Day 3 - Berlin

After another sumptuous buffet breakfast, we boarded our bus for visits to three very different memorials:  the Bavarian Quarter memorial, the Grunewald train station memorial, and the Wannsee House.  As we drove to our first stop, Mr. Barmore had us revisit some information from yesterday:  the fact that modernization had come late to Germany, she had experienced an accelerated pace of development, she had had a fast and disastrous downfall with her loss in World War I, and was a society in crisis.  He told us that Nazism was an offshoot of World War I as the people were so disgusted with their fall from power.  And we learned that Communists had also tried to foment a revolution in Germany.  The crisis in Germany society lent itself to extremist ideologies as the people tried to cope with their situation.  Mr. Barmore said that in the American system, things were explained by ‘the American way’: using the Constitution and American values, if you do things the right way you will succeed.   The Nazis, he said, insisted that it was not a process, but the blood, that will provide success.  The difference between the American system and Nazism was the freedom to choose.  With the United States, one could choose how to act, but in Nazism, there was no choice as one could not change one’s blood.  Democracy depends on choice, he said, which is one of its strengths and one of its weaknesses. 

Mr. Barmore told us the Nazis were faced with a paradox:  they came to power in 1933 and wanted to solve the “Jewish Question”, but did not know how.  The Nazi ideology was racist and about the survival of the fittest [the Aryan race], but in the beginning they were more about expulsion of Jews from society rather than their annihilation.  On the one hand, they wanted to eliminate Jews from society, but on the other, they didn’t have a clue as to how they were going to accomplish their goal.  Yet in nine years, there would be 5 factories of death operating in Poland, with precisely that function.  So how did they arrive at 1941, doing exactly what they could not conceive of doing in 1933?

We learned that it was a process which consisted of three phases. Historians had long struggled to understand the process and they fell into two schools of thought. Intentionalists believed that there was a straight line between Nazi ideology and the killings.  The other school of thought, the functionalists reasoned that if it was a straight line, there should be references to the killings in early Nazi documents. Yet, historians could not discern anything about anniliation in reports of early years. Today, most historicans accept the functionalist view which holds that Nazi policy evolved "a twisted road to Auschwitz"due to changing circumstances in three phases. This means, said Mr. Barmore, that if the functionalist view is correct at each phase of the Holocaust things could have been done to avert it, making individual and national inactions more troubling.

At one sign which showed a loaf of bread, the ordinance read ‘Jews are only allowed to buy food between 4 and 5 in the afternoon’  and was dated April 1940.   Mr. Barmore spoke of milestones for Germany’s Jews in the Holocaust.  This rule, he noted, for Berlin’s Jewish community, was just such a milestone.  He told us of how Inge Deutchkron who had survived the Holocaust and created the Otto Weidt Museum of the Workshop of the Blind we had visited yesterday, would mention this law and say that when her neighbors saw them standing in line for bread, they would not acknowledge them but would cross to the other side of the street.  They were embarrassed,  and chose to not notice her so they would have to acknowledge the law; they preferred avoidance to having to deal with the injustice of the rule.  He noted that the people that really hurt you are closer people, friends who don’t notice you, more than the law itself.  And all this was occurring in a society in which Jews sought so much to assimilate.

We also stopped by a local elementary school which has been engaging in a special project.  The letter explaining the project states that “because of the relationship to the history of local Jewish life, this project is embedded in the teaching unit ‘National Socialism’ for our 6^th grade class.”  Students choose a name of a Jewish citizen from the community and do research on the individual, then memorializing that person by preparing a brick to add to their growing wall in the schoolyard during a ceremony each spring that now receives considerable attention from the Berlin community.  Since the project’s initiation in 1994, more than 1,000 students have participated in this activity.

Our next visit was to the train station of Grunewald, a wealthy residential area of Berlin.  From this train station, beginning on October 18, 1941, that most of Berlin’s Jewish residents were to be deported.  Olaf showed us three memorials to the deportation.  The first was some railroad ties in front of the entrance to the train station, established by a local group of Lutheran women in 1986, with a plaque commemorating the beginning of the deportations and a group of trees which had been brought from Auschwitz and planted there.  The second memorial was a wall which depicted figures as they walked up the hill to the train platform.  The third memorial, established by the German railroad, was two platforms lined by plaques which represented each deportation train listing the date, number of Jews and the destination. 

