Did anyone speak out? After a sermon denouncing the T–4 program by Catholic Archbishop Clemens Von Galen in August 1941 was publicized, Hitler quietly ordered a suspension of the gassing program, though valuable lessons in mass murder had been learned. The killing of children and other undesirables resumed a year later under more decentralized circumstances, with perhaps 200,000 killed before the end of the war.[16]
Later, in deconstructing today’s experience, I’m reminded that there is also a danger in untempered and unbalanced curricula and in a system of education that increasingly crowds out discussions of morality and ethics in the classroom in favor of massive testing and technologically radicalized data-driven ‘goal setting,’ when the goal is squarely focused on high-stakes exams that determine a teacher’s worth and create the entirely wrong message for young people about what we should be valuing as a society. And I am reminded of these good doctors and nurses, damn good test takers, mind you, and leave you with this note from an enlightened principal to his teachers:
I am a survivor of a concentration camp. My eyes saw what no person should witness—gas chambers built by learned engineers. Children poisoned by educated physicians. Infants killed by trained nurses. Women and babies shot by high school and college graduates.
So, I am suspicious of education.
My request is this—help your children become human. Your efforts must never produce learned monsters, skilled psychopaths or educated Eichmanns. Reading, writing, and arithmetic are important only if they serve to make our children more human.[17]
July 6, 2013/Wannsee
Berlin. We arrived here late in the evening on the 5th from Hannover by rail, and set up headquarters in the Marriott Berlin, which is very nice, for a few days. Our bus passes Jesse Owens Allee on our tour of the Olympic Stadium, built by the Nazis for the Berlin Games of 1936, a monument to the grand vision of the Imperial Germania of the Third Reich, where sport for sport’s sake was fine, but sport for the conditioning of the super race was better. An Indian cricket team practices on the field; the fields are still in use today. We continue down into the elegant southwestern Berlin suburb at Lake Wannsee, and enter the gates of the infamous Wannsee Villa, where on one day in January 1942, decisions were made that would ramp up the fate of European Jewry, and to use the language of the perpetrators, the ‘Final Solution to the Jewish Question’ would be decided once and for all.
But make no mistake. The genocide of the Jews was already very well underway. But it was with the invasion of the Soviet Union that for the Nazi hierarchy, efforts among various government bureaucratic agencies would have to be coordinated. Here, at this beautiful mansion on a sailboat-dotted lake, with its manicured grounds and gardens, the intentionality of the Holocaust hits you square in the face and takes your breath away.
A troubling photograph is on display here—‘Einsatzkommando 12b of Einsatzgruppe D kills Jewish women and children in a pit, Dubossary, Moldova/Transnistria, 14 Sept. 1941.’ Twenty or so soldiers with rifles are shooting down into a ditch; through the tall grasses we see the target figures, as officers stand on and watch, or walk past in the foreground. It was taken just seven weeks after the blitzkrieg steamrolled into Soviet territory in the largest land and air invasion of the history of the world. Now that the Soviet Union had been invaded, there were millions more Jews in the path of the genocidal war machine; the Holocaust here was carried out by Germans with bullets. Entire villages and districts were murdered, with over 1.5 million victims. The dirty work gets done; the earth atop the covered-over pits undulates for three days.[18] It is remarkably ‘efficient’—between June and December 1941, 3,000 men have killed between 600,000 and 700,000 persons[19]—but given the ‘trauma’ for the shooters engaged in face-to-face mass murder, the thinking is, ‘there has to be a better way.’ And to dispel another myth, there is no known instance where those few Germans who refused to take part in the killings were shot or otherwise severely punished—because some did ask to be relieved, and they were.[*]
The SS bought the mansion in 1941 for a series of planned rest and recreation centers for its officers. Reich Security Chief and SS General Reinhard Heydrich took a fancy to it, and on January 20, 1942, fifteen German military and government heads met for a day to discuss the Jewish problem. As scholars have noted, the Wannsee Conference was not called to decide the fate of European Jews, but to clarify all points regarding their demise. To put it another way, the intent was there, but with events on the warfront ratcheting up, the fact was highlighted that there was no blueprint for the murder of millions—and that because there was no precedent like this in history, on some level the Germans had been ‘making it up as they went along.’ Mass murder was already underway, and the process now needed refinement, decision making, and coordination.
