Cranes gather here before setting off for Africa. The sky is up there. One such sky hangs over Berlin. Here, close by. Trees have mostly shed their leaves. Something calm and heavy in the air. Colours are pastel. Up until you dare walk in. It still looks like Mordor in there, even today. We walk through the gate: “Arbeit macht frei”. Earth and rectangles of gravel arranged like constellations to show where the barracks used to be. Arranged to facilitate control by the machine gun on the watchtower.
Camp Sachsenhausen adjacent to the town of Oranienburg near Berlin was one of the first Nazi concentration camps. At the very beginning, it housed the political opponents of Nazism, later homosexuals, persons with developmental disabilities, Jews, Roma, Poles, Russians, etc. The organisation of the camp served as an example for later concentration camps set up by the Nazis. Today, it is a site of a memorial complex.
Oranienburg is also the home of a police school located next to the very centre of the camp. The school uses some of the buildings that used to be part of the camp, those where SS troops had been accommodated. At the entrance to the university complex, there is a large sign with information about what this space was used for when it was part of the camp. The camp is shaped like a triangle. A dreadful triangle.
The inhabitants of Oranienburg were aware of the existence of the camp. The used to watch the smokestacks from the crematorium (the remains of the furnace are still there). From the density of the smoke they could conclude that many people had died that day. They were also disposed to complaining about the ashes that would fall on their clean laundry, because they knew these were ashes of human corpses. The camp brickyard worked for Speer – Hitler’s right-hand man and the main architect of the Reich. The aim was to build Berlin into Welthauptstadt Germania, and the largest building of this satanic capital was designed to have a dome larger than that of St Peter’s Cathedral in Rome. The expected time of death of camp prisoners due to working in the brickyard was within six to eight weeks. This was also the main command of all the Nazi camps in Europe. Sachsenhausen was designed in 1936 for ten thousand prisoners. It was “opened” in 1938 and soon came to intern thirteen thousand people. Within its four square kilometres, between 40 and 60 thousand people were interned immediately before its liberation. It was from here that SS officers would be sent to Auschwitz, Treblinka…
With war veterans and military disabled from Bosnia and Herzegovina, I stand at the place for roll call of the camp prisoners. It is empty now. And somehow too flat. This was where once 10 or 20 thousand people in those striped uniforms stood. The geometric shape of death, the triangle, was on their uniforms. Yellow for Jews, red for communists… Wait a minute, what sort of war veterans from BiH? Those on crutches in this Mordor dust between the gravel and the shrivelled grass. And all of them together: Shoulder to shoulder, former soldiers of the Army of BiH, the Army of RS, and the HVO. They have come for a study visit with the help of the Centre for Non-Violent Action (Sarajevo – Belgrade) and the German Berghof Foundation. To learn about German traumas of facing their own history. To compare German experience with that of Bosnia. These veterans don’t show off. Why would they, when they used to shoot at each other. Now they get on well, joking around when they meet. At the camp, their eyes become heavy, you could almost weigh their looks, and the heaviest are when one of them lifts a crutch to point at something and wonder how a human being could do that to another human being. Although, they’re still not done wondering over Bosnia.
35 thousand people died here by 1945. 10 thousand Soviet soldiers were executed to boot. Some of their faces are on the memorial. The Nazis photographed them in their tortured state to expose them as a “lower race”, but the few profiles are enough to show the multi-ethnic nature of the Soviet Union and the youth of those soldiers. Another 12 thousand people died here since 1945. But the Soviets who took over the camp did not kill, people died of malnutrition, frostbite and disease. The Allies used many Nazi camps as camps for denazification. So Nazis found themselves on the inside. Sachshausen was liberated by the Red Army. It was bombed by Western Allies since this was the centre for the development of Hitler’s atomic bomb. Parts of nearby Oranienburg are still sometimes evacuated due to the detonations. This place has the highest concentration of unexploded bombs from World War II in Germany. There is a story that Stalin’s son Yakov was interned here.
The camp found itself in the territory of East Germany, and DDR wanted some sort of anti-camp. The monumental grey concrete memorial to the victims dominates over the Nazi watchtower. The monument is conceptually part of the “Dimitrov doctrine” (named after the Bulgarian communist Georgi Dimitrov). What is dangerous in this doctrine is the Leninist conclusion that it is essentially capitalism that is to blame for crimes, while fascism is merely its worst stage. The monument depicts Germany among the victims, and the sculpted liberated camp prisoners are embraced by soldiers of the Red Army and are off to create a new state – a socialist state. The monument contains only red triangles – 18 of them. Barracks numbered 37, 38, 39 were full after Kristallnachs, a pogrom of Jews from 1938. Neo-Nazis from Oranienburg tried to burn one of the barracks, made from remnant from the camp as a monument, in 1992 following a visit to the memorial by the Israeli Prime Minister. There are many young neo-Nazis in Oranienburg. Traces of arson were left on purpose. So that it may not be forgotten. And as a warning to those for whom the Holocaust was “long ago”.
