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As I am surely the only human being awake at this ungodly hour I must therefore be the only one in this time zone who knows that the United States of America probably does not have a new president as we all had hoped. Of course, it's still too early to know for certain but it saddens me all the same - not because it proves me wrong in my predictions of the outcome, but rather for the same reasons it saddens most of everyone. We just wanted things to be different this morning. We wanted things to be better again. On the bright side, however, we can look forward to George W's graceful departure in four years, three months and eighteen days. We can also safely retain our views that Americans are just plain stupid and irresponsible - too much so to be allowed democracy. Oh! And we can console ourselves that George W will have to take the heat for the excessive debt he created and not having Kerry take the blame for it. As for me? I guess that I have to re-examine, once again, my world view. This is the second time I've had to do that thanks to Mr Bush. And you know how confusing that must be. Plus, I dropped the toilet seat on my thumb this morning so now it hurts like hell and it's going to bruise. Anyway, my train has just pulled out of The Hague Centraal Station and my journey to the east has begun.  In case you missed it I travelled back to The Netherlands after visiting Nürnberg. That's how I saw the Nylons concert in Rotterdam, after all. I even worked for a few hours that day as well. But now I am back on the path to enlightenment once again and heading east. It is fitting, I think, that I am travelling these next few days by train instead of other means. Sixty years ago trains departed from The Hague and hundreds of other European cities carrying human cargo to the east. The trains have improved, no doubt, as has my final destination but has the world itself? I don't know if I would go that far. Just look at what they seem to have just put back in the White House for four more years.  Oh god.... not THIS train again. I ride this every week! Some part of me wishes that I could stay on this train until its end and spend a few days in Switzerland. But as we know my path lies toward the east. In addition to my fitting mode of travel by train I can't help but think that my travelling alone is also somehow appropriate. This is perhaps not meant to be a pleasant journey. It is certainly not what one would call a sight-seeing trip. But exactly what kind of trip is it then? And why does the darker side of humanity fascinate us so? There is probably an aspect to it that most of us would never concede, not even privately to ourselves, that in other circumstances, a different past, an alternate fate, it could be us who were responsible for such atrocities. Perhaps that, above all, is what draws us to it? That we want to know - we NEED to know - that we could never possibly do such things. And yet they were done. Nazis come in different shapes and sizes, you see. As I once wrote, sitting in nightmare surroundings more than a year ago: "Life is never so clear-cut for most people. It is never a decision of shipping people to the East for "resettlement". It is a million tiny acts of cruelty all added together, each with its own built-in plausible deniability clause."  It suddenly occurred to me that the landscape through which we are now racing at 250 km/h is all the former DDR. Before reunification all of this outside my window was East Germany. Berlin is so far out in the boonies that it's provincial somehow, and yet immaculately chic. Not that this was always the boonies, of course. Back in the old days Berlin was more or less geographically in the middle of Germany. But those pesky militant Prussians had dragged Europe and the world into three wars (actually it was more the Bavarians fault the third time around) so after World War II it was decided that Prussia should be amputated from the rest of Germany. So, nowadays German cities like Danzig and Königsberg are located in other countries like Poland and Russia. Russia? (You ask.) Yes. Russia. Look at a map sometime and see what I mean. After the collapse of the Soviet Union Russia managed to hold onto a tiny parcel of land on the Baltic Sea between Poland and Lithuania (but not actually connected to Russia proper). The main city in that little square of land is Königsberg, or whatever the Russians happen to call it. I often joke and say that some day the Germans are going to want that land back. But is it a joke? I am quite sure the days of Germany nationalism are over for a while at least, but who's to say? It would be interesting to see the "ethnic" compositions of these territories though, after all the moving around and liquidations of populations that took place during the course of the Second World War. Hans Fritzsche (one of Goebbels subordinates at propaganda ministry and the one who would stand trial at Nürnberg in his place) commented on "the childish way these philosophic dilettantes played around with populations as if they were playing checkers." I myself had a similar feeling about the negotiations at Dayton regarding the former Yugoslavia: It depressed me the way that the leaders of respective ethnic groups (Serb, Muslim, Croat) would squabble over lines on maps and who got what percentage of territory completely without regard for the fact that people had died and suffered, and were still dying and suffering, while they argued over whether the borderline should be on one side of the road or the other or rejected otherwise workable agreements because the percentage of territory wasn't high enough. And so I arrive at Berlin's Zoo Station. (My route taking me somewhat indirectly via Duisburg so I can ride on ICE trains instead of the Amsterdam-Berlin train.) I have come a long way this week thus far and there's still a long way to go before this Odyssey is complete. Throughout this entire Travelogue I have tried to present things in such a way that they will make as much sense as possible. I will try to continue that precedent as much as I can over the next three days and hopefully even improve on it a little bit. But it is not always possible to do this since the nature of these Travelogues is to tell a story of travel and I am reluctant to present the photographs out of sequence with relation to the order in which I actually saw this stuff. That said, however, I think that the sequence of my travels over the days ahead has been quite cleverly planned so as to tell a larger story with the pictures we shall see and the places I will visit. The trip itself, you might say, tells its own story.  In Nürnberg we visited the courtroom where the events that symbolised the end of the Nazi regime in Germany were played out. Our first stop in Berlin turns the clock back on that and takes us back almost to the very beginning of Nazi Germany. The building we see here is the Library of Berlin's Humbolt University. The square directly in front of it is known as Babelplatz (Opernplatz) and it was here that an event took place just after Hitler came to power that came to represent everything that Nazi Germany itself stood for. On 10 May 1933 the first of the Nazi public book burnings took place right here on this very square.  Books by writers considered to be dangerous or a threat to state, including, of course, books by Jewish authors, were thrown onto a massive bonfire and reduced to ashes. Among these books were works by a Jewish German writer who had, ironically, once studied at Humbolt University and had certainly walked across this square many times. His name was Heinrich Heine and despite the fact that he had lived and died nearly 100 years before the rise of Hitler it is a quote (shown on the plaque in this photo) from one of his plays that neatly sums up the entire Holocaust in a single sentence:
"Wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen."Clearly there were book burnings in Heine's time as well, not to mention other periods in history. The history of literature is full of references to burning books: "You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them." Ray Bradbury "There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them. " Joseph Alexandrovitch Brodsky "Don't join the book burners. Do not think you are going to conceal thoughts by concealing evidence that they ever existed." Dwight Eisenhower "What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books." Sigmund Freud "The military don't burn books any more: they sell them to the paper manufacturers. The paper companies shred them, pulp them and put them back on the market for consumption. It is not true that Marx, Freud or Piaget are unavailable to the public. In book form they are not. But they are in the form of serviettes." Eduardo Galeano Uruguayan writer, story-teller, journalist and historian  Not surprisingly there were photographers on hand for the first of the Nazi public book burnings. Good to document the destruction of the more than 20.000 books that were destroyed.  You can't really make out that it's the Opernplatz / Babelplatz, but I am sure you can believe me that it is, right? All of this is a lesson from history, isn't it? Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 took its title from the temperature at which books start to burn. Fahrenheit 9/11 of course took its name from the Ray Bradbury book. And so on... Not that we, as a species, have learned all that much. The Nazis were mere amateurs at book burning when you compare what they did to what the Serbs accomplished in August of 1992 when they targeted the Bosnian National Library in Sarajevo with incendiary shells for three days. The resulting fire destroyed more than 1,5 millions books. A description by Dr. Kemal Bakarsic - the librarian of the Bosnia National Museum who witnessed the fire in Sarajevo sounds like something out of the Holocaust: "All over the city sheets of burned paper, fragile pages of gray ashes, floated down like a dirty black snow. Catching a page you could feel its heat, and for a moment read a fragment of text in a strange kind of black and gray negative, until, as the heat dissipated, the page melted to dust in your hand."  Underneath the square is the memorial to the book burnings. It is one of my favourite memorials in the entire world because of its simplicity and power. If you look closely you can see underneath the ground a large white-painted room of empty bookshelves.  Trains on Berlin Stadtbahn line number 7 rumble across the city every few minutes throughout the day. The final destination for most of these trains bears a notorious name - Wannsee. The foundations of genocide having been laid, the ideologies constructed, the scientific evidence subverted, the technologies created, and the order been given, all that remained for the Third Reich was the logistics of carrying out the unthinkable. It is the logistics that can come back to haunt you. And this kind of thinking always reminds me of the genocide that took place in Srebrenica and the hundreds of bodies of victims, their hands bound, and of aerial photographs showing buses and trucks. Where did the wire come from to bind the wrists of thousands? Who arranged for the means of transporting hundreds of people from one place to another? There is more to systematic murder than setting goals or giving and following orders. Plans and decisions must be made.  And so I arrive in the affluent Berlin district of Wannsee. It is a charming neighbourhood of villas and magnificent homes situated around a quiet lake (the Wannsee). On the short ride through the area it is difficult to believe that evil could prosper here. The bus driver announces the next stop: Haus der Wannsee Konferenz, located at the head of a marina with a café and restaurant overlooking the sailing boats moored on the water below. It is strangely surreal.  In this house on 20 January 1942 the Wannsee Conference was held. The purpose of the meeting was to decide various logistical issues relating to the "Endlösung der Europäischen Judenfrage" - the Final Solution of the European Jewish Question. The Nazis did not arrive at their Final Solution to the Jewish question overnight. They did not simply come to power and begin their shipments of human cattle to the east the very next day. The process took almost a decade of gradual but ever-increasing escalation and slow acclimatisation of the general public. Adolf Eichmann said that "Little by little we were taught all these things. We grew into them."  This is not to say, however, that persecution of the Jews was slow in coming once the Nazis did gain power. In fact, within weeks of Hitler's being named chancellor by President Hindenburg boycotts and attacks on Jewish businesses were already being staged. This picture shows a sign telling shoppers to not buy from the Jews, complete with a storm trooper to enforce the boycott. But the transition from boycotts and public humiliations of Jews to systematic mass murder was a large one and not easily made. Even those bent on annihilating the Jews would require time and a numbing of the senses before taking that step. One of the phases along the path to Genocide were the Nazi Eugenics and Euthanasia programs. Inspired and drawing upon existing laws elsewhere in the world that provided for the forced sterilisation of mentally handicapped and genetically diseased citizens (such as existed in Canada, for example)the Nazis implemented similar policies and eventually extended the program to include their "merciful" extermination as well. As this program took shape one form that the method of extermination took (in addition to lethal injections and simple starvation) was that of gassing. In addition to constructing more permanent facilities utilising pure carbon monoxide gas to facilitate the killing of selected patients, mobilised killing vehicles were also developed - gas chambers on wheels, the so-called "Gas Vans" - and were later used extensively in the eastern territories in the wake of the advancing German army. Pure carbon monoxide gas was too costly and difficult to produce in the required massive quantities, however, and so "self-charged" Gas Vans were later developed for use in east. The principle of these "self-charged" Gas Vans was fairly straight-forward: Simply route the engine exhaust directly into a sealed compartment at the back of the vehicle where victims would be locked inside. The carbon-monoxide in the exhaust would eventually be sufficient to kill them. But even the transition between forced sterilisation of the mentally ill and their murder was not one quickly or easily taken. The first laws allowing for forced sterilisation programs in Nazi Germany were passed in 1933 (ironically, several years after similar laws were already in effect in Canada and decades after they were in the United States) but the escalation of this into systematic murder did not take place until six and a half years later, in October 1939, when Hitler signed authorisation for the so-called Euthanasia program. In the many months that followed tens of thousands of mentally and physically handicapped Germans were systematically murdered. Not surprisingly the idea of these "mercy killings" did not sit