On that January day, Heydrich and his henchman Adolf Eichmann indicated to the gathered group that approximately 11,000,000 Jews in Europe would fall under the provisions of the ‘Final Solution.’ Deploying carefully coded euphemisms—‘evacuation,’ ‘resettlement,’ ‘special treatment,’ etc.—logistics were discussed as plans were made for major gassing centers in occupied Poland. Once mass deportations were completed, the ‘Final Solution’ would be under total SS jurisdiction. With that matter ‘settled,’ secondary decisions revolved around revisiting the legal definitions of degrees of ‘Jewishness’ established at the Nuremberg Laws of 1935.
The conference lasted perhaps 90 minutes. Just one copy of the carefully coded minutes turned up after the war and was subsequently used at the Nuremberg Tribunals. We may have been in the building longer than the criminals who plotted the destruction of European Jewry 75 years ago. And Heydrich almost got what he wanted.
July 7, 2013/Ravensbrück
A couple of hours north of Berlin, in the former East Germany, we come to the memorial at the site of Ravensbrück concentration camp. It is notable for many reasons, probably first that it was a camp for women, and also a training facility for SS camp guards—3,500 women guards were trained here. Survivors corroborate that when new SS female guard recruits would come for training, initially they did not know how to deal with the new job. Industries wanting slave labor also had to send their own guard recruits. The trainees were not kind, but they did not seem possessed with the will to carry out this abhorrent work. Former prisoners would say that always within about two weeks, new staff would have overcome any ‘cognitive dissonance’ that would have prevented them from doing their jobs. They became ‘hardened’; they ‘got over it.’
One hundred and thirty thousand women prisoners passed through Ravensbrück, and towards the end of the war, so had another 20,000 men. No inmate barracks are standing today—in the immediate aftermath of the war, the barracks were dismantled and the building materials given to German refugees who had fled the Eastern Reich as it collapsed. Many of the houses for the SS leadership remain just outside the camp wall, where they lived with their families. The housing for the SS women guards is used as a youth hostel education center today—the memorial even has a program where survivors interact with the students for about four days, and they all sleep here at night.
Each day the camp gates would open and thousands of prisoners would stream out past the SS homes into the community for their slave labor assignments, which made it kind of hard to hide it from the kids. I suppose the attitude was that it was difficult, distasteful work, but the kids had to realize that it had to be done for the wonder world that they were creating for the children’s future.
Our guide here is the historian Matthias. He appears to be in his 40s and is passionate and knowledgeable, as are all of the German historians I have met thus far. He walks us through the main camp entrance, where thousands of prisoners would pass every day, explaining that for years as a guide he would avoid the single-door entrance that the SS guards used—until one day a survivor he was leading on a tour walked through it to symbolize her victory at this place.
Ravensbrück was built for 3,00
0 prisoners. At its height it held 35,000, 30,000 of whom were killed here. From the beginning, the SS did not want women with children in the camp; but as more and more territory was overrun, the camp swelled. After the Warsaw Ghetto uprising in 1943, hundreds of pregnant women were deported here. Some are forced to abort; as numbers grow, women give birth and the babies are taken to a ‘hospital’ where they are slowly starved to death. The crematorium worked nonstop. Ash piles were dumped into the nearby lake as the Russians closed in. When the camp was overrun by the Red Army, 2,000 women and 2,000 men, mostly too infirm to be death-marched out of the camp, were found.
