00:00On January 20th, 1942, 15 men sat down for a catered lunch at a lakeside villa outside
00:06Berlin.
00:06They had wine, they had food, and over the next 90 minutes they planned the murder of
00:11every Jewish person in Europe.
00:12The meeting was called the Vancey Conference.
00:15No one shouted, no one argued.
00:17The men around that table were not monsters in the way we imagined monsters.
00:21They were bureaucrats, lawyers, career government officials.
00:24They passed around documents listing Jewish populations by country, France, Poland, Hungary,
00:30numbers and columns, like a shipping manifest.
00:3311 million people reduced to a logistics problem, and then they solved it, calmly, professionally,
00:38over lunch.
00:39When it was over, they went home to their families.
00:42The minutes from that meeting survived the war.
00:44Historians found them intact, reading them feels wrong, because they sound like notes from
00:48a corporate planning session.
00:50No rage, no guilt, just scheduling.
00:52That is what makes Vancey one of the most disturbing documents in human history.
00:57Evil does not always look like evil, sometimes it looks like paperwork.
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