well with the general populace in Germany and despite extensive propaganda efforts that seem chilling in their inhumanity to present-day observers most German citizens remained unconvinced of the need for such measures. ("Unconvinced" may not be the right word. People may have considered the basic principles behind these ideas to be sound - the concept of Eugenics, after all, was a not unpopular notion in the western world long before anyone had ever heard of Adolf Hitler - but the actual gruesome application of those principles to Germany's own citizens was perhaps more than the average German was willing to support. As a result of the general public's discomfort with this program Hitler ordered an end to the domestic gassings in late August 1941. By this point more than 70.000 people had been eliminated and although the gassings had stopped the killings by other means such as lethal injection and starvation continued until the end of the war, killing as many as 275.000 human beings. Here is where one of history's cruel twists of fate occurred. At almost the same moment that Hitler surely ordered the Final Solution he also ordered the closing down of the already existing Euthanasia program of mass murder. Similar to the concerns about the nuclear scientists in the former Soviet Union after the wall fell the decision to end the Euthanasia program left a body of experienced personnel and technical knowledge of systematic mass murder hanging in limbo and looking for new work. One of the men who helped develop the Gas Vans, August Becker, comments that "Himmler wanted to deploy people who had become available as a result of the suspension of the euthanasia program, and who, like me, were specialists in extermination by gassing, for the large-scale gassing operations in the East which were just beginning.".  A total of fifteen participants forming a cross-section of the Nazi governmental and security bureaucracy were summoned to the meeting by Reinhard Heydrich, the head of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt or RSHA (Reich Security Head Office) - an organisation created in 1939 to oversee the operations of the Sicherheitsdienst or "SD" (Nazi Security Service), the Geheime Staatspolizei (Gestapo) and the Kriminal Polizei (Criminal Police). (I include the proper German names of these organisations here because of my general dislike of acronyms and their tendency to replace and lead to a forgetting of the actual words that they represent. But that's another issue altogether.) The names of most of the participants are unfamiliar as their positions within the Nazi hierarchy were at a level just underneath that of the more familiar heads of the various Nazi organisations: Himmler, Borman, Frank, Rosenberg, Frick, Ribbentropp, Göring (all of whom, except Himmler (who was dead) were tried at the first Nürnberg trial). One name among all the participants stands out, however, and has in its own way become synonymous with the Holocaust - Adolf Eichmann. In his organisational role under Heydrich, Eichmann made the preparations for the meeting and arranged for everything from the lunch menu to recording the minutes. That morning each of these men were driven in their cars up the driveway of this quiet villa. Not to decide the fate of the European Jews - their fate had long since been decided - but to be forcibly converted into accomplices in securing that fate.  Stopping at the front door SS doormen would open the car doors and salute with a snap of their heels and convincing "Heil Hitler!". Stepping into the warmth of the house their coats would be taken and they would help themselves to cigars and cognac.  I am not quite ready to explore the interior of the house so I make my way through the grounds of the villa instead.  To the front of the house lies the lake itself - the Wannsee - visible through the trees from the front windows of the villa.  A series of various pathways wind their way through the bushes and trees and lead back to the house itself.  The view of the house from the edge of the lake.  Approaching the front of the villa now. Through these windows the participants in the Wannsee Conference would have looked out across the snow and frozen waters of the lake.  Circling around the opposite end of the house I finally step inside and into the central main hall (if you can call it that) of the villa. (Notice the fireplace which was accurately recreated for the film Conspiracy... you just knew I had to mention that eventually, didn't you? Also, although the exterior scenes of this movie were clearly filmed at the actual villa itself, I don't believe that the interior scenes would have been filmed on location. The difficulties with lighting and space would have made it much easier to film on a set.)  On this map of the museum you can see the various rooms of the main floor of the house as well as the nature of the exhibits that can be found in each room.  The room in which the actual conference itself took place is room 6 labelled the The Wannsee Conference from the previous map. Here we see a school group gathered in this room to learn about the Wannsee Conference and Holocaust. German children get a lot of this kind of thing despite the fact that they themselves didn't have anything to do with the Nazis. North American kids, of course, also learn about the Holocaust but have a further degree of separation in that it wasn't their nation that perpetrated the killings. Logically neither should experience a sense of guilt regarding the Holocaust, but I think it would be true to say that German children do learn to feel guilty about these events that had nothing whatsoever to do with them. Some might say that this is how it should be, to ensure that it does not happen again. However, I think we can probably all agree that should there be another Holocaust that it will most definitely not be perpetrated by Germans. What about making Dutch children feel guilty so as to prevent another Holocaust? Holland did, after all, have the highest level of voluntary SS enlistment of any country in Europe outside of the German Reich (Germany and Austria). What about making Cambodian children feel bad so as to prevent another genocide such as their parents perpetrated when the Khmer Rouge wiped out nearly half the Cambodian population? But let's face it... Germans of this generation have as much reason to feel guilty about the Holocaust as I do for the treatment and murder of native populations by my French ancestors. A memorial at Dachau concentration camp bears the inscription "Never Again". And yet, without even thinking I can name five different examples of significant genocide committed in the 20th century. Do Turkish people nowadays feel guilty for the Armenian genocide? What about Cambodians? Serbs? Rwandans? Serbs again? Maybe they should? At any rate it's certainly something worthy of learning and discussion by school children. I just wonder about the effects of the lingering animosity against Germany and Germans by those of Jewish faith as well as the lingering guilt complex experienced by Germans themselves - not forgetting that lingering animosity is what led to the rise of Hitler in the first place, not to mention other nationalistic leaders in the last hundred years. Alfred Döblin wrote in 1946 that "There are two types of guilt: systematically committing a crime, and making it possible and permitting it. We didn't want this and didn't know that. But it was up to us to have wanted and to have known... Will the Germans, after such a horrible lesson, draw the good, necessary and salutary conclusions that will make us real Germans -- that is, Europeans?" Dwight D. Eisenhower said in 1945 that "The success of [the Allied] occupation [of Germany] can only be judged fifty years from now. If the Germans at that time have a stable, prosperous democracy, then we shall have succeeded."  