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The room where it happens
20th January 1942 was a bitterly cold day just outside Berlin. Ice clung to the trees, snow covered the ground, and outside the villa a cohort of drivers waited. Inside fifteen men sat down to decide the fate of millions of Jews and other people deemed unworthy of life in the conquered German territories.[1] At the head of the table was SS General Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the Reich Security Main Office, whose ruthless agenda coldly oversaw the proposal for the final solution of the Jews in Europe, a wholesale mass murder. Alongside him was SS Major General Heinrich Müller, the head of the Gestapo who was pivotal in making the Gestapo the “central executive organ of National Socialist terror”.[2] Müller’s Gestapo were pivotal for turning slaughter that was being conducted under the Einsatzgruppen in the eastern conquests into the reign of terror which rounded up millions across Europe. Finally, the organiser of the conference and man widely considered the architect of the Holocaust’s mechanistic slaughter Adolf Eichmann outlined the practicalities of genocide. To be in that room was to experience the horrific banality that the Third Reich pivoted into the depths of depravity in the name of cleansing Europe of those they though unworthy of life.
How we frame power and power dynamics invariably comes down to who has the biggest guns, most ships, and sharpest sticks. Weapons, and the willingness to…
