Heydrich convened the conference to discuss “the Final Solution of the Jewish Question” on 20 January 1942 at a columned official residence set amid gardens on the Wannsee, a popular public lake outside Berlin. Present, Gerlach says, summarising, “were five representatives from the Security Police and the SD, eight politicians and functionaries from the civil administration, and two representatives from the party, one from the party chancellery and one from the Race and Resettlement Office of the ϟϟ.” Eichmann and Müller, now fully informed, were among them. “We called it the Conference of State Secretaries,” Eichmann told Avner Less. It has come to be known as the Wannsee Conference.
Masters of Death (285)
| During my first visit in 2007 |
The Conference had originally been called for December 8, but the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour and the launching of the Soviet offensive against the German siege of Moscow forced a postponement. The minutes do not openly describe the killing programme, but none of the high-ranking participants from the various government ministries could have been in any doubt what Heydrich meant when he said that the remnant of Jews who survived forced labour would have to be “appropriately dealt with.” Adolf Eichmann, the specialist on the “Jewish question” in the Reich Security Main Office run by Heydrich, provided the population statistics, which overstated the number of Jews in Europe by some two million. Much of the conference was taken up by the question of whether Jews of mixed ancestry (Mischlinge) and Jews in mixed marriages were to be included in the “final solution.” The ϟϟ was forced by considerations of public morale to respect these distinctions in Germany itself. In the occupied areas, however, the Nazis made no exceptions for part-Jews or Jews in mixed marriages.
Stackelberg & Winkle The Nazi Germany Sourcebook: An Anthology of Texts (345-346)
By the time of the conference, important preliminary decisions had been made on individual points discussed at the meeting. Hinrich Lohse had asked in a letter "Subject: Jewish executions" on November 15, 1941 from Berlin:
Should this be done regardless of age and gender and economic interests [for example, the Wehrmacht in skilled workers in armaments factories]? It goes without saying that the purification of Jews from the East is an urgent task; but their solution must be brought into harmony with the needs of the war economy . So far, I have not been able to take such an instruction from the orders on the Jewish question in the 'brown folder' or from other decrees.
| During my 2020 senior class trip |
The Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories replied on December 18, 1941 that in the meantime, oral discussions had clarified and that economic issues should be "fundamentally disregarded in the settlement of the problem". On December 16, 1941, at a government meeting, Hans Frank spoke of the intention to make the General Government "free of Jews" and referred to the upcoming "big meeting in Berlin" at Heydrich's. It is not clear why the conference was postponed by about six weeks. The historian Christian Gerlach in his book Krieg, Ernährung, Völkermord… interprets Hitler's declaration of December 12, 1941, that the extermination of the Jews must be a necessary consequence of the world war that has now begun, as a decision on the Holocaust resulting in a new situation that required fundamental changes to the plans proposed by Heydrich. Such an interpretation however is shared only by a few specialist historians.
Through the site's programme they address
the persecution and murder of European Jews, the history of National
Socialism, the events that led up to this history and its aftermath. A number of my students managed to use the experience to write successful research papers for the IBDP's Extended Essay and Internal Assessment in History.
It was here at the conference that the responsibilities for the deportation and extermination campaigns started were clarified with the measures for their implementation coordinated and their timings determined. Finally, the groups of those Jews who were destined for deportation and thus for extermination were defined here. This required the cooperation of a multitude of institutions that had not previously been informed about the “final solution”.
The contents recorded in the minutes of the Wannsee Conference include Heydrich's announcement that he had been appointed by Göring as “Commissioner for the preparation of the final solution to the European Jewish question” and that the Reichsführer ϟϟ and Chief of the German Police- Himmler- was responsible who wanted to use the conference to coordinate with the central authorities directly involved. Heydrich reported on the emigration of around 537,000 Jews from the "Altreich", Austria, as well as Bohemia and Moravia, which were to be replaced by "the evacuation of the Jews to the East" after "prior approval by the Führer". Around eleven million Jews would be considered for the “final solution to the European Jewish question”. This number also included "religious Jews" from the unoccupied part of France, England, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey and other neutral or opposing states outside the German sphere of influence.
In large labour columns, with separation of the sexes, the able-bodied Jews are being led into these areas to build roads, although a large part will undoubtedly be lost through natural reduction. Any remaining stock will have to be treated accordingly, since this is undoubtedly the most resilient part, since this, representing a natural selection, is to be addressed as the nucleus of a new Jewish construction when released.
