The Wannsee Conference with historian Professor Sir Richard Evans

20 January 2022
Historian Professor Sir Richard Evans interviewed by David Herman on the 80th anniversary of the infamous Wannsee Conference.
About this event
The Wannsee Conference formalised the Nazis’ policy of the extermination of Jews in occupied Europe. On 20 January 1942, leading Nazi officials met at the Wannsee Conference Villa in Wannsee, a south-western suburb of Berlin. The conference had been called to discuss and coordinate a cheaper, more efficient, and permanent solution to the Nazis’ ‘Jewish problem’. The conference was attended by senior government and SS officials, and coordinated by Reinhard Heydrich.
Professor Sir Richard Evans is an historian of modern Germany and modern Europe, and has published over 20 books in the field, most recently The Pursuit of Power: Europe 1815-1915 and Eric Hobsbawm: A Life in History. He was President of Wolfson College from 2010-2017.
Professor Sir Evans was born in London to Welsh parents and was educated on an Essex County Council scholarship at Forest School. He studied at Jesus and St Antony’s Colleges, Oxford. He holds a Doctorate of Philosophy from the University of Oxford, Doctorates of Letters from the Universities of Cambridge and East Anglia, and honorary doctorates from the Universities of Oxford and London and from Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario.
He is a Fellow of the British Academy, the Royal Historical Society, the Royal Society of Literature and the Learned Society of Wales, and an Honorary Fellow of Gonville and Caius College Cambridge, Birkbeck, University of London, and Jesus College Oxford. He has been Vice-Master and Acting Master of Birkbeck, University of London, Chairman of the History Faculty in the University of Cambridge. He is currently Provost of Gresham College, City of London. In 2000 he was Principal Expert Witness in the libel action brought by David Irving against Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books, as dramatized in the movie Denial (2016).
David Herman is a freelance writer based in London. He has written for The Guardian, TLS, The New Statesman and Prospect. David is Senior Book Reviewer for the Jewish Chronicle and Contributing Editor to the AJR Journal.