Here in Germany, we turn to the question of the role of the ordinary German person in Nazi Germany. In Matthias’s opinion, the majority of Germans at the time supported the master race theory. What disturbs him today is that in his opinion, few of his fellow countrymen seem conscious of this. It is a very complex topic. The historians talk about the mass crimes, and in Matthias’s words, they work on thin ice; the responses to the Holocaust run in a range. Some people want to know more—after all, many of them learned nothing about it from their teachers, many of whom were bystanders or even perpetrators.[*] Some quietly deny the extent—but as I am careful to lay out in this book, a person will find that the more he or she is willing to study it, the more he/she will learn how vast and almost unbelievable the topic is in scope. Others are tired of the topic—‘Yes, it happened. So what? Enough…’
For Matthias, herein lies the greatest danger. It is important to have the past in front of you—not in the rearview mirror, as one moves forward. The message may be simply how to ‘behave,’ and not just for Germans, but for everyone.
The Butcher’s Son
One of the most powerful moments here in Germany was when Matthias related the following story, about an ordinary German boy running errands for his father.
The butcher’s son delivered fresh cuts of meat almost daily to the SS mess hall, which still stands here. Late in life, the old man tells Matthias of his feeling as a young teen, going through the camp gates to deliver the meat, seeing the emaciated and foul-smelling prisoners, and believing fully all he has been taught—that these people are indeed subhuman, vermin. Just look at them—just smell them. It’s true and it’s disgusting to have to walk past them. Every day it is the same. They even march through the town to the labor sites; best to keep a distance from them.
It’s always the same, until on his rounds one cold morning he encounters the arrival of a new transport of women. They appear healthy but are now stripped naked, humiliated, shivering, crying, shocked, and trying to cover themselves in the plaza. Now it is his turn for a shock. Here are the enemies—not subhumans, but girls his age and older, in distress.
And they are naked. He has probably never even seen his mother or sister undressed before. And it is at this moment that he realizes that his teachers and the adults in his life are wrong—that what he is witnessing is a crime. And now, a lifetime later, he unburdens himself.
July 7, 2013/Sachsenhausen
We followed our visit to Ravensbrück with a visit to Sachsenhausen, though Sachsenhausen was known earlier as Oranienburg, the name of the nearby town. The model SS camp was built between 1936 and 1938 and served as an SS military training facility. Here also was the headquarters for the Inspectorate of Concentration Camps, the closest to the center of power, about 40 kilometers outside of Berlin. In March 1933, Oranienburg became one of the first ‘KZs’—Konzentrationslagers, or concentration camps. Due to its proximity to the capital of the Reich, local political opponents were imprisoned and tortured here. As a simple matter of natural progression, the Gestapo would also shoot political prisoners here in the ‘shooting pit,’ which they ‘perfected’ over time.
After the invasion of the USSR, Sachsenhausen was used to murder Soviet POWs as well. In the infamous ‘neck-shot facility,’ unsuspecting prisoners would be seated individually facing away from a hidden port with a rifle being aimed at them; over 10,000 were murdered in ten weeks in 1941. And it was here at Sachsenhausen where crematorium ovens were developed, and also here that scientists and engineers perfected gassing vans and facilities. Doctors experimented on live subjects. Always testing.
Later in the war, vast shipments of stolen property from the death camps in the east were also unloaded and warehoused at Sachsenhausen. A brick factory was opened, making bricks stamped ‘GERMANIA’ to be used in the new Reich construction in Berlin. Life expectancy in the brickyard was six to eight weeks.
And as we know, major corporations had their hands in it as well, profiting from the slave labor that left the camp each day and, like at Ravensbrück, paraded through the surrounding community. After 1936, authorities toned down the visibility/profile of the camp, due to these sinister applications of state policy. But again, nearly 200,000 persons passed through the camp gates. Hiding in plain sight? ‘We did not know,’ becomes the familiar refrain after the war.
Track 17
Our state-of-the-art bus brings us to a place seemingly on the edge of nowhere in Berlin. We are at the Gleis 17 Grunewald Railway Station Memorial, the major site of the deportation of Berlin’s Jews. There is no train station that we can see, just tracks that end abruptly, loading platforms, one spur of rails below, but no train.