In the process, "Europe from west to east" would be combed through because of “socio-political necessities” and to free up living space in the Reich territory. First, the German Jews were to be transported to transit ghettos and from there further to the east. Jews over the age of 65 and Jews with war invalidity or bearers of the Iron Cross I would be sent to the Theresienstadt ghetto which would "turn off the many interventions in one fell swoop". After possible difficulties in the “evacuation operation” in the “occupied or influenced European territories” had been addressed and discussed, the question of how to deal with “Jewish mixed race” and “mixed marriages” was addressed.
Standing in front of a display containing the minutes of the conference in 2017, and the room recreated for the outstanding BBC documentary series Auschwitz: The Nazis and the 'Final Solution' (2005). Of
the fourteen participants invited and sat around a table in this room
discussing the logistics of mass murder, eight held doctorates or
comparable university degrees. The minutes of the Wannsee Conference,
copies of which were displayed within the glass of the table I'm
standing over (since changed after a recent refurbishment post-Wuhan
'flu) were used in the opening speech in the trial against the Race and
Settlement Main Office and quoted a few weeks later in the indictment
for the Wilhelmstrasse trial. Although there was not yet an
implementable overall plan for the “final solution”, the protocol is
considered to be the key source for the organisation of genocide which
Holocaust deniers therefore claim is fake, usually by referring to a
book by Robert Kempner in which he mixed images of facsimiles with
copies despite nevertheless correctly reproducing the text itself.
Historians Norbert Kampe and Christian Mentel have refuted these false allegations.
The Wannsee Conference is the subject of now three feature films. Here is the start of the 1984 German television production Die Wannseekonferenz which presents the conference in real time. Directed by Heinz Schirk based on the play by Paul Mommertz. It shows a disturbing performance of charm and calculation by Dietrich Mattausch as Heydrich with Gerd Böckmann as Eichmann. In 1987 the cinema version followed which was filmed at the conference venue and was based on records and minutes kept of the conference, spoken by unnervingly convincing actors in carefully reconstructed surroundings and wearing meticulously authentic uniforms. In it however, Kritzinger is portrayed as a skeptic which does not correspond to the
historical facts that have been handed down. In his review for The American Historical Review, Alan Steinweis notes scenes where Heydrich pulls Krtizinger and Stuckart aside as dramatic inventions. Nicholas K. Johnson (80) laments that Steinweis "unfortunately reviews the film as historians are prone to—he focuses on several scenes that obviously contain fictional elements, or “artistic license,” and avoids engaging with the film’s broader arguments and vision. The review also compares Conspiracy with Die Wannseekonferenz and actually argues that the former may be more historically accurate because it discusses the killing process in more detail, as mentioned by Eichmann during his interrogation."
Here is the entrance as shown in the film and from the same position during my 2021 class trip: 
The film won numerous international prizes, including the Adolf Grimme Prize. in his review for Der Spiegel, Heinz Höhne was unimpressed:
Screenwriter Paul Mommertz, 54, is delighted: 'An optimal film, on a remarkable level.' The praise goes above all to the director Heinz Schirk, and rightly so: he understood it with a squad of proven actors, above all Dietrich Mattausch in the role of Heydrich and Gerd Böckmann as Eichmann, the Mommertz play that atmosphere of racist mania for cleansing and callous bureaucratic perfection that made the Wannsee Conference the most horrific Hitlerite in Germany. But what is presented here as a document-safe reconstruction of contemporary history, on closer inspection, proves to be a product of televised fabulous fabulousness and combination. Because: This is not the Wannsee Conference as historians know it. It's the Wannsee Conference a la Paul Mommertz.
Wannseekonferenz appears to be the better movie with Conspiracy coming across as a flashy imitation, although watching both films is instructive. Both have the same people attending the conference, but how each attendee is portrayed at the conference is strikingly different. Most of the attendees in Conspiracy (except for Dr. Klopfer) are viewed as flawed intellectuals, but full of grace, charm and manners (which makes a nice stark comparison with what they are discussing). Almost all of the attendees in Die Wannseekonferenz (except for the female secretary) are shown as crude, corrupt pigs that differ with each other only as to how to divide their 'power'. I'm tempted to have my students research the 'real' Major Lange. The crude drunken Major Lange of Die Wannseekonferenz seems more likely to be butchering the Jews of Riga than the soft spoken, charming, well-mannered Major Lange of Conspiracy.