Here we see the view out across the lake from inside the Wannsee villa. (I did not sign the guestbook, in case you were wondering.)  A preview of things to come, it seems. One of the displays tells visitors to the Wannsee Conference villa about Auschwitz.  Oh oh. Remember what I was talking about the other day? Here we go again... IG Farben, Krupp, Siemens.... even Rheinmetall Borsig, which probably no one has ever heard of but which I signs for almost every weekend when I am in Düsseldorf. All of German industry profited from concentration camp labour. This form of slave labour was cheaper than employing local workers, even in the occupied territories. The daily pay for each worker from the camps was paid directly to the SS and not to the workers themselves. And it was not just industrial giants like those listed here who utilised concentration camp labour. Relatively small clothing companies such as Hugo Boss's firm used slave labour to manufacture uniforms for the SS. Even simple farmers would hire such labour by ones and twos from the SS to help with farm work. It is perhaps plausible, with some imagination, to think that the CEO of Siemens or Hugo Boss were maybe not aware of where this cheap labour was coming from. But farmers hiring one single worker to help around the farm? They just HAD to know where this worker came from and that it was wrong.  Even to this day one can find the logos of National Socialism around us, even in a Jewish cemetery as in this photo. The Anti-Defamation League would count this as an act of anti-Semitism. I would count it as an act of stupidity. I have a hard time believing that the person who spray-painted this cares much about anything more than how "cool" the Hitler and the Nazis were and probably has no idea why he or she should hate the Jews in the first place. After all, these days there are plenty of other groups of more visible and readily identifiable people toward whom hate can more easily be directed (and surely they hate them too). If you ask me the anti-Semitic hatred by the modern Nazi types just strikes me more as stupidity disguised as hate rather than real hatred. And people who adapt a façade of hate like this are moronic, just like the very early Nazis, I suppose, but one cannot forget that Hitler himself purged the himself, the party and Germany of the moronic thugs in the Röhm purge of 1934. Hitler also despised spending any time with his moronic former beer hall cronies after gaining power and I doubt very much that he'd have a very high opinion of today's so-called Nazis. So what does that say about them?  I liked this display because I felt that for those of us living here in The Hague it brought home the fact that the Holocaust is not as much a distant memory as we might think or feel at times. This is a poster calling for the registration of persons of Jewish blood (partial or whole). While not an unusual poster for the Nazi era it is interesting because of what is written at the very top - "Gemeente 's-Gravenhage" - The Hague. (The Dutch is also a bit weird. I think "Joodschen" is a bit antiquated.) Check out the addresses: Jan Hendrikstraat? Stationsweg? Beeklaan? Anna Paulownastraat? Rijswijkscheweg? Appeldoornschelaan? Azaleastraat? Marceliusstraat? How many of those streets have you heard of before? Nearly all of them, I'll bet.  A chart on the wall of the conference room shows the various participants in the Wannsee Conference. As I mentioned before they were all high-level functionaries just below the heads of the various organisations. You can see on the "organigram" what I am talking about. Nearly all of them, with the exception of the SS participants, are just under the state secretaries of their respective organisations, who are in turn under Hitler. Also check out the picture of Eichmann. I always find that picture kind of weird, what with his cap jauntily placed upon his head and his friendly grin. He doesn't look the part of the man responsible for shipping millions of Jews to their deaths. Right next to Eichmann is Heydrich who is the exact opposite of the man who played him in the film Conspiracy - Kenneth Branagh. I felt that Heydrich was portrayed as a little too charming and suave in the film. I never pictured the real Heydrich as being like that. But who knows? What does a picture really tell you anyway?  Here we see the same wall that today contains the charts and organigram that we just saw. This picture shows the dining room (later the infamous conference room) of the Wannsee villa as it was in 1922.  This is an important document from the minutes of the Wannsee Conference. If you know even a little about the conference you will be familiar with this document. (It apparently comes from the Kosovo collection since it has a "K" ERN. Oh wait... it has TWO ERNs! It was re-stamped!!!! Call the Evidence Unit!!!) This chart gives the total of Jews in various European countries that must be dealt with in the Final Solution. To me there are a number of things that are very interesting about this chart aside from the ERN numbers: The first jumps right out at you from the first read.... nearly every single one of the figures is a very rounded number. Germany (Altreich) = 131.800 Jews. The Netherlands = 160.800 Jews. USSR = 5.000.000 Jews. And yet for the Ukraine and Byelorussia the figures are amazingly precise... 2.994.684 and 446.484 respectively. Where the hell did Eichmann get those numbers from?!? (I always wonder.) The second strange thing is the inclusion of certain countries such as Ireland, Switzerland, Spain, Sweden. The list contains several countries not under the influence or control of the Nazis, but these four seem REALLY out there in that respect. I can almost believe that MAYBE fascist Spain might have turned over their Jews to the Nazis, but Switzerland, Sweden and particularly Ireland? These countries weren't even really under threat from the Nazis. Their inclusion on this list shows an amazing audacity on the part of those organising the Final Solution and reveals their immensely broad expectations and aspirations. The last thing that I find interesting about this list is illustrated by the number of Jews that are listed for the territory of Estonia. None. Estonia is listed as being "Judenfrei" (Jew-Free). Quite obviously there were at least SOME Jews living in Estonia prior to the outbreak of war so the fact that the territory is listed as Jew-Free reveals something very important and that is that this list contains estimates of Jewish populations not as they were at the start of the Second World War but as they were at the start of 1942 after more than two years of war, incited pogroms, executions by the Einsatzgruppen and other groups of the SS and military. Tens and hundreds of thousands of Jews were already systematically murdered before the end of 1941 and it is interesting to me that this list does not include them in its totals. It is revealing, somehow, but I am not sure of what exactly.  