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DO TODAY'S GERMANS STILL REMEMBER?  A spectacular aerial view of the Jewish Holocaust Memorial in Berlin |
Three German generations born since The Holocaust
of TheColumnists.com
I’m just back from Berlin--a trip I thought I’d never make.
I was just a kid when we got into WWII in 1941. But, with my Jewish background, I remember the Holocaust all too well. Germany, the country that carried out the slaughter of six million Jews, was not at the top of my list of places to visit.
But last month, a friend asked me to go there with her. She wanted to visit her daughter who had moved to Berlin after marrying a German and having two children.
Three generations have been born since Hitler’s “Final Solution of the Jewish Question.” I wondered how today’s Germans, too young to have lived during the war, faced up to their legacy of genocide. Did they share the guilt? Or did they want to look away from the atrocities and move on.
I decided to go. I was in for some surprises.
Even as I saw Berlin’s famous sites--its
two rivers representing layers of history, its broad tree-lined
boulevard Unter den Linden, the island of museums, the magnificent
Sans Souci Palace of Fredrick the Great--I couldn’t stop
thinking of the Holocaust.
My first thought was that Germany would destroy all reminders
of the Nazi’s plan to exterminate an entire people. Just
the opposite has happened--at least in Berlin. Everywhere I went,
I saw evidence that the tragic past was not forgotten.
Near the famous Brandenburg Gate, a maze of concrete slabs--looking like nameless tombstones--spreads out like a vast surrealistic landscape. It is actually a public monument.
The slabs, called the Jewish Holocaust Memorial, cover more than a city block. They lie in undulating, wave-like patterns on uneven ground.
The U. S. architect, Peter Eisenman, said
he wanted visitors--who can wander in day or night--to feel a
sense of confusion and insecurity. He wanted them to rethink
the past by sensing the feelings the Holocaust victims may have
experienced.
Not everyone extolled the memorial. On the first day it opened
in 2005, the site was desecrated with a swastika. It was quickly
removed.
Paul Spiegel, head of Germany’s Central Council of Jews, was not pleased with the memorial. He said it left “an incomplete message.” It merely showed the Jews as victims. Visitors are not confronted with the important question of guilt and responsibility.
The monument, he said, failed to ask “Why? Why did it happen?”
On another day, I went to the Grunwald Bahnhof railroad station. Here, the Nazis packed Jews into freight trains and shipped them to concentration camps. Some went to Auschwitz, the notorious death camp where prisoners were herded into what they were told were showers. They were really gas chambers spewing lethal fumes.
On the Grunwald Bahnhof station platform,
I saw inscribed the dates and number of victims shipped each
month. The earliest inscription traced back to October 10, 1941--
two months before Pearl Harbor. It said 1,251 people were sent
to concentration camps at Auschwitz and Lodz. The freight trains
kept rolling like clockwork even as the Russian and Allied armies
closed in on Berlin.
.
I did not get a chance to visit the city’s well-known Jewish
Museum. But I did go to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp
on the edge of Berlin.
While the Nazis hosted the 1936 Olympic Games, they had slave laborers build this camp to hold Jews and political foes. Inmates included anti-Nazi clergymen-among them the well-known Lutheran pastor Martin Niemoeller--as well as “undesirables” like gypsies, homosexuals, the physically disabled, trade unionists, communists, and Jehovah’s Witnesses who refused to join the military.
Sachsenhausen was the second major camp
built after Dachau. Unlike Auschwitz and other extermination
camps, it was primarily a labor camp-a sign still standing over
a gate says “Work Liberates.” The camp also served
as a school of brutality, training SS officers to be guards at
other camps.
Of the 200,000 people imprisoned in Sachenhausen, more than 50,000
were executed or died of starvation. I saw the pitiful wooden
barracks where they slept. I looked into the jail cells where
some were beaten and tortured. And I walked into the bleak courtyard
where lightly clad inmates lined up at 5:30 a.m., shivering in
the bitter winter cold.
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size of the slabs that make up the Holocaust Memorial |
How do the Germans feel about the Holocaust?
I spent a good deal of time in Berlin with a gentleman born after the war. I got to know him well enough to ask that delicate question. He agreed to tell me if he remained anonymous. I will call him John.
“I personally do not feel guilty,” John said. Like all Germans, John said he studied the Nazi era in detail in high school. He feels Hitler’s rise to power is something not fully understood to this day.
Nevertheless, he said, the Germans are
not unique in needing to understand the reason they put into
power a leader who undertook a campaign of genocide.
“Unfortunately, as recent history has proven, humans continue
to behave horribly toward each other in many places in the world.”
The fact that Germany is not alone does not excuse the Holocaust, John added. “One has to ask oneself, ‘How would I have acted back then?’ And ‘What can I do to grow and to help others grow morally to make sure that under similar circumstances such a catastrophe would be avoided?’
“I certainly think it (the Holocaust) should not be forgotten and a ‘moving on’ can only happen with the full knowledge of what happened…”
Of course, this is just one man speaking. I have no idea how much it reflects the feeling of most Germans. Still, all signs indicate the Holocaust is not forgotten. For example, Germany has made it a crime to deny it ever existed--as some claim--and has banned Hitler’s manifesto, “Mein Kampf.”
From what I have read and all the people I met, I feel there is a greater awareness now about what Germany did than there was after the war. If there is not collective guilt, I think there is at least a notion of collective responsibility, a resolve to see it never happens again.
©2007 by David Zinman. This column first posted Jan 29, 2007.
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