Next to the House of the Wannsee Conference is this 1874 zinc copy of the Flensburg lion (or more properly the Idstedter lion) I'm standing beside which became the symbol of the so-called Alsen colony around Wannsee. The war club "Alsen" took care of the preservation of the lion in Wannsee. The original had been created by the sculptor Wilhelm Bissen as a reminder of the victory of the royal Danish troops over the Schleswig-Holstein troops in the battle of Idstedt on July 25, 1850. In 1864 Bismarck had it brought to Berlin and initially installed in the Zeughaus. After the war ended in 1945, it was brought to Copenhagen by the American army. For some time after the war, many Danish politicians had hoped that Schleswig and Holstein would now return to Denmark. When it became clear that this would not happen, they put forward the idea of returning the lion to Flensburg which was, again, owned by Germany which sounds paradoxical; perhaps the logic was that since the Danes themselves could not yet return, the lion at least would. Finally by 2011 the lion was brought to Flensburg and placed in the Danish military cemetery.
In 1874, a zinc copy of the monument was erected here in Wannsee in a public park near the Colonie Alsen association of war veterans. This monument was paid for by banker Wilhelm Conrad. A path leading up to the statue was fittingly dubbed the Straße zum Löwen, i.e. the Road to the Lion. This copy has replaced the reliefs of the four Danish officers with a single image of the German officer Prince Frederick Charles of Prussia, in effect reversing the meaning of the original monument. In 1938, the Danish press reported the existence of the copy of the historic monument and, after the Danish embassy complained about the poor condition of
the lion which by then had become overgrown by trees and bushes, it was
moved to its present location on Heckeshorn (right next to the memorial
site where it can be seen behind my 2017 cohort sitting in the garden of the Haus der Wannsee-Konfernz, looking at towards the lake). Since then, the "Straße zum Löwen", which ended at the old location, no longer leads to the memorial.
| Franz Alfred Six (1909 - 1975) |
After the war the villa became part of the Wannsee Hospital together with other neighbouring villas until it was closed in 1971. From 1990 to 2009 the Tannenhof Berlin-Brandenburg association operated the villa as a drug therapy centre. The International Montessori School is now using the building since a renewed renovation in accordance with its status as a listed building.
Disguised as a "broadcast technical research institute", special antennae were installed and the largest and most important radio monitoring system in Germany was built. Strictly shielded from the public as listening to "enemy broadcasts" was forbidden under threat of death, the "Special Service Seehaus" recorded broadcasts in 36 languages from 1941 onwards and employed around five hundred people. To the annoyance of Reich Propaganda Minister Goebbels, who was also sitting in the Sweden pavilion with his "Interradio" staff, the reports from the Propaganda Ministry were exposed as lies by the information it gathered on the war situation. Therefore efforts were made to keep the messages received there as secret as possible. The monitoring system gained an important strategic importance especially towards the end of the war. Today there are apparently apartments in the house, which has been renamed the Sweden Pavilion again after renovation and remodeling.
Waldhof am Bogensee, former weekend retreat of Josef Goebbels north of Berlin near Lanke. It was a gift to Goebbels from the city of Berlin back in 1936 for his 39th birthday. “What a jewel the house has become, so idyllic, romantic, and peaceful,” he would later write of it, using it as an illicit 'love nest.'
With the Russians now so close, on the last day of January 1945, Goebbels had sent Schwägermann out to Lanke, his lakeside mansion on the Bogensee, to evacuate Magda, their six children and two governesses into the air raid shelter at Schwanenwerder. The next day he declared Berlin a ‘fortress city.’ Surrounded by her brood, Magda was in a world of self-delusion. From Berthe the milliner’s she purchased a green velvet hat, a black turban, and a brown hat trimmed with fur; she mentioned that ‘when things calmed down’ she’d like to have a brown hat remodelled. ‘The news you’ll be hearing isn’t rosy,’ she wrote to Harald, now in British captivity, on February 10. ‘We’re all sound in heart and health; but as the whole family belongs together at times like these we’ve shut down Bogensee and we’ve all moved back into Berlin. Despite all the air raids our house is still standing and everybody here—including your grand-mother and the rest of the family—is well housed. The children find it splendid that there’s no school and, thank God, they’ve noticed nothing of the seriousness of the hour.’ ‘Papa and I,’ she concluded, ‘are full of confidence and we’re doing our duty as best we can.’
Irving (885-886), Goebbels, Mastermind of the Third Reich
My 2024 Bavarian International School cohort at the so-called Bridge of Spies, the Glienicke Bridge, over the Havel connecting the Königstraße in Wannsee with the Berliner Straße in the Berlin suburb of Potsdam and as it appeared as part of the border between East and West Berlin during the Cold War. The half-timbered bridge was opened at the end of 1907 as the fourth structure at this location under the name Kaiser Wilhelm Bridge, but this name didn't catch on.