The school group continues to mingle in the Wannsee Conference room. I should probably mention that although I have sort of presented the Wannsee Conference in the flow of this Travelogue as the starting point of the Final Solution that this was not actually the case. When one looks at a timeline of the build-up to the Final Solution it is important to note that long before the Wannsee Conference in January 1942 the so-called Einsatzgruppen were already carrying out liquidations of Jews by the tens and hundreds of thousands in the east. Deportations of German Jews to the eastern territories had already begun (thus forcing further liquidations of eastern Jews to make room for the German ones). And experiments were already being undertaken to find more efficient methods of elimination. With regard to the experiments the Euthanasia program itself had already explored several options that ultimately led to gassing with carbon monoxide as an effective and efficient means of extermination. It was, in fact, the Euthanasia program that developed the idea of disguising gas chambers as showers. In addition to more conventional-seeming methods of killing the Nazis also tried other such methods as filling pits with people and quicklime to allow the chemical reaction to slowly dissolve the victims to death and thus combine the killing and disposal of bodies. This method was somewhat trying on those involved in its execution (no pun intended), however, so it didn't not come to much. Another experiment with killing was to try executions using dynamite. A concrete bunker was loaded with dynamite and people and the explosives detonated. Richard Rhodes comments (from his book, Masters of Death): "The experiment was not a success: the dynamite destroyed both the victims and the pillbox, catapulting body parts in every direction, and the experimenters had to retrieve arms and legs from the surrounding trees." At any rate all of this had already taken place well before the conference at Wannsee. The experiments and their results were certainly discussed at the meeting, in fact, as were the on-going deportations and planning. All of this clearly indicates that the wheels of the Final Solution were undoubtedly already in motion and that the purpose of the Wannsee Conference was to merely plan for the future of the program and to ensure co-operation with the various governmental departments under the authority of the SS. Unspoken but equally clear in the purpose of the meeting was the Nazi habit of ensuring that everyone was made an accomplice in their criminality. This is a commonly used bureaucratic trick (that even the UN employs) of making illegal and immoral decisions and only then informing those responsible for its execution of their responsibilities. The only one in the upper echelons involved with any deniability was Hitler himself as the order to implement the Final Solution was signed by Göring, not Hitler, in July 1941 and directed Heydrich to take the steps necessary.  This authorisation, signed by Göring in his capacity as Reichsmarshal, was an important document used during the Nürnberg trials and elsewhere. (A translation from www.ghwk.de follows.) Reich Marshal of the Großdeutsches Reich Berlin, July 31, 1941 Plenipotentiary for the Four Year Plan Chairman of the Ministerial Council for Defense of the Reich To the Head of the Security Police and SD, SS-Major General [Gruppenfuehrer] Heydrich Berlin. Supplementary to the task entrusted to you by the decree of January 24, 1939, to solve the Jewish question under the prevailing circumstances by emigration or evacuation in the most favorable way possible, I herewith commission you to carry out all necessary preparations in regard to organisational, practical and material matters for a total solution of the Jewish question [Gesamtloesung der Judenfrage] in the German sphere of influence within Europe. Inasmuch as the competences of other central organizations will hereby be affected, they are to be included. I further commission you to submit to my office in the near future an overall plan that shows the preliminary organizational, practical and material measures requisite for the implementation of the projected final solution of the Jewish question [Endlösung der Judenfrage]. Göring This document makes fairly clear that an order to undertake the Final Solution has been issued by the summer of 1941. This is consistent with Rudolf Höss's (the commandant of Auschwitz) recollection that he was told in the summer of 1941 that Hitler had made an order for the elimination of the Jews. It also is consistent with planning and deployment of the SS forces to support such an end that were undertaken by Himmler around that time. It makes sense too, I suppose, since in Hitler's mind the war with the Soviet Union was going well and the Russians would soon be crushed. And once the war was won and the Jews of eastern Europe were under Nazi control, a solution must be undertaken. But for me the interesting question has always been whether or not Hitler did, in fact, personally and clearly make an order for the Final Solution. I feel that he did but the documentary evidence seems to circle strangely around his involvement, not quite touching him. This is revealing it itself, of course, but there still lingers a question in my mind as to what form Hitler's directives on the subject took. Was it a clear and unambiguous order to eliminate by murder the Jews or Europe, or was it more vague than that, its fuzziness clarified by the likes of Himmler or Heydrich into their own vision of what the fate of the Jews of Europe should be. True, Hitler had been quite clear in speeches, conversations and even his own book about the annihilation of the Jews, but as mentioned earlier there are some justifiable grounds to dismiss such talk as inflamed rhetoric and not a serious plan to kill every Jew in Europe. It was not until that exact thing actually happened that these earlier comments were seen in a different light. On this journey I have given this question a great deal of thought and almost like an epiphany I suddenly realised from putting certain pieces together that Hitler MUST have clearly and unambiguously directed those below him to murder the Jews of Europe. Like finding that single jigsaw piece that leads to a rapid completion of the entire puzzle the catalyst for this was reading something written by Himmler in 1940 where he rejected "the Bolshevist method of the physical extermination of a people from inner conviction as [being] un-Germanic and impossible". This almost seems to require a double-take or, at the very least, a snorting dismissal as hypocrisy. But I have no reason to believe that this should not be taken at face value and that to Himmler, on a personal level, the idea of the physical extermination of a people was simply not an option. It was "un-Germanic", in fact. And to the idealistic Himmler that means it was not something that he wanted his elite SS to be involved in. It was also not something that was in his own nature to be able to do. But the other side of the coin is Himmler's absolute and unwavering loyalty to his Führer. And this is of utmost importance because in my recent epiphany it follows that if systematic murder of the Jews was not something Himmler felt his SS should be involved in, that it was "un-Germanic", then something compelled Himmler to direct his forces and energies to that end. In other words, someone ordered him to do so. And in all of Germany who was the only person who could issue an order to Himmler?  At the entrance foyer now I look back into the main central room and a new school group that has just arrived.  Here we see the view from the front door out along the drive to the main gates of the villa.  