Mr. Barmore also spoke to our group about how the Holocaust represented modern murder.  First, because of the technology, and second, because of the bureaucracy.  The technology allowed the Nazis to bring people from as far away as Norway quickly and efficiently, and the vast system of bureaucrats, with their organization and exacting, meticulous methods, made it possible for the Holocaust to be so total.  This presented a problem after the war, he said, in that how do you answer an individual who says, “I didn’t do anything wrong, I just drove a train” or “I just typed a letter, I’m not responsible.”  How can you do the most terrible things, without really thinking you are taking part in it, we were asked.

   

After lunch at a nearby German restaurant we arrived at our final memorial destination for the day, the Wannsee House.  It was in this house, located on the beautiful waterfront lake, Wannsee, that representatives of the bureaucratic agencies would meet on January 20, 1942 for a luncheon over which they would discuss how to carry out the plan known as the Final Solution.   Olaf told us how after the war, though the city owned the Wannsee House, it was a property that was ignored until 1992 when they opened the exhibition about what had occurred here fifty years earlier.  “Initially they wanted to forget,” he said.  “Now they want to use it to educate.”

Inside the Wannsee House, which in 1942 was a house used by Nazi leaders for meetings and social gatherings, Mr. Barmore reiterated what he had told us about Nazi racial ideology; namely that the Nazis did not view their desire to eliminate the Jews from German society as emanating from any hatred of them, but from their ‘reasoned’ conclusion that Jews were essentially a destructive virus in the body of Germany and for its survival, they needed to be eliminated.  “The Jews are our misfortune” was a common phrase used by the Nazis.  To the Nazis, ‘misfortune’ represented ‘evil’ from a profound point of view.”

Phase  I [1933-1939] focused on legislation and emigration of Jews.   Early in the Nazi years, April 1, 1933, a one day boycott of Jewish businesses occurred.  This was not orchestrated from above, by the government, but was an action of the S.A. and was unsuccessful and unsettling for the German people because it represented chaos at a time when they had elected a new government on the promise of law and order.  Nazis therefore decided they must not allow mob activity to take over and decided to go about the process differently.  They would have the legal state first define who was Jewish, then take away the rights of those individuals and proceed against them in a legal, orderly way to “squeeze them out of Germany”.   But when no nations were willing to accept  Germany’s 500,000 Jews [less than 1% of the population] and many Jews were unwilling to leave their home, the Nazis realized they would have to go about their goal a different way, and Reinhard Heydrich was placed in charge of a special office to find solutions for the Jewish quarter.

Phase II [1939-1941] focused on the period of concentration or ghettoization.  The Nazis had been unsuccessful in dealing with their own Jews, and now with the invasion of Poland, there were an additional 2.5 million Jews that Germany needed to deal with.  Possible solutions discussed were the concentration of the Jews near Lublin, or shipping them to Madagascar, neither of which was possible.  The Jews of Poland were concentrated in the larger cities into ghettos during this period.  Mr. Barmore noted that this was a phase of the process which is unfortunately often overlooked in a discussion of the Holocaust, while the death camps are the major focus.  He told us that the average length of time a Jew spent in a death camp was 2 hours.  This is where they were brought to die, while the ghettos were the place that they lived --- for one, two, maybe three years.  So a study of the ghettos, he reasoned, and their life in the ghettos, was a crucial part of Holocaust history.

Phase III began June 1941 with the German attack on the Soviet Union.  The Nazis understood that it would be a special war; one of competing ideologies and they prepared for that special war by establishing special units, called Einsatzgruppen [mobile killing units], prepared for a harsh war with Russian communists, partisans, and Jews who might be aiding the Soviet army.   These units from June through December would be responsible for killing more and more Jews outside big cities, often with the help of local citizens, especially in the Ukraine and Lithuania who viewed themselves not as being conquered by the Nazis but as being liberated from the Soviets.

After this happens in the Soviet Union, but only in the Soviet Union, the Nazis needed to decide what to do with the rest of the Jews and they started analyzing their options in October and November of 1941.   They reasoned that the mobile killing units were inefficient, and they were especially concerned that 20-30% of the members of the units doing the shootings had suffered mental breakdowns.  They needed to design an indirect, impersonal way of killing by industrializing it, so they developed the factories of death in Poland.   They had already experimented with carbon monoxide at Belzec and zyklon B gas at Auschwitz [then a concentration camp], and so they were ready to proceed, but they needed a process of how to proceed. Hitler’s deputy, Reinhard Heydrich was given that task.