During the last days of April 1945, during the fighting between the Wehrmacht and the Red Army in the area of the Berlin suburbs of Potsdam, the Glienicke Bridge was destroyed. Contrary to reports, it wasn't intentionally blown up by either the Wehrmacht or the Red Army, although explosive charges had been attached to all of the pillars. The engineer who was to blow it up was stationed in one of the last houses on the Potsdam side. An intentional blow-up would have completely destroyed the bridge as an attack by the Red Army from the Berlin side was expected. However, as Red Army troops from the Potsdam town centre approached the bridg, Soviet tanks fired on it and hit two explosive charges that destroyed part of the bridge; all other detonators remained intact.
Between 1962 and 1986, high-ranking agents from both military camps were exchanged three times on the Glienicke Bridge. Among others, the spies Rudolf Ivanovich Abel and Francis Gary Powers were exchanged on February 10, 1962. From 1963, members of the military missions of Czechoslovakia, Poland and Yugoslavia based in West Berlin (and some of their family members) were also allowed to cross the bridge with the appropriate identification papers. In 1973, this regulation was extended to employees of the USSR General Consulate, which had been based in West Berlin since June 1973.
The East German authorities closed the bridge on November15, 1984 for security reasons, leading to new talks between visiting representatives of the Berlin Senate and the DDR government. This resulted in the West Berlin Senate declaring that it would cover the estimated repair costs of two million marks. Although the paints came from the same West Berlin factory, different shades (DB 601 and D 603) were used, so that the two-tone design was retained in 1985. On March 11, 1988, at around 2 am, three refugees from Potsdam broke through the barriers on the bridge to West Berlin in a stolen standard W50 truck.
Tempelhof aeroport
The Nazi eagle, shorn of its swastika, still remains. Amongst the first projects the Nazis undertook
with the
reconstruction of Berlin was the planned renovation of Berlin's Tempelhof International Airport, which
began in 1934. Tempelhof was dramatically redesigned as the gateway to
Europe, and became the forerunner of today's modern airports. Indeed,
the airport halls and the neighbouring buildings are still known as the
largest built entities worldwide, and Tempelhof has been described by
British architect Sir Norman Foster as "the mother of all airports". The
building complex was designed to resemble an eagle in flight with
semicircular hangars forming the bird's spread wings. A mile long hangar
roof was to have been laid in tiers to form a stadium for spectators at
air and ground demonstrations. However, although under construction for
more than ten years, it was never finished because of the war. Tempelhof
was one of Europe's three iconic pre-war airports, the others being
London's now defunct Croydon Airport and the old Paris–Le Bourget
Airport. It acquired a further iconic status as the centre of the Berlin
Airlift of 1948–49.
The
Nazi enlargement of Berlin's Tempelhof aeroport grandiosely
demonstrated their aims at enlarging Germany's influence in Europe. The
airport's eagle design clearly conveys that "the Eagle of Germany" would
again take to the skies, to fly higher than ever before. Coupled with
other Nazi architectural accomplishments, like the 1936 Olympic Stadium,
and Nuremberg Zeppelin Tribune, were assuredly profound propaganda
victories for the Nazi regime.
| |
| Hitler and Göring at Tempelhof, 1932 |
The early Nazi concentration camp Columbia, which was opened on December 27, 1934, was located directly at the new building and had operated until November 5, 1936 and demolished in 1938. A 1994 memorial designed by Georg Seibert and the Friends' Association for the commemoration of Nazi crimes on and around the Tempelhofer Flugfeld eV commemorates the existence of the Columbia concentration camp since 1994.
From January 1940 until early 1944, Weser Flugzeugbau assembled Junkers Ju 87 "Stuka" dive bombers; thereafter, it assembled Focke-Wulf Fw 190 fighter planes in the still unfurnished main hall and hangars 3 to 7 of the new terminal, which were supplied by a railway and trucks via a connecting tunnel.[16] Hangars 1 and 2 were not used to assemble aircraft as these were already used by Luft Hansa for its own planes. Aircraft parts were brought in from all over the city while complete aircraft engines were trucked to Tempelhof. Once the airframes were complete and the engines had been installed, the finished aircraft were flown out. The Luftwaffe did not use Tempelhof as a military airfield during the war, except for occasional emergency landings by fighter aircraft.
A decapitated reichsadler in front of the aeroport with how it originally appeared on the roof with victorious Red Army soldiers, May 1945 below. 