Walking back to the bus stop now I take a final look back at the gates to the Wannsee villa and carry onward with our journey. Our next stop today continues our story but before we leave the Wannsee Conference behind it is important to remember its place and importance in the history of the Final Solution. In my thinking it somehow marks the boundary between the theoretical possibility of such a holocaust and its actual commencement. Describing the Wannsee Conference at his trial in Jerusalem Eichmann said: "[T]he gentlemen convened their session, and then in very plain terms — not in the language that I had to use in the minutes, but in absolutely blunt terms — they addressed the issue, with no mincing of words. And my memory of all of this would be doubtful, were it not for the fact that I distinctly recall saying to myself at the time: look, just look at Stuckart (State Secretary of the Ministry of the Interior and Colin Firth's character in the movie Conspiracy), the perpetual law-abiding bureaucrat, always punctilious and fussy, and now what a different tone. The language was anything but in conformity with the legal protocol of clause and paragraph…. The discussion covered killing, elimination and annihilation."  But killing and annihilation was not the only topic of discussion. The minutes themselves seem to dwell most of all on the question of "Who is a Jew?". The Nürnberg race laws laid out a tangle of definitions in answer to this question, as are detailed in the chart above. It is chilling to imagine the dull legal discussion that took place that cold January day on who is and who is not a Jew - of who will and who will not be allowed to live. On 13 July 1961, addressing the Israeli court tasked with determining his fate Adolf Eichmann stated that he considered the "murder, this extermination of the Jews, to be one of the most heinous crimes in the history of mankind." And yet he was one of those considered absolutely most responsible for the implementation of the Final Solution.  A short ride on the S-Bahn brings us to the next stop on our journey... Berlin's Grunewald Station.  Beginning just before the Wannsee conference in October 1941 and continuing almost until the end of the war in February 1945 more than 50.000 Berlin Jews were deported from the city by train from Grunewald Station. The planning and decisions of the Wannsee Conference called for co-operation with the SS all organisations to implement the Final Solution. The co-operation of the German Reichsbahn (Railroad) was of great importance to transport the victims to their fate. Gleis 17 (Platform 17) was the commonly used loading platform for these deportations. Most of the other platform stairs have been bricked over throughout this tunnel but just up the stairs to the right where passers-by seem not to look more than 10.000 human beings were loaded into cattle cars and taken away from the city they called home.  The platform has now been converted into a memorial by the German Railway Group: The memorial at Grunewald station, platform 17Research reports on the role of the Reichsbahn during the Third Reich all come to the same conclusion: if it had not been for the railway and especially the Reichsbahn, the deportation of Jews from all over Europe to concentration camps would not have been possible. For a long time, not only the Bundesbahn but also the Reichsbahn of the GDR did not examine their involvement in the inhuman national socialist crimes. During the celebrations to mark the 150th anniversary of the railways in 1985, the rail administrations in the West and the East found it difficult to even mention that part of railway history. No central memorial had been erected in memory of the victims of the deportations carried out by the Reichsbahn in either of the two German states.When the two reunited railway companies were founded as Deutsche Bahn AG, this became painfully obvious, because neither of the two can gloss over its own history or even pick and choose what it wishes to remember. The Board of Management on behalf of Deutsche Bahn AG decided to erect a central memorial at Grunewald railway station to serve as a forceful reminder of the deportations carried out by the German Reichsbahn during the years of national socialist rule. The centre piece of the memorial is formed by 186 objects cast in steel that are placed in chronological order and surrounded by gravel. In them, along the edge of the platform, is written the date of the deportation, the number of people deported, the point of departure in Berlin and the destination. The vegetation that has grown over the years between the rails on platform 17 has been left as it is. Today, the vegetation is part of the memorial and stands symbolically for a platform from which a train will never depart again.  13 June 1942 - 746 Berlin Jews are sent to an unknown fateAs a result of these deportations the SS used existing German law to revoke the citizenship and seize the property of the deported Jews. The law stated that this could be done legally if the Jew became the resident of a foreign country and the moment the Jews stepped off the cattle cars in Poland and elsewhere they immediately became residents of that country. Shortly after these deportations began, on 18 October 2004, Himmler contacted Heydrich to order an end to the emigration of Jews overseas. The previous policies of trying to remove Jews from Germany through emigration was no longer an option. The fate of the Jews of Europe was now sealed. It is telling that with regard to deportations of German Jews Himmler had ordered that no Jew was to take with him any more personal belongings that the French had allowed the ethnic Germans of the Alsatian region to take with them when they were expelled during the first war. It is telling because one might wonder what the sense in that was since what did the French have to do with the Jews? But it was more than just petty shifting of retribution from one group to another. The belief was, at the time, that it was International Jewry who were responsible for the wars of destruction and humiliation of the German people. Hitler himself had even said before the war that if International Jewry succeeded in starting another war that it would end in their annihilation. (A statement that is significant not only to illustrate what I am talking about here, but also because it was one of several statements by Hitler before the implementation of the Final Solution alluding to the destruction of the Jewish race - statements that one must surmise as to the extent that they were taken seriously, whether by the "average German" or Nazi fanatics.)  The platform is an unbelievable 160 metres long and seems to stretch forever.  Nearby buildings and unused rail lines have fallen into decay and lend an air of melancholy to the site.  I appreciate the idea that the uncontrolled vegetation forms a part of the memorial. It has a powerful effect, I think.  A single rose lies at the base of the platform underneath a plaque commemorating the victims. (It says what I said earlier already about the deportations of Berlin Jews, in case you are wondering. Except that this plaque says 10.000 and not the proper figure of 50.000 total deported.) (NOTE FROM FUTURE SELF: As my German sucks I did not properly understand the text on this plaque and that has subsequently been pointed out to me. It does not say "zehntausend" which would mean ten thousand as I understand, but rather "zehntausende" which means multiple tens of thousands which can, of course, mean 50.000. Sorry everyone.)  I do not know what the plaque says in Hebrew, however. Clearly not the same thing that it says in German judging from the lack of words.  04 September 1944 - 39 Berlin Jews are sent to Auschwitz12 October 1944 - 31 Berlin Jews are sent to Auschwitz 17 May 1943 - 735 Berlin Jews are sent to Auschwitz 04 March 1943 - 1143 Berlin Jews are sent to Auschwitz And this, I think, is possibly the most fantastic and powerful photo that I took during my entire journey. My own path today also lies to the east in Auschwitz.  