THE WORST CONFERENCE EVER

Those of us who work in the events industry are always striving to make our events enjoyable, remarkable and, of course memorable (hopefully for all the right reasons!).

Sometimes, and it’s often through no fault of our own, things go wrong. A speaker goes well over time. A flight is diverted. A delegate turns up to the Gala Dinner in the same dress as the CEO.

When you think about it, there’s SO MANY opportunities for things to go haywire that, the fact that they rarely do is one of the finest testaments to the skills and dedication of the people in our industry.

But even if the electricity goes out as everyone files into the conference room, I can 100% guarantee you that your event will not even come close to qualifying for the title of “The Worst Conference Ever”.

If you have a few minutes and are curious enough, I would like to tell you about the one that was.

It happened eighty years’ ago this year. On January 21, 1942, in fact.

It took place in a suburb of Berlin, Germany called Wannsee in a very fine mansion on the shores of a very pretty lake.

Event industry people know that destination selection plays an important role in setting the scene for a conference. This was a very tranquil part of Germany. A very attractive place to meet. A photo of the venue is shown at the top of this article.

It was such a memorable setting that, forevermore the event was known simply as The Wannsee Conference.

Interestingly, the conference was small. Just 15 delegates attended. And, whilst it wasn’t a medical conference, eight of these people held doctorates from some of Germany’s finest educational institutions. So it was a gathering of highly intelligent minds.

So, you’re probably wondering what could possibly have happened at such a small gathering to have qualified it for the title of Worst Conference Ever.

Surely the catering could cope with a group that size? And there couldn’t have been a disaster with the AV, could there? They didn’t need microphones … and, since it was 1942, there wasn’t that much AV in existence, anyway.

But the truth is that this conference had more impact on the world than any event any of us have ever worked on.

It all came down to the heart and soul of every conference – its agenda.

Like many of the conferences we put on, these people had gathered to discuss ideas. To formulate a strategy. To devise a solution to a problem that was deemed to be in desperate need of working out, despite the fact Germany was heavily involved in the War that raged across Europe at the time.

Early in proceedings, the agenda of the conference was made clear when copies of the following yellow piece of paper were presented to the delegates:

If you look through the left-hand column, you will see it lists, in German, the names of many of the countries and jurisdictions in Europe at the time.

The right-hand column contains numbers. Populations. According to the bottom row, the total came to a little over 11 million.

So, clearly, this wasn’t a tally of the TOTAL population of each country (many more people lived in Europe at that time).

This was a tally of the number of Jews who lived across Europe, and the agenda of the conference was to work out how to slaughter them all.

These 15 high-ranking, highly-educated members of a seemingly civilised country had been ordered by Adolf Hitler to devise a way of finding and gathering every Jewish person in Europe, and killing them.

They were to come up with what became known as the “final solution” of the “Jewish Question”. To design The Holocaust.

Now, those words may affect me a little differently than you, as … and here’s my disclaimer (in case the surname doesn’t give it away) … I’m Jewish … and I know that within those 11 million people were dozens of my family members.

Here’s a photo of Chelmno, a clearing in a forest in Poland, where my family met their end.

It looks peaceful now, but under this ground lay their bodies, along with about 200,000 other victims. Almost all Jews.

Prior to the Wannsee conference, the Nazis would collect Jews from the villages and towns in which they lived … in my family’s case, the Polish village of W?oc?awek … pack them standing tightly in trucks and drive them several hours to this place. They were then ordered to dig large ditches as their graves and were shot.

But this method was too slow and costly for Hitler, so he ordered the Wannsee Conference to come up with ‘better’ ways of exterminating the Jews.

So, the trucks that were used to gather the Jews from their homes were adapted to have the exhaust pipe feed into themselves, which effectively delivered to places like Chelmno truckloads of ready-made corpses, saving time and bullets.

The architecture of the industrial-scale killing factories known as Concentration Camps (so named as their purpose was to ‘concentrate’ the widespread Jewish population into a small number of destinations so they could be more effectively dealt with) was refined.

In the end, the Wannsee Conference achieved just over half of its goal. Six million out of 11 million European Jews were killed.

Perhaps not a success in the eyes of the delegates and organisers, but DEFINITELY worthy of the title of Worst Conference Ever.

This week these events have been much on my mind as yesterday was Yom HaShoah: Holocaust Memorial Day and it occurred to me that a surprisingly large number of people don’t know much about it.

I mean, they generally KNOW it happened and may have seen some scenes in movies depicting some of the horrors and injustice.

But they generally have little idea of how it actually came about. And, if they're ignorant of some of those details, it becomes all too easy to accept attitudes and opinions that made the Holocaust possible.

For example, people know the term anti-semitism, but they've never understood that it is a hatred that runs so historically deep, that is fuelled by a constant barrage of lies and falsehoods that, even to this day, people can find themselves not being comfortable with the very idea of there being Jews.

And are even more offended that they have a country, Israel.

They are taught that a guy called Adolf Hitler killed lots of Jews … but never stop to think that, whilst the ideas and motivation were his, the actual killing was done by people OTHER THAN him.

In fact, the real work of the Holocaust was done by people more like us than like him. A nation of educated, seemingly cultured and civilised people were convinced that Jews were less than human and deserved this treatment.

And very few of us are aware that something so essential to our events industry … a conference … played such a terrible role in history.

Just as the phrase “Lest We Forget” is synonymous with memorial services on ANZAC Day, the words “Never Forget” are forever tied to The Holocaust.

I hope this article helps ensure we never forget.

Darren Isenberg is one of Australia’s most booked and re-booked Corporate MC’s and Presenters. He also speaks to groups on how to improve their Positive Influence and the Presentation Skills.

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You can learn more about him by heading to www.dipresents.com.au or by asking his kids. But don’t talk to his mother. She still has no idea … but thinks he’s great at what it is anyway.