When the front approached at the end of April 1945, the airport was to be defended. The airport commander at the time, Colonel Rudolf Böttger, and some senior Lufthansa employees circumvented this order, however, by having the weapons provided and setting up a field hospital. This did not lead to a defence of the airport, which could have led to its complete destruction. According to Wikipedia, Böttger evaded Adolf Hitler's extermination order to blow up the entire complex by suicide. However, according to other sources he was called upon by an officer of the Waffen ϟϟ for insubordination and shot. In fact, the concrete floor of the main hall was blown up, so that it fell onto the luggage level below and the main hall became unusable. On April 29 1945 Red Army troops occupied the Tempelhof district and the airport. The new buildings were largely spared from destruction, but there were several fires that also severely damaged the steel structure of the hall buildings. The buildings of the old airport were completely destroyed and the airfield was littered with impacts. The underground bunker with the film archive also burned down completely, and all films were destroyed in the process.
On July 2, 1945, the Red Army left the airfield so that it could be taken over by the Americans (473rd Air Services Group) before their official arrival on July 4.
The airport was given a new meaning in 1948 when, along with the Gatow airfield and later Tegel Airport, it served to transport food and goods for Berlin by plane during the blockade of West Berlin through the valiant efforts of the RAF and USAAF. A large part of the cargo consisted of fuel. The vital supply through the Berlin Airlift between various West German cities and Berlin lasted from June 26, 1948 to May 12, 1949. In Tempelhof, the planes took off and landed at roughy ninety-second intervals. The American pilot Gail Halvorsen popularised the dropping of candy during the approach to Tempelhof with parachutes made of handkerchiefs from the cockpit windows, which was adopted by other pilots and gave the aircraft the legendary name of raisin bombers. The southern runway was built for the smooth operation of the airlift.
Tempelhof Airport closed all operations on October 30, 2008, despite considerable protest. The former airfield has subsequently been used as a recreational space known as Tempelhofer Feld. In September 2015 it was announced that Tempelhof would also become an emergency refugee camp.
The swastikas return to allow Tom Cruise to make his movie Valkyrie
Nearby, Volkssturm along Hermannstrasse. Beevor (302) writes of how
The remnants of his `Norge' and `Danmark' regiments were waiting impatiently by the canal for motor transport, which was having difficulty getting to them through the rubble-blocked streets. Just as the trucks finally arrived, a cry of alarm was heard: `Panzer durchgebrochen!' This cry prompted a surge of `tank fright' even among hardened veterans and a chaotic rush for the vehicles, which presented an easy target for the two T-34s that had broken through. The trucks that got away even had men clinging on to the outsides. As they escaped north up the Hermannstrasse, they saw scrawled on a house wall `SS traitors extending the war!' There was no doubt in their minds as to the culprits: `German Communists at work. Were we going to have to fight against the enemy within as well?Treptower Park
In October 2003, the statue of the Red Army
soldier was restored in a workshop on Rügen, brought back to Berlin via ship and has been on its base since May 4, 2004.
One enters the memorial either coming from Puschkinallee or from Am Treptower Park , each through a triumphal arch made of grey granite shown here on July 12, 1957 when members of the district association of Greater
Berlin, together with the delegations from the CSR, from China, North
Korea and Vietnam, attended the 7th party congress and during one of my class visits An inscription on this honours the soldiers “who died for the freedom and independence of the socialist homeland”. Following the path you come to a kind of forecourt with a three metre high statue of a woman, an allegory of the “Mother Homeland” mourning for her fallen sons. From here the line of sight of the main monument opens up. A broad, gently sloping path lined with sloping birch trees leads along the central axis to the main field of the complex. This is marked by two large, stylised flags made of red granite, which lean towards the path on either side. At the front of each is the sculpture of a kneeling soldier in full gear and armed with a machine gun. There is an older soldier on the left and a younger soldier on the right. From here a few stairs lead down to the symbolic burial ground, which forms the centre of the complex. These graves, greened with grass and small hedges, are marked by five square stone slabs, each with a laurel wreath (the real graves are more likely to be found on the sides of the complex under the plane trees and under the burial mound).
In the following decades, the Treptow site was at times completely superimposed on mass events and state rituals of the DDR. In 1985, on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the end of the war, the representatives of the DDR's youth movement organised a torchlight procession at the Treptow Memorial.
There, they represented
the "oath of youth of the DDR". In the time of the invasion on 28
December 1989 strangers smeared the stone carcass and the base of the
crypt with anti-Soviet slogans. The SED-PDS suspected that the
perpetrators would come from the right-wing extremist scene and
organised a mass demonstration on January 3, 1990, involving 250,000
citizens of the DDR. On this occasion, Gregor Gysi, party chairman,
demanded "constitutional protection" for the site; historian Stefan
Wolle therefore considers it possible that Stasi employees were behind
the vandalism, fearing their positions upon re-unification.