Trees and leaves litter the now unused train tracks. Another 1000 Jews are sent to Auschwitz.  These trees are relatively young but are a testament to how much time has passed since the cars loaded with human cargo would jerk sudden and with a squeal of iron slowly roll along these rails away from this platform.  The road up to the parking lot of the platform has an interesting memorial of human outlines in cement.  I think that other plaque must have been out of date because this plaque says basically the same thing but lists the total number as 50.000, not 10.000.  In only a few short hours I will be boarding my own train to the east. In the meantime I kill some time walking around the familiar sights of Berlin and leave the horrors of the Nazi regime behind me for a while. Here we see the Reichstag by night. A long line of people wait to ascend to the dome for a wonderful view of the city.  A bit closer now. The queue is really long. I considered going up but it's not really worth the wait since I've done it before several times. (Sorry, no pictures from the Reichstag Dome this time around.)  Here we see the destroyed Reichstag near the end of the Second World War with Russian bombers overhead.  The fight for Berlin was a nasty one, as we shall see later on in this Travelogue. Here we see a destroyed German tank alongside the Reichstag.  In the wake of the war this begin to return to normal. German children go for a swim in the Spree river with the Reichstag in the distance. Notice the destroyed dome of the Reichstag. The skeleton of the dome was later demolished and the building remained dome-less until the 1990s when the new glass dome was constructed.  When I see the Reichstag and walk around this area I cannot help but think of Hitler and Albert Speer's grandiose plans for the city of Berlin. I've written on this extensively before, so I can just cut and paste a bit from past Travelogues to share this fascinating stuff with you again. (Oh joy, everyone says. More reading.) The building directly in the foreground was the planned Southern rail station where visitors to "Germania" would arrive. Stepping outside they would be confronted with architecture dwarfing the human scale. Looking North along the immensely broad avenue they would see Hitler's version of the Arc du Triomphe - nearly three times the size Napoleon's Arc in Paris.  And framed in the archway their view would be dominated by the absolutely colossal Congress Hall standing an unbelievable 220 metres (730 feet) high in the distance. This incredible domed Congress Hall was to be built on a scale that is difficult to imagine even today in the age of soaring skyscrapers. Hitler and Speer were insane to plan to build buildings of such size. Not because it was technically impossible, but because the sheer scale was so out of proportion with reality as to be an affront to sensibility. (Albert Speer admitted as much later in life when looking back on these crazy architectural plans.) I think of this a lot when I see the designs for the World Trade Centre site in New York City. Designs that are the "new batch" because the first set were too "unimaginative". These new designs, by comparison, all involve the construction of incredibly tall buildings on the site of what were already two of the tallest buildings in the world. Where's the imagination in that? Where's the emotional power and tribute to the victims in that? The message (I am told) is that the United States is not afraid. Putting up the world's tallest buildings on the site sends a message that the United States will not be intimidated. Well, I can wear a big bulls-eye around my neck and go running around downtown Jerusalem with a Palestinian flag and a sign that says "Death to Jews" and demonstrate that I am not afraid or intimidated either. That doesn't mean that it's a particularly good idea. I was never the greatest fan of the twin World Trade Centre towers in the first place, so it's not surprising that I am against their being resurrected on an even "grander" scale. The enormous edifices of the Nazis were built to demonstrate the superiority and power of the German people. The twin towers of the World Trade Centre were built for similar reasons. Underneath the marble facing of the Nazi edifices lay ordinary brick masonry and the shoddy workmanship inherent to a job that was rushed to completion. Underneath the façade of the World Trade Centre towers was a core structure that was designed to withstand the impact of a jumbo jet. That much they did, until they collapsed under the heat of the fire. We take it for granted now that the buildings did collapse, but at the time it was unexpected, as was the entire attack. And perhaps there is a lesson in there somewhere that is as old as the scriptures? Do not build monuments to your own glory that are an affront to both god and man. Or is all this explanation a little too esoteric? The hijackers hit the World Trade Centre because the towers were 110 storeys tall and like their effect on the anyone who saw the Manhattan skyline of the time they were nearly impossible to miss. The Congress Hall in Berlin, had it been built, would have met a similar fate. Even from an Allied bomber droning over the city at 15.000 feet the 250 metre (830 feet) wide dome would have been impossible to miss.  To give a further idea of the disproportionate and offensive scale of this building here we see a shot of the interior of the Congress Hall as it would have looked. See that Nazi eagle at the far end? Then below that a long row of columns? Then below that, at the centre, is a platform? That would presumably be the Führer Platform similar to one on the Zepplin Field in Nürnberg from where Hitler would address the gathered deputies and spectators. Given that this platform is about 10 metres (30 feet) across you can only imagine how small Hitler, or anyone for that matter, would be in comparison to this gigantic building. (This was the days before giant projection television screens remember.) Of course the cost of constructing such a ridiculous building would be prohibitive and Hitler’s finance minister repeatedly made protests against what he considered to be squandering of public funds for the project. Hitler’s reply was that the minister should "realise what a source of income to the state [his] buildings would be in fifty years. Remember what happened with Ludwig II. Everyone said he was mad because of the cost of his palaces. But today? Most tourists go to Upper Bavaria solely to see them. The entrance fees alone have long since paid for the building costs. Don’t you agree? The whole world will come to Berlin to see our buildings. All we need do is tell the Americans how much the Great Hall cost. Maybe we’ll exaggerate a bit and say a billion and a half instead of a billion. Then they’ll be wild to see the most expensive building in the world" But Hitler worried about his health and that he would never live to see these buildings completed. He told Speer that "these buildings are more important than anything else. You must do everything you can to complete them in my lifetime. Only if I have spoken in them and governed from them will they have the consecration they are going to need for my successors."  