Thread by @davidfrum

80 years ago today

https://twitter.com/auschwitzmuseum/status/1484094007688978434

Fifteen men participated in the Wannsee conference. What befell them? 1/x

The chair and leader of the conference, Reinhard Heydrich, was assassinated by Czech partisans in 1942 - leading to the terrible Nazi reprisal war crime of the Lidice massacre. 2/x

Let's follow the others in alphabetical order ... 3/x

Josef Buhler, who represented the Nazi occupation authorities in Poland, was extradited to Poland after the war and hanged. 4/x

Adolf Eichmann, Heydrich's chief deputy, would escape to Argentina after the war. He was found by Israeli intelligence, tried in Israel, and hanged in 1962. 5/x

Roland Freisler, the notorious Nazi jurist who would later preside over the trials and death sentences of the 1944 anti-Hitler plotters, was killed by an American bomb in the final weeks of the war. 6/x

Otto Hoffman, who represented the Nazi race and resettlement office, served six years of a 25 year sentence, and was then pardoned by the West German government in 1954. 6/x

Gerhard Klopfer, Bormann's man at the conference, was never charged with any crime. He practised law in West Germany until his death in 1987, the conference's last survivor. 7/x

Friedrich Kritzinger, who represented the Reich chancellery, was arrested after the war, expressed remorse for Nazi crimes, was never charged, and died of natural causes. 8/x

Rudolf Lange, who personally oversaw the mass murder of Jews in Latvia, disappeared on the eastern front in the final days of the war, perhaps a suicide. 9/x

Georg Leibbrandt, who represented Nazi race ideologist Alfred Rosenberg, was never charged with the United States. He emigrated after the war to the United States, was later barred, and died in West Germany in 1982. 10/x

Hans Luther, who represented the foreign ministry and kept the minutes of the conference - the only record - died of natural causes shortly after the end of the war. 11/x

Alfred Meyer, who represented the eastern occupation authorities, committed suicide just before the end of the war. 12/x

Heinrich Muller, chief of the Gestapo, was last seen in Hitler's bunker a week before the end of the war. He then disappeared, fate unknown. 13/x

Erich Neumann, who represented Goring's planning ministry, was never charged with any crime. He died of natural causes. 14/x

Karl Schongarth, an SS officer who carried out mass murders of Polish Jews, was tried after the war by a British court. He was hanged in 1946. 15/x

Wilhelm Stuckart, a co-author of the Nuremberg laws who represented the interior ministry, was released from prison in 1949. He got a job in local government and died in a traffic accident in 1953. END

For those who want to read more about the aftermath, I strongly recommend Jeffrey Herf's "Divided Memory." Herf is especially acute on how East Germany's "anti-fascist" ideology shielded actual Nazis - and repurposed old antisemitism as new anti-Zionism amazon.com/Divided-Memory…