In the following decades, the Treptow site was at times completely superimposed on mass events and state rituals of the DDR. In 1985, on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the end of the war, the representatives of the DDR's youth movement organised a torchlight procession at the Treptow Memorial.
The Soviet
war memorials were an important point of negotiation on the Russian side
for the two-plus-four treaties on German reunification. The Federal
Republic therefore committed itself in 1992 in the agreement of December
16, 1992 between the Government of the Federal Republic of Germany and
the Government of the Russian Federation on war grave security to ensure
its existence permanently, and to maintain and repair it. Any changes
in monuments require the approval of the Russian Federation. In 1994,
the military ceremonial was held for the withdrawal of Russian troops
from East Germany at the Soviet Memorial. Since 1995 a memorial service has
been held every year on the 9th of May with flowers and wreaths,
including the "Union of Antifascists Treptow e. V." The event is under
the motto "Day of Liberation" and corresponds with the day of the
Victory , the Russian holiday. On May 9, 2015, about 10,000 people
visited the memorial to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the war.
More problematic is the portrayal of Soviet innocence, which lacks validity due to the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact's program for the future division of Europe between Germany and the Soviet Union, subsequent Red Army participation in the invasion of Poland in 1939, and the Soviet invasion of Finland in 1939-1940. Claims that the German invasion disrupted the Soviet Union's peaceful development ignored the forced collectivisation of agriculture and the Great Purge in which 19 million Soviet were arrested, a majority of whom either were executed or died in labour camps. Stalin, responsible for these atrocities and the disastrous lack of preparedness for the German invasion, was omitted from the narrative.Geographical Review , Apr., 2003, Vol. 93, No. 2
The
last two sarcophagi dedicated to the heroic dying stand in line with
the central location of the complex, an artificially created burial
mound. This is dominated by the sculpture “The Liberator” by Yevgeny
Wutschetich standing on a double conical base. 
The figure shows a
soldier who carries a sword in his right hand and a protective child on
his left arm; a swastika is bursting under his boots. This memorial to the liberator as
part of geographic memorial triptych with his
mother on Mamayev Hill in Volgograd (1967) and the worker behind the
front in Magnitogorsk (1979) a showing the forged sword in
Magnitogorsk, the raised sword in Volgograd and the lowered sword in
Berlin. Here it serves as a mausoleum on which a ten to
twelve metre high bronze statue is placed depicting a bareheaded,
heroic, Soviet soldier wielding a sword and standing on a smashed
swastika, into which the sword is deeply cut. On his left arm he is
carrying a child while staring out over the plaza. This sculpture, "Der
Erreer" by Jewgeni Wuchetich, stands on a double conical base 12 metres
high and weighing 70 tonnes. The statue rises above a walk-in
pavilion built on a hill. In the dome of the pavilion is a mosaic with a
circulating Russian inscription and a German translation. This mosaic
was one of the first important orders in the post-war period for the
August Wagner company which
combined workshops for mosaic and glass painting in Berlin-Neukölln .
The hill itself is modelled after a "Kurgan" (mediæval, Slavic tombs on
the Don plain), often found in Soviet memorials such as those at
Volgograd, Smolensk, Minsk, Kiev, Odessa and Donetsk. On top marks the
outstanding endpoint of the 10-hectare complex. The sculptor himself
emphasised in several interviews that the representation of the soldier
with a child saved had a purely symbolic meaning and not a precise
incident. However, in the DDR the narrative of sergeant Nikolay
Ivanovich Massov, who had brought a little girl near the Potsdamer
bridge to safety on April 30, 1945 during the storming of the
Reichskanzlei, was widely circulated. In his honour, a memorial plaque
was erected on this bridge over the Landwehrkanal and for a long time he
was regarded as the model of the Treptow soldier. The model for the
bronze figure was the Soviet soldier Ivan Odartschenko. Another version
claims that the monument is modelled on the heroic deed of the Soviet
soldier and former worker of the Minsker Radiowerkes T. A. Lukyanovich,
who paid for the salvation of a little girl in Berlin with his life. The
source for this version is the book Berlin 896 km by Soviet journalist and writer Boris Polewoi.
