never to go away, and partly because, in Marianne's case at least, the changes seemed to follow certain patterns. Those patterns suggested that Marianne was mentally rearranging her traumatic partings and leave-takings in a way that slightly reduced the burden of the past. Survivors may be understandably upset at the idea that traumatic memories are open to question. But from a human point of view, it seemed to me that the evidence that this is so does not detract from their accounts; on the contrary, the way the psyche tries to cope with the past by rearranging it is powerful evidence of the survivor's pain and suffering. The other major set of insights which I gained concerned memory and identity. The quality of the documentation in this case allows us to document, or at least to venture some hypotheses, about the way individuals can lose sight of earlier identities. It is probably a universal feature of human life that we lose sight of who we once were; but for someone such as Marianne the process was accentuated by the abrupt changes in identity and situation to which she was subject before during and after the war, and by the multiple roles she had to play in order to survive the war. Her later experiences, and the influence of wider public attitudes towards the Nazi past, closed off access to some of her earlier ways of seeing (or at least prevented me sharing that way of seeing, if she was trying to communicate it).

Whist researching in Essen in the 1980s you were an active member of the town's Jewish community. How did you personally feel the impact of your discoveries when you pieced together Marianne's history?
True enough, it was moving to discover that Marianne and her parents had sat and consumed their Kaffee und Kuchen (coffee and cake) at the same tables and in the same cafes as I had fifty years later. But the personal impact of Marianne's stories did not lie particularly in my Essen connections. It was the intrinsic power of uncovering a person's life which had lain hidden for so long, and re-establishing connections which Marianne had never had the strength to pursue: to discover, for example, that Christian Arras and his wife had named their first child after her - and that Marianne had never discovered this tribute, though it had happened in 1947. Or that the TV producer Imo Moszkowicz, had held a secret love for her for 60 years, of which she will never have been aware. These were moving moments of contact; moving also because I discovered them only after Marianne had died and could never close the circle.

The Past In Hiding is also a detective story. Was there a particularly significant clue whilst piecing together Marianne's past?
There were so many but the biggest revelation must be the discovery of Marianne's underground diary. This was a revelation for many reasons. First, it was genuinely remarkable that Marianne had never remotely alluded to its existence. Either this meant that she had forgotten about it (more evidence of the way she suppressed her former identity) or it meant that she could not face looking for it and exposing it the daylight of scrutiny. Secondly, the period on the run was, by its very nature, the period when other kinds of documentation (for example official records) were unlikely to exist. I did of course have testimony from some of Marianne's helpers, but that was all. So the discovery of the diary transformed what we could know about that period. Thirdly, I do not know of other cases where people who were 'passing' as non-Jews have kept a diary. The insights it provides are thus unique. And finally, the diary opened up a Marianne that was very different to the one I had imagined, and possibly different from the one Marianne herself remembered; a girl with different preoccupations and a different take on the world than I had expected from a Jewish girl on the run in Nazi Germany.

What should we learn from The Past In Hiding?
Marianne's case was very unusual and her experiences not readily generalisable. Indeed, part of what makes her story so memorable is precisely that it is unusual. So in some ways she is just a remarkable exception. There are very, very few German Jews who survived by criss-crossing the Third Reich on German trains! On the other hand, there are insights on offer here, both into the experience of German-Jews, the nature of the Third Reich, and into the character of the survivor, that have wider purchase. Marianne's family's experience helps to explain why many German Jews left it so late to leave Germany. It shows that does not necessarily reflect badly on them that they did not see the writing on the wall - it was not necessarily false pride, for example, or a fear of seeing one's comfort disturbed. Marianne's parents and the parents of her fiancé, and indeed Marianne's own generation, saw a great deal to admire in the German world around them; and had many very good reasons for feeling that they were well-established members of their community. Even when Marianne's Jewish friends were learning in the 1930s to form their own identity in Jewish Youth groups, away from their non-Jewish peers, they were still strongly influenced by the values of the pre-Nazi German youth movement. Marianne's story shows in many ways how 'German' were Germany's Jews, and that this German-ness was in many cases a source of strength, of moral uprightness. As far as the Third Reich is concerned, Marianne's story shows how substantial the flow of news was into and out of the Third Reich. The correspondence in and out of Izbica in Poland; the information Marianne and others gathered from the soldier, Arras; the communication in and out of Theresienstadt; the news Marianne gained of her parents movements from Theresienstadt to Auschwitz, and the BBC broadcast about gassings in Auschwitz are all evidence of this. The cumulative impact, when combined in one person's life, as it is here, is extraordinary. It alters our sense of Nazi Germany's permeability - provided, of course you were determined to seize all possible opportunities to send and transmit news and information. Those who did not want to see or hear, and were not willing to take risks to do so, could manage to avoid learning very much at all. But a courageous observer like Artur Jacobs, the head of the Bund, was already learning the truth about the Holocaust in summer 1942. The Bund, too, alters our sense of what was possible in Nazi Germany. The group showed that a like-minded, informal community, particularly if it enjoyed a certain infrastructure in terms of meeting places and a plausible cover story (dance group), had a chance to engage in small, courageous actions against the regime that could save lives. But the Bund's experience also showed that even to save one life required many helpers; and that even a morally committed group such as this could not save very many lives. Some of the insights the book offers into survivors' memory have been ventured above. Above all, Marianne shows how burdened many survivors were, even those who had escaped the trauma of the camps, by their experiences. No matter how much and how successfully she sought to rebuild her post-war life, the past was always present for her , and she had to find mental strategies to deal with it. Marianne, as many other survivors, then had to endure the unspeakable agony of seeing one of her children become anorectic and then die, aged 18.