Then we notice the stepping grates at our feet on the edge of the tracks. You look down:
Oct. 18, 1941. 1251 Jews. Destination: Lodz Ghetto.
What does this mean? On that day, the first of the mass deportations from Berlin, 1,251 people, were rounded up and sent to board the trains of the Reichsbahn. The police and SS had assembled the people for this transport in a local synagogue, and then herded the men, women, and children by foot to this site of their deportation east. For two and a half years, about 180 transports shipped Berlin’s Jewish population to ghettos and annihilation centers. And who is going to pay for all of this? After all, there is a war on. Well, who do you think? ‘The conveyance of the Jews was billed to the Jewish community: 4 pfennigs were charged per kilometer for adults and 2 pfennigs for children above the age of four.’[20] The Jewish community of Berlin is essentially forced to buy tickets to its own annihilation.
And this all brings to mind another incident that took place as the deportations from Berlin were being orchestrated, little known but highly illuminating and important. Between February 27 and March 6, 1943, a large group of non-Jewish German women publicly protested in the cold for the release of nearly 2,000 Jews—their husbands and the male children of these ‘mixed marriages.’ These couples had held special ‘exemptions’ from the ongoing racial laws, tabled even at the Wannsee Conference, but with the defeat at Stalingrad, these male Jews were ordered to be rounded up. Outside of the site of their incarceration at Rosenstrasse 2–4 in Berlin, despite being threatened with lethal force, the women and children gathered here chanted and yelled in the belief that their loved ones were to be deported to suffer the same fate as those other Jews shipped to the East. News of the protest spread, and the regime did not carry out its threat and the men were eventually released (though most were picked up again to work in labor camps).[21] It was the only German public protest against deportation of Jews, and not one of the protesters was shot. No government likes bad ‘PR,’ even the Nazis at home, especially as the tables began to turn on the war front.
I also recall a dinner I had with some lovely people who were impressed by my work and filled with praise for the job I am doing with my students in preserving the past. Near the end, though, the conversation turned to some of the postwar German émigrés that they had known. One person insisted that the folks she knew who grew up in Germany during the war had had the ‘gun to their heads’ if they did not join the Hitler Youth as children—‘they had to do it, or they were dead.’ By her extrapolation, Germans were forced at gunpoint to carry out the policies of the Third Reich. I politely explained that that was most likely not the case. It’s not a simple issue, and it is probably not my place
to pass judgment on German teens in Nazi Germany 70 years ago, but the simplistic ‘gun to the head’ mythology persists.
As we prepare to board the bus to our final stop for today, I pause by myself. It is a beautiful summer day. A breeze ripples gently; the trees reclaiming the site shimmer and whisper. A whistle blows; nearby, an unseen train is passing, the clicking on the tracks steadily growing louder, then trailing off slowly in the wind. I look down. March 27, 1945; the last transport out of Berlin—to Theresienstadt, in Czechoslovakia.
July 10, 2013/Theresienstadt, Czech Republic
At the Berlin train station, we begin our journey to the south, the Czech Republic. The train meanders past Magdeburg again and alongside the Elbe River, passing through the beautiful mountains of the Sudetenland.
After a tour of old Prague and the Jewish synagogue and cemetery here, we move on to Terezin, or Theresienstadt. Forty miles northwest of Prague, it was originally built in the late 18th century as a fortification and garrison town by Emperor Joseph II and named after his mother, Empress Maria Theresa. I will be at the site where the ‘Train Near Magdeburg’ was destined to arrive—but never did, thanks to the US Army. But why there?
In the closing days of the war, as the Reich collapsed in the East and began to be rolled up in the West, Theresienstadt was the destination of the three transports hastily evacuated from Bergen–Belsen. Only one train made it there; the other was liberated by the Americans and the third by the Russians. It is known that as thousands of prisoners from other camps flooded into Theresienstadt in the last month or so of the war, typhus and other epidemics broke out.
A Train Near Magdeburg Page 7