The Heereswaffenmeisterschule dating from 1935 at Treptower Park then and now
Schöneweide
During the Nazi era, Niederschöneweide in Treptow developed quickly into an important location for the armaments production thanks to its metal and chemical industry. A new building was built for Hasselwerderstraße in the Hasselwerderstraße, where, among other things, the departments of inheritance and race care, infant care, Schularzt and Schulzahnklinik were housed. At the end of the Sedanstraße (today: Bruno-Bürgel-Weg), a building was built for the SA-Stand 5 "Horst Wessel", which at the same time served as an HJ-Heim for Niederschöneweide. In 1933, the crossing area in front of Schöneweide train station was redesigned and the main road system was expanded. Because of the intensified consignments from 1941 personnel shortages in the factories arose. In order to maintain production, more and more forced labourers were employed. In 1943 Albert Speer erected a barrack camp for more than 2,000 forced labourers between the Britzer, Sedan and Grimaustrae. The barrack camp is now under monument protection. A partial area of this was made available to the public in the summer of 2006 as a documentation centre for Nazi forced labour under the sponsor "Topography of Terror". On April 16, 1945 the last great battle of the war in Europe began around Berlin. On April 24, just after German rear groups had blown the Kaisersteg and the Treskow Bridge, Niederschöneweide was in the hands of the 8th Garde Army of the First Belarusian Front.
At the last well-preserved former Nazi forced labour camp is located in Schöneweide, located at Britzer Straße 5, Berlin-Schöneweide. During the war it served as one of the more than 3,000 mass housing sites dispersed throughout the city for forced labourers. The camp was ordered to be built for two thousand workers by the “General Building Inspector for the Reich capital” (Generalbauinspektor für die Reichshauptstadt) in close proximity to large armament industries. It included thirteen stone barracks for housing. Civil forced labourers and forced labourers of various nationalities, Italian military internees as well as female concentration camp prisoners lived here. A well-preserved residential barrack referred to as ”Barrack 13” has been open for tours since the end of August 2010. In 2000 a compensation program was set up to help out the 2.3 million surviving forced labourers, which is probably both too little and too late.
Website: http://www.ns-zwangsarbeit.de
Oranienburg-Sachsenhausen
The camp was used between 1936 to the end of the Third Reich in 1945, and then used by Russians in the Soviet Occupation Zone as an NKVD camp until 1950. It now operates as a museum. The camp was established in 1936 and was located 22 miles north of Berlin, giving it a primary position amongst the German
concentration camps: the administrative centre of all concentration
camps was located in Oranienburg, and Sachsenhausen became a training
centre for ϟϟ officers (who would often be sent to
oversee other camps afterwards). Originally planned to accommodate six thousand inmates, Sachsenhausen generally had a population of between ten and fifteen thousand, rising to about thirty-five thousand in the final months of the war. The blocks were arranged in a fanlike configuration in a semicircle around the Appellplatz, which had a radius of about a hundred meters. The camp as a whole therefore was similar to an isosceles triangle: at the base, the semicircle of the parade ground, then the blocks in four concentric rings, and at the apex the nursery and pigpen. Executions took place at Sachsenhausen,
especially of Soviet prisoners of war. Among the prisoners, there was a
"hierarchy": at the top, criminals (rapists, murderers), then
Communists (red triangles), then homosexuals (pink triangles), Jehovah's
Witnesses (purple triangles), and Jews (yellow triangles). During the earlier stages of the camp's existence the executions
were done in a trench, either by shooting or by hanging. A large task
force of prisoners was used from the camp to work in nearby brickworks
to meet Albert Speer's vision of rebuilding Berlin. Sachsenhausen was
originally not intended as an extermination camp—instead, the
systematic murder was conducted in camps to the east. In 1942 large
numbers of Jewish inmates were relocated to Auschwitz. However the
construction of a gas chamber and ovens by camp-commandant Anton Kaindl
in March 1943 facilitated the means to kill larger numbers of
prisoners.
At the main entrance. The Main gate or Guard Tower "A", with its 8mm Maxim machine gun, the type used by the Germans in the trenches of World War I, housed the offices of the camp administration. On the front entrance gates to Sachsenhausen is the infamous slogan Arbeit Macht Frei ("work makes (you) free"). About 200,000 people passed through Sachsenhausen between 1936 and 1945. In Sachsenhausen,
some 6,500 were confined at the outbreak of the war. Shortly thereafter, in September 1939, 900 Polish and stateless Jews from the Berlin area were taken to the camp; at the beginning of November, 500 Poles were interned. At the end of that month, 1,200 Czech students were added, and approximately 17,000 persons, mainly Polish nationals, were admitted as inmates in the period from March to September 1940. Despite the high number of new inmates, the camp population here too stabilised at the level of roughly 10,000 prisoners. That was because of the high mortality rate as well as the transfer of large numbers of Poles to Flossenbürg, Dachau, Neuengamme (in the Bergedorf section of southeastern Hamburg), and Groß-Rosen.