Here is a today’s final view of the Grosse Platz (the Great Square, or Adolf Hitler Platz) as designed by Speer and Hitler. Notice the East-West Axis running alongside the buildings at the front of the square (visible in the bottom left corner of the photo) and continuing along through the Brandenburg Tor (located just to the right of the centre at the very bottom of the photograph). Imagine yourself stepping through the main entrance to the square which is located at the opening on the side directly opposite the Congress Hall (the left side of the square closest to the foreground). As you passed through the main gate the Congress Hall would tower high above you almost out of the range of vision, obscured by low-lying clouds. To your right is the Reichstag building, puny in comparison. (The Reichstag was suggested for demolition by Albert Speer but Hitler decided to spare the building because he liked the architecture and planned to use it for social occasions.) To your left would be the Presidential Palace, planned as a replacement for Hitler’s Chancellery. Interesting in the plan of the Presidential Palace is the defensive measures that Hitler instructed Albert Speer to incorporate into its design. Defensive measures not considered or even felt necessary in the design of the first Chancellery that Speer built for Hitler. All windows and doors were to be equipped with heavy bullet-proof shutters in the possible event of a riot in response to "unpopular measures" taken by Hitler. "This remark" said Albert Speer, "betrayed a nervousness that [Hitler] had not had before [and] I unwittingly gave expression to this separation of Hitler from his people - a Hitler who was ready to have soldiers fire upon the populace - in my design for the façade of his palace." Speer described this façade as "frowning" and commented that it reminded him of the Leader who had long since moved into realms of self-idolatry. "It had been the very expression of tyranny." he would later say. Standing at the entrance to this square one would have to struggle to take it all in and perhaps at this they would ultimately fail simply because their eyes and minds would be incapable of processing the overwhelming scale. (Could someone standing at the foot of the World Trade Centre towers possibly grasp their true size?) "Our great buildings in Berlin and Nürnberg will make the cathedrals look ridiculously small." Hitler said. "Just imagine some little peasant coming into our great domed hall in Berlin. That will do more than take his breath away. From then on the man will know where he belongs."  Just imagine that Speer wanted to knock the Reichstag building down! Shameful! Anyway... back in the present once again. It is extremely difficult to get a picture of the Reichstag from this angle without any other people in it taking the same picture. This one is pretty good though, I must say.  A short walk through the Tiergarten brings us to the brilliantly lit Brandenburg Tor.  We are now in what was once East Berlin. It is easy to tell since the chariot at the top of the Brandenburg Tor faces east. That plus the sign that identifies this as Pariser Platz. I included that sign at dead centre to remind myself that Albert Speer's office once overlooked Pariser Platz (off to the right side, no longer existing). In the basement of that office a giant model of the plans for the city of Berlin sat in a room. Hitler would sometimes walk across the garden from his nearby Chancellory building to look at the model and dream of the city he would build.  An aerial view of Pariser Platz and the Brandenburg Tor shows the area as it was before the war. Pariser Platz is the square at the top of the photo and Albert Speer's ministry the building at the top right.  Another view of Pariser Platz during the Nazi parades staged after Hitler was named Chancellor in January 1933.  Just a short way down from Pariser Platz along the Unter den Linden (the name of Berlin's East-West axis road just to the east of the Brandenburg Tor) is the corner of Wilhelmstrasse. Turning right here would bring you to Hitler's Chancellory. I include this picture because, having seen the Unter den Linden all lit up for Christmas it is interesting to see what kinds of decorations the Nazis had put up.  And speaking of Nazi Christmas.... this isn't a very good image, but the Christmas trees with Swastikas are strange, don't you think. It does remind us, however, that Nazis are people too. And I don't mean that as a joke, but rather to say that even the most brutal societies most people are just people with families who get together at the holidays, whatever their respective holidays might be.  This annoys me. The guy who used to have a sausage stand here got his license revoked but the busker guy who pretends to be a statue can still hang out here. Yah, that's fair.  Once again, it is almost impossible to take a picture of the Brandenburg Tor without many tourists in it, but I think I did quite well.  A bit of a side angle to show the recently restored panels lining the inside of the gate.  A short walk down Berlin's East-West axis road brings us to the Soviet War Memorial, another of my favourite spots. This is in what was once West Berlin, but Soviet soldiers were still allowed to stand here as an honour guard even though it was out of their "domain".  We'll come back to some of these sights on the day after tomorrow. For now we can just enjoy them without the heavy burden of hearing about their history. There's been enough history today already, don't you think?  This is the western side of the Brandenburg Tor. See how the chariot is facing away from us?  Another short walk brings us to the rejuvenated Potsdammer Platz. Look at the pedestrian light at the right side. It is one of the old East Berlin ones with the funny men on it.  And this shows the funny Green Walking man from the East Berlin pedestrian lights.  You can also see in the background a slice of the Berlin wall, now a tourist attraction.  In the distance is the tent-like roof of the Sony Centre at Potsdammer Platz.  A short train ride takes us to the west of the city and the district of Kufürstendam. This is the Kaiser Wilhelm Gedächtnis Kirche, a church built as a memorial to Kaiser Wilhelm the First. It was damaged by Allied bombing in the Second World War with only the clock tower remaining. That clock tower remains in damaged form today as a reminder of the destructiveness of war. The weird purple building in the foreground is the rebuilt church that is still used for worship.  Here is a better view of the old church tower.  As you can see the giant circular stained glass window that once graced the church was blown out during the war and never replaced.  A view from the back showing more damaged parts of the tower.  And for those who like the "before and after photos" I include this picture taken just after the war showing the ruins of Berlin and the Kaiser Wilhelm Gedächtnis Kirche in the distance.  Another before and after photo showing the Kaiser Wilhelm Gedächtnis in the wake of an Allied bombing raid.  And with that my day in Berlin comes to an end. Riding the S-Bahn across the entire city brings me to Berlin Lichtenfeld train station where my night train to the east (destination Krakow) will depart at 21h20, as you can see. Hmmmm. Gleis 17? How's that for a fitting platform number? It's like all of this was meant to be.  Shortly before 21h20 the train pulls up to the station. Wait a second! I thought this was supposed to be a German Night Train. This don't look like no German anything! This might be an experience. But whatever it is it is NOT a cattle car that I will share with 50 other people so not a word of complaint shall be heard from me. Unlike countless millions of victims of the Nazi genocide I shall be reasonably comfortable on my train journey to the east. |
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