Rainer Grieger, president of the Brandenburg Police School, has been in service for 31 years. He has done intensive research into the role of the police in National Socialism, that is, the rate at which the police was incorporated into Hitler’s terror machine. Following 1945, in West Germany, police was decentralised and incorporated into democratic society, while in the DDR, it defended the state and the party from the citizens. Ten years ago, the decision to build the school at this very site that was once the barracks of the SS gave rise to great controversy. Grieger himself was not in favour of this decision in the beginning. “Just recently a colleague from Poland says to me that we can’t walk around with our heads bent in shame over the Holocaust, we must lift up our chins because of our responsibility to the future, to make sure past evils are never repeated. Because the police is also responsible for building peace.” There is an exhibition about the propaganda and crimes of Hitler’s police in the school corridors that cadets see every day. They have and annual 35 hours of training in history. They learn about Hitler and the DDR, Grieger’s deputy and a political scientist from Stuttgart, Jochen Christe-Zeyse, tells us. He also points out that the murderers from the ranks of the police were the so-called ordinary family men. Jochan has always been interested in how these “ordinary people” become murderers in certain contexts. And how to deal with such experience. Survivors from the concentration camp participate in the history lessons. They are quite old now, and there are fewer an fewer of them, which makes the culture of memory all the more important. Jochan points out the importance of making victims and perpetrators concrete, and he is against abstract numbers. “We are looking for the optimal measure of teaching, because I myself as a child did not like hearing about war too much. Research has shown that only a small percent of citizens empathise, while many simple don’t care.” The school has a pronounced sensitivity for the nearby memorial site. This is why, for example, they do not engage in dog training, because Nazis had used dogs in concentration camps to torture people. The cadets live in Oranienburg so as not to be noisy at night. The shooting range has been soundproofed out of respect for the victims.
We stand by the remains of the SS watering hole where Himmler’s boys guzzled beer after their killing sprees. The Brandenburg Memorial Association believed the building should be preserved in its authenticity for memory’s sake. From 1950 to 1990, the space where the school in now located was used by the DDR Army for the purpose of repairing tanks.
The Topography of Terror is a place in the heart of Berlin. Today, it is a Documentation Centre for Nazi crimes. From 1933 to 1945, it was the site of the most important institutions of Nazi terror. Thanks to a citizens’ initiative, in 1987 (on the 750th anniversary of Berlin), and outdoor exhibition was organised, and in 2010 it grew into a museum and centre. The permanent exhibition contains fundamental information about the seat of the Gestapo and the SS and their crimes throughout Europe: from when Nazis came to power, the ways they came to control all positions of power and a detailed overview of institutions that worked in the service of terror, to concrete crimes and persecuted groups. The main protagonist of the exhibition is the head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler. The one whose 1919 school certificate says he “always behaves well” and that he was “conscientious and diligent”. The one of whom Goebbels said in 1930 that “he is not terribly intelligent, but he is diligent and obedient”. The one for whom Speer said in 1953 that he was “half teacher, half raving madman”. The same Himmler, the mass murderer who in 1943 said that “anti-Semitism is exactly the same as delousing”. SS crimes in Serbia also have a place in the Topography. A powerful effect of the the concept is achieved by a parallel display of SS troopers as bloodthirsty in their uniforms and as ordinary people in their private lives. This contrast is also fitting for the Gestapo. “The task of the police is to recognise the symptoms of disease and remove the germs of destruction, that is the job of the police in the Fuhrer’s nation state,” so said Werner Best, deputy to Reinhard Heydrich, chief of state security of the Reich. The reintegration of many Nazis into everyday life after the war was not forgotten either. It was all but amnesty. Because, if the police needed an expert for prints, it took one. Those are the words of Konrad Adenauer, who in 1952 thought it was time we stopped with the obsessive search for Nazis, because we risk not knowing where it will end.
The Germans do not have a single word for monument: “denkmal” denotes remembrance, but it is also used to celebrate a triumph. “Mahnmal” is a monument that cautions and warns. The Holocaust Memorial – a monument to the killed Jews of Europe is located near the Parliament and the Brandenburg Gate. It consists of dark grey concrete slabs of various heights, 2711 in total. Beneath is the Holocaust Information Centre. It seems that some were tired of the debate about the design, suggesting that an empty space be left in the centre of Berlin, a plot with a single sign saying. “German Holocaust Memorial”. We debated for twelve years and we could not find a solution.”
