Wannsee and Trump: Monsters do Exist but More Dangerous are the Common Men

Primo Levi wrote, “Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.”

I am writing this tonight because the other article I am working on is growing in scope with every illegal and unconstitutional action of the Trump-Musk regime of terror. The past few days have been busy and the last two nights I have been unable to work on it because of my exhaustion. So tonight a detour.

I am fortunate that I teach in a small private collegiate academy where a large number of our 9th to 12th grade students are internationals. In my class of juniors and seniors all but one African American student is an international, and will we are a Christian school, most of them are not Christians and their beliefs are respected. Their parents pay a lot of money to see them get an education that will help them enter elite American universities, something we are very successful at doing. The reading list that our students are expected to read in high school include classics and books which are currently being banned by fundamentalist Christian groups such as Moms for Liberty in schools and libraries across the country.

Since I am a published historian I get a large amount of leeway in what I teach and how I conduct my classes. I think that having a published historian who does not write from a fundamentalist Christian perspective adds credibility to attracting students, our accreditation and ability to attract international students. No parent, student, administrator or faculty member has ever forbid me to teach anything. Thus my students learn about Black and Women’s history, civil rights, crimes committed by the United States, the Constitution and Bill of Rights, and the Holocaust which is one of my specialties. I am spending a bit over two weeks on it this year teaching all of my classes about it.

One thing I am doing this year is to show the film Conspiracy (2001) starring Kenneth Branagh, Stanley Tucci, and Colin Firth, which is about the Wannsee Conference which dealt with the coordination of the Final Solution to the “Jewish Problem.” It is a well done and well acted film in which the actors convey the hatred of the participants toward the Jews done in a business meeting around a conference table, complete with refreshments and lunch.

Likewise, it is an excellent tool to understand how highly educated professionals, many with earned doctorates, mostly in law can plan genocide, and some even laugh about it. In it we can discover how euphemisms like deportation, evacuation and efficacy can be used to minimize the greatest campaigns of state sanctioned violence and genocide. Mind you, all of these terms are part and parcel of everything President Trump and his cabal of lawless gangsters, criminal and oligarchs are going about overthrowing our republic, trampling our constitution, and conducting a campaign of terror against Americans and immigrants, as well as our foreign policy.

I have provided to students with hundreds of pages of information, translated documents, and testimony regarding the Nazi War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity as well as taken the time to teach about the subjects, in regards to the film they even received a translation of the surviving minutes of Wannsee. We watched most of the film today and will finish it Tuesday. I get a lot of questions during the film which I pause to answer. One of my students is a Bosnia Muslim whose parents and grandparents fought against the Serbian genocide of their people and who lost family members and friends of his family.

I love teaching all of my students, but my internationals are a particular joy.

Anyway. I am very tired and need to get to bed.

Be safe and watch your six, especially if you are resisting Trump’s tyranny.