New Perspectives on the Holocaust

EVANSTON, Ill. --- On a snowy January day in 1942, 15 high-ranking Nazi Party and German officials met in Wannsee, Germany to plan what they called the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question.” On Tuesday, May 15, a noted Holocaust scholar will speak at Northwestern University about that infamous meeting and discuss what we have learned about it in the course of 70 years.

Mark Roseman, Northwestern’s 2012 Theodore Zev Weiss Holocaust Education Lecturer, will speak at 4 p.m. in the McCormick Tribune Center Forum, 1870 Campus Drive, on the Evanston campus. His lecture, titled “Genocide, Followed by Lunch: The Wannsee Conference 70 years Later,” is free and open to the public. A reception will follow.

Roseman is Indiana University’s Glazer Professor of Jewish Studies and the author of “The Wannsee Conference and the Final Solution: A Reconsideration.” Roseman contends that the infamous Wannsee meeting -- often described as the moment in which systematic persecution and deportation of Jews became a policy of genocide -- was in fact one of many steps on the road to institutional compliance with mass murder.

Roseman’s lecture is sponsored by Northwestern historian and Holocaust Educational Foundation Professor of Holocaust Studies Peter Hayes.