ABSTRACT
When I read the protocol of the Wannsee Conference for the first time ten years ago, two details aroused my curiosity: first, the fact that seven of the fourteen participants (not counting Heydrich) held doctoral degrees.1
Most of them were top civil servants. In Germany civil servants are traditionally trained in law. But that so many of them had bothered to get a real or honorary doctoral degree seemed both strange and ominous. Second, that this was the only one of thirty copies to have survived the fall of Nazism. Those legal experts and their helpers had been most efficient in their attempt to destroy almost every trace of their planning of the big crime.
