The road to Berlin

The trip to Berlin was the second longest road trip on our tour. Fortunately, the weather had turned much cooler than it had been when we drove to Prague. We made a stop just over the German border for our lunch at a roadside restaurant. After picking up our food, we sat outside at picnic tables. Despite the cooler temperatures, the insects were out in force. My friend Sura was wearing a sky blue shirt which the bugs seemed to like. We took turns trying to brush them off her back and shoulders, but it was a Sisyphean task.

By mid-afternoon, we arrived in a southwestern suburb of Berlin and we were no longer plagued by the tiny winged pests.

Our first stop once we made it to Berlin was Wannsee House.

The Wannsee neighborhood is very elegant. According to a website on the History of Wannsee Villa, this beautiful home was built in 1914-15 by "merchant, factory owner and Privy Commercial Councilor Ernst Marlier" who owned it for a few years before selling it to industrialist Friedrich Minoux.

The house was the site of the famous Wannsee Conference in January 1942 and since 1992 it has been a museum and library/archive dedicated to the story of the fateful conference where the "final solution" was developed. The Wannsee Villa site reports "In November 1940, [the owner] sold the villa to the Nordhav SS Foundation set up by Reinhard von Heydrich. According to the museum website, 'The purpose of the foundation was to build and maintain vacation resorts for the SS Security Service (SD).' Heydrich wanted to use the Wannsee villa for 'official functions and as a holiday resort.'"

As it happened, one member of our group had done an internship at Wannsee House and was offering a few of us some background on the conference. We were just standing in the central hallway listening to our friend Beth share what she knew when a member of the staff came up and told her she was not allowed to give her own tour. We protested saying she wasn't giving a tour, but rather sharing some background information. The staff member was adamant that she had overstepped. We were flabbergasted. It seemed absurd, but our guide explained that the staff member was acting on behalf of local guides--protecting their ability to make a living.

That's the staff member coming through the door. Our friend respectfully demurred and then we were each on our own to make our way through the museum.

The central hallway (pictured above) features a map similar to one we had seen at Theresienstadt listing countries of deportations.

One of the first placards in the museum notes that the conference was originally scheduled for December 9, 1941, but this was the day Hitler wanted to announce the declaration of war on the US.

One site providing a translation of the Wannsee conference minutes noted that the participants at the conference were mostly technocrats, one of whom was named Martin Luther.

The conference duration was "only an hour". Another site on the Wannsee Conference offers this statement:

Marshall Rosenberg, who teaches non-violent communication, was struck in reading psychological interviews with Nazi war criminals not by their abnormality, but that they used a language denying choice: "should," "one must," "have to." For example, Adolph Eichmann was asked, "Was it difficult for you to send these tens of thousands of people [to] their death?" Eichmann replied, "To tell you the truth, it was easy. Our language made it easy." Asked to explain, Eichmann said, "My fellow officers and I coined our own name for our language. We called it amtssprache -- 'office talk.'" In office talk "you deny responsibility for your actions. So if anybody says, 'Why did you do it?' you say, 'I had to.' 'Why did you have to?' 'Superiors' orders. Company policy. It's the law.'"

I found this chilling.

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum declares that the origins of "the Final Solution" are unclear, yet the genocide of the Jews was the culmination of a decade of Nazi policies. A placard at the museum noted: "In the course of the final solution and under appropriate direction, the Jews are to be utilized for work in the East in a suitable manner. In large labour columns and separated by sexes, Jews capable of working will be dispatched to these regions to build roads, and in the process a large number of them will undoubtedly drop out by way of natural reduction."

Although Heinrich Himmler is the acknowledged "architect" of the Holocaust, Reinhard Heydrich was the chair of the Wannsee Conference.

The Jewish Virtual Library says he "stood out as one of the cruelest and most brutal mass murderers in Nazi Germany." A lifelong anti-semite, he joined the Nazi party after being discharged from the Navy. Himmler was godfather to his oldest son.

After Kristallnacht, Heydrich saw to the arrest of 26,000 German Jews who were then sent to concentration camps. The next year he ordered Jews into ghettoes. He was also behind Einsatzgruppen executions of Jews in the Soviet Union.

Hitler had appointed Heydrich as the Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia in the fall of 1941. His responsibilities included squelching the Czech resistance and transporting Czech Jews to Poland. At the end of May 1942, "two Czech patriots, Jan Kubis and Josef Gabcik, parachuted from Britain into Prague, ambushed Heydrich's Mercedes and threw a bomb into the front seat." Heydrich, mortally wounded, died days later on June 4, 1942. We saw this monument to Operation Anthropoid, the code name for the attack, on our way to and from Terezin.

Adolf Eichmann was responsible for deportations of Jews. According to a description at the Wannsee House museum, he compiled the protocol of the Wannsee Conference.

Eichmann is famous for having escaped to Argentina in 1950. He was finally apprehended by Israeli agents ten years later, and executed in Jerusalem in 1962.

The entire Wannsee Conference meeting lasted about 90 minutes (some sites suggest it was only one hour, regardless it didn't take them long to do this evil work). Beyond spelling out the details of the Final Solution, one of the objectives of the conference was to resolve conflicts between the SS and the German Civil administration in Poland. Additionally, the conference was charged with addressing the issues of whether or not to deport the Mischlinge, people of mixed .blood, and those in mixed marriages.

Beyond the minutes and records encased in the rooms off the the entry hall, there are also placards offering the perspectives of survivors, including Primo Levi.

Levi's comment is: "I felt as if everyone should ask us questions, read from our faces who we were and numbly listen to our story. But no one looked us in the eye, no one took up the challenge. They were deaf, dumb and blind, shut inside their ruins as if in a fortress of deliberate ignorance, still strong, still able to hate and to despise, still trapped and caught up in a web of arrogance and guilt."

Ever since I started studying the Holocaust, I have heard stories of how, after the war, no one wanted to hear these stories. There are a number of explanations for the attitude of those alluded to by Levi including guilt, shame and disbelief.

The museum has a number of other displays, including some art.

The Women of Ravensbrück by Helen Ernst, 1946

Art in the camps was forbidden, but each of the camps I've visited have featured art. Some of it, such as this Ernst piece, was based on memory.

The museum offers interesting archives and displays, such as this "death book" from Mauthausen.

As the images included here show, the museum has a number of displays from other camps. This one reminded me of the problems of displaced persons following the war.

This is a view inside one of the women's barracks at Bergen Belsen on April 18, 1945 after liberation.

There was an interesting exhibit on antisemitism

This old saw regarding the "blood libel" was something which still had shocking resonance in the mid-twentieth century. The phrase, "Die Juden sind unser Unglück!" appeared at the bottom of every issue of Julius Streicher's propaganda rag.

The Wannsee site is truly beautiful.

By the time our visit was complete, the sun had come out and we had a lovely view of the lake.

Our next stop was the Topography of Terror museum.

This indoor/outdoor museum is worthy of much greater attention than I was able to give it at the end of a long travel day. It's located on the site where a number of buildings important to the Nazi era still stand.