Assignment 3 - Kyle Hosey

It is January 1941. In the Berlin suburb of Wannsee, fifteen high-ranking officials of the Nazi government gather at a luxurious villa on the shores of a frozen lake. The directive: organize the "evacuation" of the Jewish population of Europe from German territories. It is the infamous Final Solution. The horrors resulting from this conference became a scar on the face of humanity for all eternity, a reminder that unspeakable things could occur in what was thought to be a civilized age. Surely, we think, the people making these decisions must be nothing but monsters, totally devoid of feeling, reason, and utterly self-serving. Surely they cannot believe that mass-extermination is justified? Remarkably enough, just after the war, that proof was indeed found in the form of the only surviving transcript of the Wannsee conference, the basis of HBO's Conspiracy. It quite clearly shows the chilling logic and calculation involved in what nearly all of humanity considers unspeakable; the attempt to work extermination into the existing Nuremburg Laws, heated discussion on the possibilities of sterilization, and above all a sense that nothing could be remotely wrong with killing an entire population. Therein lies the true question of good and evil. How can good and evil be clearly separated if men debating the methods of the Holocaust believe, in an incredibly convoluted sense, that what they are doing is just? Good and evil could be totally opposite concepts; which is which would be entirely dependent on one's individual viewpoint. In that case, both good and evil are subjective and merely social constructs. All of us (hopefully) would agree that the Holocaust was an unrivaled human tragedy; Eichmann, Heydrich, and Bormann saw it as their most important mission. Perhaps we are proved correct simply because our viewpoint triumphs over the other; in this case and in similar cases, that is undoubtedly a good thing. But I cannot help but wonder how that perception might have changed had our idea of wrong and right not been victorious. If the world came to be ruled by the Nazis as Hitler planned, would we as a society still condemn his actions as evil in the centuries to come? Well, we came to rule the lands of the Native Americans; that process is not typically thought of as an evil one, despite the massive loss of life. The conquistadors believed in the moral justness of their actions. So did the Nazis, monarchs willing to wage war for territory, and the opposing forces that fought against all three. If everyone believes in their own righteousness, then there can be no distinction between good and evil, only subjectivity.