 

Therefore three phases in the Twisted Road to Auschwitz, I-Emigration and Legislation, II-Ghettoization, and III-Annihilation were complete.   However the Nazis came to be what they could not conceive of when they initially came to power, Heydrich and representatives of the bureaucratic agencies which would be used in the  murder of  Europe’s Jewish population delineated the process for it here,  over lunch, in this house where we now stood.

Mr. Barmore's final comment to us, before we boarded the bus, was that for himself and many Holocaust educators, the study of this event remains so relevent because the Holocaust poses questions that no one is beyond.

 

Day 2 - Berlin

DAY 2  BERLIN

Wednesday, April 8, 2015

This morning, after a good night’s sleep and a wonderful breakfast at the Moevenpick, we began our day with Mr. Barmore asking us to consider some questions before we headed out, such as:  “How did Hitler come to power?”, “Why do dictators like referendums?”, “Was the Nazi Party voted in to power or was it more that the previous regime was being voted out?” , and “Why was the East German dictatorship after the war called the ‘Democratic Republic of Germany’?” In essence we were being asked to consider the relationship between citizens and their government and the responsibility of individuals in a democracy.

We learned that Germany’s development in nationalism was different from most other nations.  Germany was more than 300 principalities which needed to be unified.  What makes people think they should unify?  Some suggestions were shared culture or history, common language, and in the case of Germany, a common enemy in the personage of Napoleon.  

Our first stop of the day was at the site of the 1933 book burnings in Berlin, in the plaza in front of Humboldt University.  The memorial to the book burnings is a glass plate on the plaza through which one can see rows of empty bookshelves.  We were asked to consider which books were burned and why?  Mr. Barmore told us that the Nazis wanted to destroy books by authors they felt were ‘contaminating’ the German culture.

We then walked to the German Historical Museum where Mr. Barmore told us he would be showing us some highlights of German history in an attempt to provide a framework that would contextualize the Holocaust.   That, in and of itself, he said, was difficult because if one accepts the assumption that German history defines the German people, how does a museum present that history as something which led up to what that society did?  He also spoke to us about nations having historical mythology and how nations often tried to recreate what was viewed as having been a perfect time.  And sometimes, we reshape our nation’s past in order to accommodate the future we desire.  Nazism, we were told, is the outcome of German nationalism, and their ideal to recreate the perfect Middle Ages.

At the German Historical Museum,  Mr. Barmore used the United States to explain some of the differences between the concept of nationalism as it developed in Europe and what we would call ‘American nationalism’.   America, he said, was a result of rationalism and the focus on democracy and the rights of the individual.  In the United States, the structure and role of the government was created in the name of the people.  The purpose of the state is to guard the civil rights of the citizens and the government officials in America are our civil servants.   In contrast, in the European historical evolution of the context of ‘nation’, it is something greater than its people, something vague and difficult to define.  The individual is only something because of the group; an individual cannot develop culture alone.   The nation will be personified by a symbol in order to simplify it.   France would be symbolized by the female statue, Marianne, Britain by Britannia, and Germany by the statue,  Germania.   And under fascism, the German state would become an absolute;  the role of the individual in that society was to serve the state.

As we continued through the museum we learned that during the Romantic Period,  many aspects that gave identity to a people, such as language, literature and music, would become specific to that nation.  In this way, Shakespeare’s plays became not just literature, but English literature, and Beethoven’s music would become German music.  While Germans were lacking in terms of geographic unification, they developed a sense of cultural unity which defined them.

 Later, when the Nazis came to power, a spiritual component to nationalistic pride was added, so that Germans became superior not just physically but spiritually, which manifested itself in creativity.  For the Nazis this superior creativity would be attributed to race.  And when Jews became emancipated they entered the middle class, became economically successful and fell in love with German culture --- what Mr. Barmore called this the “one-sided love affair”.   While Jews felt assimilated, eventually German racism would hold that Jewish contributions to German culture were not creativity, but a vulgarization, cheapening or copy of that culture, and that would eventually destroy the culture.  To the Nazis, Germans created literature, Jews created journalism, a vulgarization of literature, and while Germans produced theatre, Jews created movies.  To protect the very existence of German culture, therefore, we were told, the Nazis believed that Jews needed to be expelled from German society. 

