Berlin Memorials, Part 2

After leaving the German Resistance Museum, we headed over to the Große Hamburger Straße in Berlin's Mitte district.  The Mitte district was once a thriving Jewish neighborhood.  This was the site of Berlin's oldest Jewish cemetery, before it was destroyed during the Nazi times.

Across from the cemetery was the oldest home for Jewish aged in Berlin; there was also a school for Jewish boys located on the same property.  During the war, the Gestapo commandeered both buildings and used them as virtual prisons, detaining the Jews until they could be transported to camps in the east.  The Nazis destroyed the cemetery in 1943.  They desecrated the graves and used the gravestones to reinforce the walls of air raid shelters built on the grounds of the cemetery.  By April 1945, the grounds served as the final resting place for victims of Allied bombing.

In the lower right section of this photo it's possible to see the one remaining, "symbolic" gravestone of Moses Mendelsohn.  There's a sarcophagus filled with the remains of Jewish gravestones.  currently, the site holds the remains of 3,000 Jews and 3,000 other victims.

Outside the gates of the cemetery site (it was locked, and we didn't really have time to explore), there are a few other kinds of memorials.

These statues, with their elongated faces and bodies, reminded me of statuary I saw at Ravensbrück and Theresienstadt. The rocks at their feet are serving the same function as rocks on a gravestone at a Jewish cemetery.

There were a number of other memorials at this site.

Our last stop with Andy was Rosenstraße.  I learned about the women's protest at Rosenstraße by way of the film by the same name.   This is a compelling story about a successful protest by "Aryan" spouses of Jews.  Up to 1943, the Nazis had exempted the Jewish partners in these marriages from the "Final Solution".  The Nazis termed this the Schlußaktion der Berliner Juden.  Characterized as particularly brutal, the Gestapo rounded up the Jewish spouses from factories and homes.  Although 8,000 Jews were sent on transports to the east, about 2,000 of the Jews were imprisoned in a Jewish administrative center on Rosenstraße.  Their spouses, mostly women, congregated across the street, and raised their voices, demanding "Give us back our husbands."

Women Stand Here.

"Give us back our men!"

At one point the guards demanded the streets be cleared or they would open fire.  The women dispersed, only to return to the street and the protest.  There were a few other close calls, but ultimately this was an illustration of successful resistance.  

The "monument" is not particularly elegant--it's rather blocky--but the story is one of the most important of the war. 

The last set of memorials we reviewed were called Stopelsteine. These memorials were designed by Gunter Demnig. "Believing that a person begins to be forgotten when his name is forgotten, he installed such plates in over 500 places around Germany and Europe, documenting some of the many Jews, Gypsies, political dissidents, homosexuals and other groups of people who fell victim to National socialism."

I think these are very effective memorials.  As noted in the quoted passage above, these plates identify individuals by names.  We encounter in these plates people, as particular human beings, who lived in a particular place, who died in a particular place at a particular time. 

The downside of these memorials is that they are literally underfoot and can be overlooked.    Knowing they exist, however, one can "keep an eye out" for them.

The remainder of the day was focused on the Jewish Museum of Berlin--the subject of the next post.