Lakes and a Dark Date

Hello subscribers!

This week two new posts went up on the DT Blog, the first on Monday, and it was the promised themed post “Dark Tourism & Lakes”. This featured volcanic crater lakes of toxic sulphurous-acid-saturated waters, a lake prone to “limnic eruptions” (namely Lake Kivu in Africa – seen from the Rwandan shores in the photo above), lakes that have witnessed massive landslides leading to catastrophic tsunamis, a lake near Mount St Helens with a vast layer of dead tree trunks still floating on it, lakes associated with environmental disasters, dessication and pollution as well as lakes filled not with water but with mud, salt and even liquid lava. I hope you liked (or will like) this special kaleidoscope.

Then on Wednesday it was a historically important day, and I’m not referring to the inauguration of the 46th president of the USA on that day, but to a much, much darker significant day on that date 79 years ago, when top Nazi bureaucrats attended the Wannsee Conference on the edge of Berlin on 20 January 1942. This “business meeting”, chaired by Reinhard Heydrich, was about how to implement the “Final Solution of the Jewish question”, i.e. how to “exterminate” them most efficiently. The method of gassing, already practised in the Nazis’ “euthanasia” programme to systematically murder disabled and mentally ill people, and also pioneered at the death camp of Chełmno, was adopted for the industrial-scale mass murder of millions of Jews over the following year or two, and in the case of Auschwitz even until early 1945. So, it was at the Wannsee Conference where what has to be regarded as probably the greatest crime against humanity ever was soberly and coldly discussed by a bunch of “Schreibtischtäter” (literally ‘desk perpetrators’, but meaning people who don’t commit the crimes themselves but administer them through bureaucratic acts). One such “Schreibtischtäter” was Adolf Eichmann, who prepared the final summarizing document from the minutes of the conference, which then became the blueprint for the worst phase of the Holocaust. Eichmann survived WWII and fled to South America, but was captured and abducted to Israel by Mossad agents in the 1960s and put on trial there. The contemporary exhibition at the House of the Wannsee Conference also covers this trial, which culminated with Eichmann being sentenced to death. The video footage of the testimonies by this little bureaucrat, showing a cold and callous, unrepentant attitude throughout the trial, makes for chilling viewing.

So much for the Blog and dark history. Of course we are still in a current dark chapter in our own history, as the coronavirus pandemic continues to rage on, worst of all in the USA, but also worldwide. Here in Austria the severe lockdown measures are slowly showing an effect in flattening the curve, but we’re still far from being out of the woods. My wife and I have signed up online to be vaccinated, but it will probably take a long while before it’ll be our turn. Our hopes that it might be in time for the summer so we can go on our planned Namibia trip in August (deferred from last year) are beginning to fade …

So much for now.

Stay safe, stay healthy and until next time,

Peter