From the museum we went to the former Jewish neighborhood, Mitte.  Our first stop here was the Otto Weidt Workshop for the Blind. In this factory, students heard from Olaf about the blind and deaf employees who made brooms and brushes from horse hair and pig hair. Otto Weidt also employed Jews, and used the Berlin Work Act to legally keep employing his Jewish workers during the war. Because some of the brooms and brushes made were supplied to the German army, the workshop was deemed ‘important for the war effort' .  Otto protected his Jewish employees as well as a Jewish family of four which hid in a secret room built behind a secret wardrobe closet.  After eight months of hiding, the family was betrayed and deported to Auschwitz, where they were all murdered.  Olaf explained how Otto Weidt helped one employee, Inge Deutschkron, who is the survivor who returned to Berlin after the war and memorialized the rescue efforts of Otto Weidt by single-handedly creating this museum.

 

After lunch we walked to the Jewish cemetery where we visited the grave of Moses Mendelssohn and the memorial to the women who had been interned in the German concentration camp north of Berlin, Ravensbruck.  On our walk to the last stop  of the day, the Old Neue Synagogue, <olaf called our attention to several engraved brass plaques amidst the cobblestones of the sidewalks on which we were walking.  These, we were told, were part of the Stolpersteine (Stumbling Stones) project of a German artist and sculptor, Gunter Deming.  Since 1989 he has placed these stones, at the request of family or friends, to memorialize victims of National Socialism, primarily Jews.  Each stone bears the year of birth and the deportation and fate of the person.  The stones are then laid before the building where the individual or family lived. In light of our discussion yesterday of traditional versus modern memorials, Olaf asked us whether or not we thought these were an appropriate memorial and there were varying perspectives.  

We continued on to the Old Neue Synagogue which was built over a six year period and consecrated in 1866.  The beautiful Moorish building style and the large Schwedler Dome of gold, shaped the silhouette of Central Berlin,  and was a symbol visible to all of the self-confidence of the Jewish community.  During Kristallnacht, in November of 1938, most of Berlin’s 14 synagogues were burned, but Wilhelm Kratzfeld, the Berlin police officer responsible for the district, was able to preserve the synagogue from major damage by chasing away the arsonists and calling the fire department.  The synagogue was able to resume services in April of 1939 and the last services took place in March of 1940 at which time the synagogue became a storage place for documents and records.  Allied bombs severely damaged the synagogue in 1943 and in 1958 the main synagogue was blasted in what was then East Berlin.  In 1988 a seven year reconstruction project was undertaken and the synagogue opened as a museum in 1995.

Mr. Barmore talked to us about German Jews and their aspirations.  People, he said, when they entered into a different society or culture, might try to assimilate or integrate.  Many Jews wanted to truly assimilate into German society, even to the point of converting to Christianity.  Others wanted to integrate, which meant becoming a part of the society but still retaining certain elements of Judaism.  Mr. Barmore told us how German Jews, attempting to integrate into German society, would built such extravagant synagogues, to rival the most elegant Christian churches.   And Olaf showed us two Torah curtains which contained a Psalm.  While the writing was in Hebrew letters, the words created were Germans.

We headed back to the hotel where we would have time to freshen up before our dinner at a restaurant back in this Jewish neighborhood.  

Upon returning to the hotel, the students were asked to consider the various sites of today and to reflect upon some aspect of a memorial that had impacted them.  The goal of this trip is to complicate students' thinking and their observations reflected that goal.   Camille noted that she was impressed with the synagogue and the fact that instead of fully remodeling the synagogue, the community "took the damage with pride" leaving it unfinished.  Caitlin stated that the book burning memorial left the greatest impact on her because of the fact that the Nazis would choose to destroy knowledge, simply because of whom it came from.

