In ‘Andor’ season 2, a Wannsee Conference reference, and a new sort of space Jew

By pj pigs
April 23, 2025

Since the beginning of the franchise, Star Wars has invited Nazi comparisons — but usually superficial ones.

The white-armored Stormtroopers, Darth Vader in his flared helmet and Imperial bridge officers in Hugo Boss-inspired feldgrau, had all the outward markers of space fascism while largely sidestepping racial ideology or tactics.

But Tony Gilroy’s Andor is another animal, and in its season two premiere, the Disney+ show took its cue from the infamous meeting where the Nazis outlined the final steps of the Holocaust — and even created a new sort of space Jew for the occasion.

At a snow-capped mountain lair, Director Orson Krennic (Australian Jewish actor Ben Mendelsohn) gathers a select circle of the Empire’s most decorated bureaucrats, advising them that this particular meeting is not to be included on their calendars.

“No notes, no records, none of you were here,” Krennic says, before lowering a shade on the window and playing a cheery informational video about Ghorman, a proud planet of spider silk merchants marked for possible annihilation.

If all this secrecy seems a lot like the Wannsee Conference, it should.

“The very first scene that Krennic has where he talks about Ghorman, that’s based on the Wannsee convention — the Nazi convention where the Nazis got together and planned the final solution over a business lunch,” Andor creator Tony Gilroy told The Hollywood Reporter.

At the 1942 Wannsee Conference — indeed a luncheon — shorthand minutes were taken, but the conference’s chair Reinhard Heydrich ordered, at the meeting’s close, that the notes were not to be verbatim. Only a protocol summary of the meeting survives.

Dramatizing this summit, Gilroy and director Ariel Kleiman chose a more dramatic locale than the Wannsee villa, which overlooked its eponymous lake, instead opting for what the Reporter describes as Star Wars’ answer to Hitler’s Eagle Nest in Bavaria and Hohenwerfen Castle in Austria.

That the scene is chilling — and recalls the quite good HBO film of the meeting, 2001’s Conspiracy with Kenneth Branagh as Heydrich and Stanley Tucci as Adolf Eichmann — is a testament to Gilroy’s more sophisticated take on George Lucas’ universe.

But the Empire’s target of Ghorman — desired for its deposits of a mineral called Kalkite — is also more than a bit suggestive of the Nazis’ chosen victims. As we watch the video of the doomed weavers spinning fibers, there is a flash of what looks remarkably like a Torah scroll with wooden dowels being closed. (I suspect Kleiman, who is Jewish, knew exactly what he was doing, even if in-universe it’s some Ghorish way to roll textiles.)

The people on the street — who aren’t cutting cloth — are dressed a lot like pre-war Europeans, including a man in a skullcap who sells his wares from a suitcase.

And then we get to the propaganda: two Goebbelsian figures are behind a whisper campaign to “weaponize galactic opinion” against the Ghormans to paint them as a people who are clannish, arrogant, overcharge customers and, as we see demonstrated, work in a space spider shmatta business. The empire’s propagandists, much like the Nazis,  love the readymade metaphor of the spiders Ghormans use in their trade, noting, “it’s an image we can build on.” There’s even a bit of a Stab-in-the-Back myth at play having to do with shipping lanes.

Gilroy may have gilded the lily; the parallels to libels aimed Jews are so exhaustive, when Krennic cuts the team behind the smears off to say “we get the idea,” it feels like a writer’s note to self.

While we haven’t seen the Ghormans in the flesh yet, I wouldn’t be surprised if they are also accused of funding some form of alien Marxism. We’ll have to stay tuned to learn more about these people — who Wookieepedia identifies as including some brave partisans — but any sort of space Jew that improves upon the template of Watto is to be welcome in this galaxy.