The controversial slabs symbolise the unfathomable nature of the crime. When you are among them, you are overwhelmed with loneliness and claustrophobia, and two people cannot pass each other between two slabs. Underground, the discomfort intensifies, and the global scope and symbolism are reduced to the personal fates of the killed, to personal documents, sites of execution, families… Names written out in large letters glide across the screen, while a voice in the off reads who they were… The slabs do not have a final conceptual interpretation, the feeling is personal, the discomfort intensive. Seemingly similar, they are of various dimensions, different like people. They are not numbers. Underground, there is also the memory of the Demajo family from Serbia. There is also a photograph of Staro Sajmište (the Old Fairground) in its full glory when it was opened, when Milan Stojadinović stood in awe before the Philips stand, along with other citizens, gawking at a television set, only to have all that faith in progress plummet into barbarity in only a few short years. There were Jews who would go to complain to the police after being harassed, only to have the Nazis shave their heads, cuff their trousers and make them walk German streets with a sign saying “I will never complain to the police again”.
“The Missing House” is an installation by the French artist Christian Boltanski located in Berlin at the site of a building on Grosshamburger Street No. 15-16 that was destroyed in the 1945 Allied bombing of Berlin. You will scarcely notice this monument unless you have a particular gift of perception or you know beforehand what you are looking for.
With a group of students, Boltanski researched the history of the destroyed building. They found out that the tenants of the building before the war were mostly Jews who, at the time of the bombing, had probably already been deported, killed, or were lucky enough to have escaped in time. Boltanski had the idea of marking this site by putting up plaques bearing the names of the tenants, their occupations, years of birth and death, all more or less in the spots where they lived.
“Stolperstein” or the “stumbling stone” is a project by artist Gunter Demnig who lives and works in Cologne. His original idea was to have metal plates 10x10cm placed in the cobblestones in front of buildings where victims of Nazism had lived, in memory of them. Demnig says a person is forgotten when their name is forgotten. Almost every stone begins with “Here lived…”. Demnig installed the first “stolperstein” in Berlin, in Kreuzberg, without a permit. He received permission to install another 600 plaques in Cologne, and then a further 2000 in Berlin in 2000. This has become his life’s work, a project implemented in cities throughout Germany, but also in other countries: Austria, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Belgium, Norway, the Ukraine, Poland, and Italy. Over 32000 stones have been installed in over 700 towns and cities.
The commercial centre of what was once West Berlin is the site of the conserved remains of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church. Built at the end of the 19th century, it was badly damaged during the Allied bombing of 1943 when its tower was destroyed. Citizens pressured the authorities not to reconstruct the church, but to leave it as a monument and a warning sign.
The Memorial Church also has a symbol of reconciliation: the Stalingrad Madonna, a drawing made by Kurt Reuber, doctor and theologue. He drew it when he was a German soldier in a trench outside Stalingrad, for Christmas in the icy winter of 1942 when the German army had been surrounded. It is a depiction of Mary holding the baby Jesus in her arms, close to her face. On the right-hand side are the words “Light, Life, Love”, on the left “Christmas in the Cauldron 1942”, and on the bottom “Fortress Stalingrad”. Reuber died in 1944 as a prisoner of war captured by the Soviets. Copies of the Stalingrad Madonna were given as symbols of reconciliation to the cathedrals in Volgograd (formerly Stalingrad) and Coventry destroyed in a German bombing.
There are signs on poles in the Bavarian Square: a stylised drawing on one side, and an example of a Nazi law or regulation on the other. For example: “Jewish authors are prohibited from engaging in any form of literary activity in Germany (March 1935)”. Apart from resembling modern-day advertising, the installation is made more poignant by the selection of places where the signs are exhibited – their content is often linked with present-day infrastructure. Next to the children’s playground is a sign saying “Aryan and non-Aryan children are prohibited from playing together (1938)”; in front of the bakery is a sign saying “Jews are allowed to buy groceries in Berlin only between 5 p.m. and 6 p.m. (1 July 1940)” with a stylised drawing of a loaf of bread on the reverse side.
The authors clearly indicate that the Holocaust did not happen overnight, that years were spent preparing for it until a group of people was dehumanised to such an extent as to make its “eradication” legitimate.
Some 16 thousand Jews lived in the Bavarian Quarter before the war. By 1943, none were left.
According to one relevant study, today every fifth German has Anti-Semitic leanings. But four out of five are not anti-Semitic.
In tomorrow’s edition: Experience with the Stasi.
published in newspaper “Danas”
25th October 2012
http://www.danas.rs/danasrs/drustvo/terazije/nebo_nad_berlinom.14.html?news_id=249817
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