YouTube video of Otto Weidt's Workshop - Student Reflections

https://youtu.be/HGim9auASLc

Day 1- Berlin

DAY ONE – Berlin

Tuesday, April 7, 2015

Nineteen students from three high schools, New Milford and Midland Park [New Jersey] and Bishop O'Dowd [California] met together for the first time this morning at our hotel, the Moevenpick, in Berlin.  After introducing ourselves and meeting our Israeli historian and guide throughout our two weeks in Europe, Shalmi Barmore, we set off with our local guide, Olaf, to get a sense of the capital city of Germany.  Everywhere we went there were signs of construction as this city is an amazing study in old architecture and new buildings.  We learned that 60% of Berlin had been destroyed during World War II and then after the reunification in 1989 of East and West Berlin, there came a new spurt of building, particularly in formerly East Berlin. 

 

We visited the former Central Airport which had been built by the Nazis and which later served as the airport for West Berlin until the reunification of the city.  Next we spent some time at the famous Checkpoint Charlie, one of the security checkpoints through which people could legally pass between East and West Berlin after the Berlin Wall was built in 1961, at an aerial map of Berlin, we were able to see the scope of the Berlin Wall which stretched 96 miles and which had been built to keep Germans in East Berlin from escaping to the democratic West.  Standing before the map, Mr. Barmore asked us to consider some words, such as ‘occupy’ and ‘liberate’.  Did the Germans feel as though they were being liberated by the Allies?  Did they feel as if they were under an occupation?  Thus we were introduced to a theme which we will revisit many times during this trip, that of ‘perspectives’.  We will be challenged to consider the various perspectives of individuals living in Europe during World War II and to analyze their viewpoints. 

At Checkpoint Charlie, and later throughout the day, we saw several remnants of the Berlin Wall, whether they were five or six panels, carefully displayed before the Potsdamer Platz for tourists to visit, an untouched section of the wall left standing before the Topography of Terrors, a museum which we will visit tomorrow, or markers on the streets of Berlin which denote where the wall had stood.  Mr. Barmore told us that for him, Berlin was a haunted city; haunted by so many events that had taken place here. 

We visited Museum Island, home to many outstanding museums including the Pergamon Museum and the Egyptian Museum.  Olaf asked us to reflect upon why the Germans had spent so much time and money on building museums and bringing such important cultural and historical works to Berlin.  He spoke to us about how Germany felt she was making a statement that there had been Greece, then Rome, and now there would be another culture, Berlin.   Having made that statement, that Berlin was a city to rival these past cultures, it begged the question: If Germans were so appreciative of culture and learning, how could these people have followed Hitler?  How could the Holocaust have happened with such a cultured, educated people?

Mr. Barmore then spoke about why Berlin is building a new palace, which will house a museum which chronicles German history.   To Germany, it is important that she not be defined by the Holocaust.  It is a part of her past, which she has confronted, but she also wants to showcase the earlier periods of German history as well as what Germany has accomplished since the end of World War II. He asked us to personalize it and consider how people would deal with a certain chapter in their life that they were not particularly proud of. 

 

Our next stop was the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe which is a city block on which are placed 2711 grey blocks.  We talked about what the memorial represented to visitors as well as to the residents of Berlin.  We spoke of the difference between the classic memorials in so many cities which honor war heroes and which leave little room for discussion and the modern memorials which seem to challenge the visitors to enter into a discussion about what the memorial stands for.  What is the symbolism of the blocks?  What is appropriate behavior at the memorial? Why is it only for the murdered Jews?  Next we walked across the street to the memorial to the homosexuals who were victims of Nazi persecution and discussed its placement, content and symbolism.

 

      We stopped for lunch at Potsdamer Platz shopping center’s food court and then continued on to the Reichstag, Germany’s Parliament building.  After taking a group ‘selfie’, we walked to the top of the glass dome, which gave us stunning views of the city of Berlin.  Across the street from the Reichstag, we visited the memorial to the Sinti and Roma [more commonly known as Gypsies].  A pond with a stone center and ever changing flowers, surrounded by stones carved with the names of camps where Sinti and Roma were persecuted and executed, it, as with the two previous memorials was thought-provoking. 

 

 

We drove around the city of Berlin for a little while longer, taking in sights of various districts and seeing more portions of the Berlin Wall, and then headed back to our hotel where the exhausted students were given their Berlin roommates and time to relax and freshen up before dinner in the hotel.

Waiting for the teachers to decide their roommates!!!!!

Holocaust Study Tour 2015

Welcome to our blog for HST 2015! We will be posting daily beginning on April 7th. Please join us as we embark on an educational journey and comment on our blog. We look forward to the insightful comments from our followers each year.