Berlin: Wannsee

We learned to negotiate the subway system in Berlin today. There are many different lines as in cities like Paris or London, but, there are also two entirely separate systems: the U-Bahn and the S-Bahn. Lines may converge, or rather approach one another at some stations, but deciding which to transfer to requires exceptionally good eyesight or very good glasses to decipher the fine print on the transit maps. With some trial and periodic error, we managed to get about. Our first assignation was this morning at 11. We met with Martin Jander, a history lecturer and journalist, to visit some of the Jewish places in Berlin. These are few indeed if our tour is any example. We began at a street sign: Judenstrafze. This simple sign is the only indication that the nearby area was the part of the original city of Berlin where Jews settled. But Jews were there from the beginning: the city was founded in about 1238; the tombstone of a Jewish man has been found dating from 1242. For centuries Jewish people lived in that area as a separate but somewhat tolerated group. In the early seventeenth century a pogrom erupted after a non-Jew, on trial for theft from a church, said that Jews had put him up to it. Forty Jews were brought to the plaza where the trial was being conducted and were burned to death. The rest of the community in Berlin and in the whole of the state of Brandenburg, were evicted. 

Jews were allowed to return after about 150 years as a result of political changes engendered by the Enlightenment. Jews were given the rights to live in areas other than the ghetto, to attend university, to enter the professions, and to join the military. There were definite restrictions at the same time: They could not become full professors or rise to major appointments in the army or state. Still, because of this period of liberalization, many Jews became more integrated into the society and began to consider themselves Germans first and then Jews. Ironically, when the National Socialists came to power and began the relentless drive to strip Jewish people of their most basic rights, it was especially hard for those people to fathom that the processes at work could eventually lead to such an extreme outcome.

Early anti-Semitism had its origins in the differences between Jews and the other groups living in Europe, the biggest difference being that of religion, especially as the whole of the continent was gradually Christianized. Centuries later when the Christian churches themselves became more distinct from one another in creed and ritual, the arguments for a virulent anti-Semitism became more based on “race,” a distinction that, in fact, does not exist. The existence of anti-Semitism has deep roots in most of Europe and though political concerns require “appropriate” language and behaviour, especially in Germany which is constantly under international scrutiny for any signs of its resurgence, the gulf runs deep, leaving areas of accommodation but not true comfort or friendliness between the different populations. It is analogous to black/white relationships in the USA and the resentments and mistrusts held to this day on both sides.

Our guide, Martin, was originally from Freiberg, Germany. The family lived in Berlin for a period in his early teens. Falling in love with the place, he determined to return here for university. As a history major, he found himself going deeper and deeper into the story of his own people, of his own family, realizing that his grandparents were Nazis and that they, as well as his parents who came to adulthood during the war, had never changed their views whatsoever about the war, the Holocaust, or the Jews. They simply didn’t speak openly about the things that had happened. A good family friend whom Martin had dined with at his grandparents’ home had been one of the murderers of Rosa Luxemburg, a leader of the German Social Democrats. Over the years Martin has recognized the degree to which most of his contemporaries live with a split consciousness – denying what at a deeper level they know to be true: the tacit complicity of many, perhaps a majority, of non-Jewish Germans with the Nazis’ aims, particularly in the early years of growth and success in the war.  They claim if questioned, that their families knew nothing of what the Nazis were about and that at any rate there was nothing that they could have done. A general attitude is: we simply don’t talk about these things, let alone think about them.

As examples of the falsehood inherent in these statements, Martin told two stories:  In Berlin alone there were about 3,000 businesses that used slave labourers during the war. Most men were fighting at the front or were dead and workers were desperately needed. Men and women were transported from other countries to work as slaves, held under abominable conditions without sufficient food or proper conditions to allow them health, and forced to work in German industries and businesses. No one in Berlin or in other centres could avoid knowing about this. Each day the slaves were marched by armed guards with dogs to the sites of their work; at the end of each day they were marched back again to barbed-wired, guarded camps where they were kept overnight.  Many inmates of these camps died as a result of the conditions of their work, again, not an easy reality to hide from nearby neighbours.

In some places courageous individuals found ways of helping their workers by giving them extra food and by protecting them from the SS’s periodic transportation sweeps of Jews still among the workers. Like Schindler they would protest losing “their essential workers,” often bribing SS officers into overlooking them. Martin took us to the site of a small workshop where brushes had been made: Otto Weidt’s Workshop for the Blind. During the Nazi era, between 35-40 workers, mainly blind and deaf Jews, worked their under Weidt’s protection. Weidt’s secretary and her mother had to be hidden in a secret room behind a cabinet when the SS came for inspections as Jews were allowed only manual labour in the businesses. In 2008 the workshop, long closed, was opened as the Silent Heroes Memorial Centre, honouring not only Otto Weidt, but also other courageous Germans who had risked their lives to save Jewish people. This memorial and others like it stand in contradiction to the statement that many make that “nothing could be done to help the Jews.”

Martin took us to several other sites as well, including the grounds of the old synagogue which had been destroyed during the war but which holds a memorial to the courage of the wives and children of 1500 Jewish men taken by the Nazis for deportation in 1943. These men had previously been exempted as they were married to non-Jewish German women. The women and children surrounded the building next to the synagogue where the men were being "processed" and refused to leave, loudly demanding the release of their husbands and fathers. The SS threatened to shoot the protesters but ultimately refrained out of fear of larger reactions by other Germans who might support them. The men were released. We saw as well the beautiful "New" synagogue, built over a hundred years ago, greatly damaged during the war. and not reconstructed by the East German government, and also the site of the old Jewish cemetery.  

After leaving Martin and having some lunch, Mark and I took a very long subway ride out to Wannsee, a suburb of Berlin set on a lovely lake surrounded by parks and beautiful homes. One of these was the site of the infamous Wannsee Conference, held in January, 1942 to co-ordinate the proposed “Final Solution” of the “Jewish Question.” Heydrich and Himmler, main architects of the plan to speed up the process of ridding Europe of its Jewish population, gathered heads of departments whose co-operation would be required to facilitate the transportation of Jewish populations to the death camps being set up, especially in Poland. I have written about this conference in an earlier post and so will not elaborate further on its background.

The villa itself is a lovely home set among spacious gardens and overlooking the lake. Each room is set up with exhibits of different aspects of the Conference and its results: the early history and ownership of the villa itself and the manner in which it became property of the SS; the members of the Conference – with pictures of each and an identification of their positions and roles in the Holocaust; early methods of ghettoizing and murdering Jews; transportations to the earliest death camps; and, individual Jews who did or did not survive the attempts of the SS to murder them. We arrived at the villa rather late in the afternoon and as it closed at 6PM, we had just over an hour to look through the exhibit. The photos, the testimonies – some given with audio tapes, and the histories of the victims and the perpetrators, were in composite powerfully moving, particularly as we saw them in the very rooms where this group of men deliberated for just a few hours, coming to quite amiable arrangements about the proposed mass murder of million before they sat down to a sumptuous lunch with wine. There were about twenty visitors in the villa as we went through the exhibit. There was no chatter whatsoever. I am bringing home a book that documents the entire exhibit.

The pictures below are of the house in Wannsee where the meeting took place; some of the high-ranking men attending; and, the list passed about of the numbers of Jews still living in various countries who were to be captured, transported, and murdered.

Tomorrow we will go out to Sachenhausen where one of the very first concentration camps was opened soon after the Nazis came to power in 1933.