Erich Neumann, the economist at the Wannsee Conference.
This villa is located at 56-58 am Grossen Wannsee in the western Berlin suburb of Wannsee. On 20 January 1942, one of the most murderous meetings in history took place here as 15 officials of Nazi Germany got together to discuss how they would kill all the Jews in Europe. The meeting itself was not where the decision or order to assassinate the Jewish people was made, that order had probably been given by Hitler some six weeks earlier. This meeting was called in order to discuss how they would overcome some of the problems related to that order. In other words, the meeting was to provide solutions which would require the experience and knowledge of the participants.
Wannsee Protocol gives a precis of what was discussed and lists the 15 participants of the conference and the organisations they represented. Most of these men were highly educated, some indeed were not even old fighter Nazis, they were civil servants who only joined the party to continue their careers and enjoy the perks that party membership offered. One person in this group was Erich Neumann.
Erich Neumann came from a well off family. His father was a factory owner and thus could afford to educate his son.
In October 1920, he started work in the Prussian Ministry of the Interior, in the district of Essen .
As an economist, Neumann had the task of representing Germany and German companies at international conferences.
In September 1933 he also took on the task of secretary in the Prussian State Council. As this body had been founded in July 1933 to replace a previously elected body, I assume that he got this job because of his political reliability. In any case the role of the Nazi Prussian State Council was purely advisory.
Neumann had been a member of the conservative DNVP, the party of Alfred Hugenberg, the business person and press magnate who had helped steer Hitler into power as he believed he could control him. In May 1933 alongside many more people, Neumann joined the NSDAP. This rush to join the National Socialists was following their seizure of power earlier that year and thus can be seen as a career move by many rather than belief in what Hitler stood for.
He continued to work n the Prussian State Ministry and from October 1936 was assigned to the four-year plan authority, although for more than one year he had already headed a group for Goering that was to assess the general internal and external economic situation. . Here he headed the foreign exchange business group. Given the seemingly conflicting Nazi aims of self sufficiency and acquisition of raw materials from abroad for the armaments programme, this was an important role.
In July 1938 Neumann became State Secretary and deputy for Paul Körner. Körner was the right hand man of Hermann Göring , for whom he was State Secretary and in charge of the Prussian State Ministry and the Four Year Plan authority. Neumann’s tasks as deputy to Körner included, amongst other things, the confiscation of assets belonging to Jews.
Neumann was in on the secret of the upcoming war against the USSR. His role was in the examination of agricultural production. In a lecture on 19 April 1941 at the Administrative Academy in Berlin , he assumed that due to a lack of imports of animal feed, these conquered areas would no longer be able to produce surpluses due to a lack of working horses and would therefore become areas which would require support . One thing that this makes clear is the interdependency of various parts of the economy and supply chains. In this case, it is clear that harvests would be lower if there were not horses to do the work because there was not enough feed for them. We can see similar instances of how disrupting supply chains for political reasons caused hunger in both the USSR and in countries occupied by Nazi Germany. It is my opinion that not enough emphasis has been placed on the question of supply chains and the negative effect this has had on the economy in totalitarian states.
As far as the Wannsee Conference of 20 January 1942 was concerned, Neumann represented Goering’s four-year plan authority. As with all civil servants, he represented his ministry and he demanded that Jewish workers from factories essential to the war effort should only be deported if replacements could be found elsewhere. This corresponded to the agreement between the Reich Main Security Office and the military Economic Armament Office . As a result of this intervention, Adolf Eichmann's deportation guidelines of 31 January 1942 provided for an exception for German Jews in armaments factories and agriculture.
In future videos I shall examine the fate of the other participants of the conference and shall continue to examine the fate of the victims.
Photo credits :
House of the Wannsee Conference by A.Savin licence CC BY3.0
Forst by Hans G. Oberlack licence CC BY 4.0
University of Freiburg by Chalco public domain
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