We all have things that stick in our minds & the historic images of the book burnings across Berlin was one such thing for me. Books by Jewish & other authors, including Einstein, Karl Marx, Helen Keller etc were deemed 'un German' & were piled up in the square between the university & burnt.
I knew of the event & the images but a stop & short walk to the spot was so important to me who values education. The book burning memorial at Bebelplatz is set below ground level - a room with empty bookcases that you look down on - a powerful memorial that needs no words.
To stand on the spot I knew about from history was momentous for me.
The quote by Heinrich Heine came to mind at that spot "Those who burn books will in the end burn people."
The Berlin visit took us to the infamous Wannsee Conference centre, in an exclusive area on to the stunning lake. It looked idyllic with beautiful views but it was here where The Final Solution was signed off, as 'meeting followed by elevenses' without another thought.
Walking in the same rooms as the SS plotters & Reinhard Heydrich was surreal because we know the impact of the decisions made in this space & how it would fuel the Holocaust. Reinhard Heydrich chaired the meeting that 15 people took part in - leading members of the SS, state secretaries from the government offices, the party & the Reich Chancellery. The Gestapo official responsible for the deportations was Adolf Eichmann, who took the minutes of the meeting. He escaped after the war but was captured & trialled in Jerusalem in 1960/61. Notes from that meeting, identifying the numbers of the Final Solution.
Our tour crosses paths with Reinhard Heydrich again later in Prague where we visited the church of Operation Anthropoid & how he met his death through an assassination ...
We stopped at a small railway siding at Gleis 17 & on its platform are metal markers of all the transport trains that left from this unassuming siding to camps all over.
The dates, destination & numbers on the platform plates on both sides is sobering, a reminder of the mass movement & extermination of people in the Holocaust. By the end of the war, more than 50 000 Jews had been deported from this station.
The next stop was the vast Sachsenhausen Concentration camp.
Sachsenhausen was the camp I knew the least about on the tour but it was also one of the most impactful, entering under gates with the familiar slogan of Arbeit Macht Frei (work makes you Free). It held mainly men but also a smaller number of women & children, political prisoners, including many Russians & it was at this camp that they trained SS officers for other camps.
They did medical experiments & it was the earliest use of gas chambers & crematoria, the originals still there, protected by a roof. The area outside this space holds the ashes of inmates that were dumped there or thrown in the river - they will never have a named resting space. There is also an execution firing ramp where prisoners were shot. The camp held & executed thousands of religious prisoners, homosexual men, Jehovah Witnesses, political prisoners etc The lists grew on a whim - no one was really safe.
We walked out of the main camp to the side camp & read the etched boards & the scale of the depravity was hard to take in, the site atmosphere is heavy with residual energy, with hanging being done regularly on gallows while they were lined up for roll call, where executions were common on the ramp area, where ashes were disposed of in the river or in pits. The camp contained various sectors - the roll call area, the shoe testing track (where prisoners were forced to walk round & round testing leather for the German shoe industry), the prison within the camp ruled over by the Gestapo, a place veiled in secrecy & torture, the execution trench, the industrial yard where enforced work was done, the Soviet camp with mass graves of at least 7,00 people etc
Badges of all colours marked out the various people in the camp ...
We walked back in silence to our coach, stunned by the scale of the camp & its killings.
The lunch stop in the pretty Polish town of Wroclaw, formerly the 'Festung' defended town of Breslau, was a reminder how the whole region was drawn in to the war. Breslau had historically been part of the Kingdoms of Poland, Bohemia, Hungary, Habsburg Empire of Austria, Prussia, Germany before becoming part of Poland again after 1945. What a complicated history this city had through all those changes over the centuries, a reminder how wars change regions ...
These breaks were essential as we gathered in small groups to chat, socialise & normalise our day. The resident military specialist tour guide with us make sure we were all coping with the intensity of the tour, an important consideration with so much darkness.
Thank you for taking in this dark history, knowledge is power,
Dee
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