Sofsky (35)
Observation points then and now; since the torching of a barracks by neo-Nazis, security cameras have been installed throughout the site. Despite this, the site has been vandalised by Neo-Nazis several times. In September 1992 for example, barracks 38 and 39 of the Jewish Museum were severely damaged in an arson attack. The perpetrators were arrested, and the barracks were reconstructed by 1997.
The mortuary and infirmary, showing the autopsy table. The brick pathology building with a large basement mortuary was constructed in spring 1941 and was involved in the storage, examination, abuse and disposal of the bodies of deceased prisoners. Before this the bodies of deceased prisoners were stored in a wooden shed and in the cellars underneath barracks R I and R II of the sickbay. The growing number of inmates exposed to the increasingly unhuman conditions led to a rapidly rising death rate, especially after the outbreak of war in September 1939. The relevant ϟϟ administration body therefore approved construction of a mortuary and pathology department on November 12, 1940. On this day alone, eight prisoners died in Sachsenhausen concentration camp. According to Harry Naujoks a former political prisoner in the camp,
In 1941 Dr. Lewe came to Sachsenhausen from the Buchenwald camp to take charge of the pathology department. Being camp senior, I was told that blocke seniors had to report inmates with unusual tattoos. This report was passed onto the roll call leader. Eventually, each of the tattooed inmates was ordered to come to the sickbay. Soon after we'd receive a death notice. Several times I went to the pathology department while Dr. Lewe wasn't there and in his room saw pieces of skin and body parts with these tattoos, which were kept in jars of alchol lining the walls. In the drawers too, prepared sections of skin were kept. I have held such sections of skin with my own hand.
The Russians, accompanied by Polish soldiers, chanced upon Sachsenhausen concentration camp as they moved to invest Berlin. The camp was in Oranienburg, and the fall of that former royal borough brought it home to Hitler that his days were numbered. There were just 5,000 prisoners left in Sachsenhausen of a population that had reached 50,000. The rest had been taken on 'death marches.’(58) After the Reich - The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation
More and more Berliners had been taking the risk of listening to the BBC on the wireless and even dared to discuss its news. But power cuts were now creating a more effective censorship of foreign broadcasts than the police state had ever achieved. London had little idea of the great Soviet offensive, but its announcement that Sachsenhausen- Oranienburg concentration camp had been liberated just north of Berlin gave a good idea of Red Army progress and its intention to encircle the city. The indication of the horrors found there was also another reminder of the vengeance which Berlin faced. This did not stop most Berliners from convincing themselves that the concentration camp stories must be enemy propaganda.
Beevor (274)
The 140-metre tall Tower of Nations behind me during my 2011 Bavarian International School class trip and in the 1970s, representing what Caroline Wiedmer describes as an
“antithesis of the Nazi architecture of the camp” and a “design in
which the triumph of anti-fascism could be made visible.” At the top of
each of the three sides of the obelisk are eighteen red triangles
representing the ones political prisoners were forced to wear on their
uniforms to designate their identities in the camps. This arrangement
of triangles suggests the multinational political prisoner population at
the camp.
This representation speaks to the importance of international unity — a cornerstone of communist ideology — but lacks regard for any victim groups that were persecuted so harshly at the camps. There is no implied or overt reference to Jews, Sinti or Roma, homosexuals, Slavs, women, or Jehovah’s Witnesses, though all of these groups suffered explicit mass murders in the camp at Sachsenhausen based singularly on these identities. Indeed, many of these captives may have been Communists, but unless they identified as such, they were excluded from memory at the Tower of Nations.
Directly
in front of the tower is Rene Graetz’s Liberation, added to the site in
1961, consisting of three figures standing atop a stone block.
Inscribed on the face of the block are the countries from which
prisoners at the camp came from, serving as a written representation of
the implied meaning of the red triangles on the obelisk. Certainly, the
communist struggle was important to the East German regime as a defining
point in the shaping of a new national identity and to promote the idea
of the ideological and moral victory of the communists that had
recently chased fascism from not only the borders of Germany, but also
the entire the European continent.
Grzimek’s Pietá is not, however, without its limitations on historical representations. Though all the figures clearly are prisoners, and do depict a more historically accurate prisoner representation than those in Liberation, the man in the rear of the cluster, though wearing a look of grief on his face, stands tall, gaze fixed on a far off point, chest out and prideful. This is in contrast with many traditional representations of Pietá in which Mary is shown cradling the dead body of Jesus. Generally, the Pietá form is undeniably sorrowful. Mary has her head down, or tilted slightly up in supplication, and does not evoke any sense of physical strength or pride. Grzimek’s Pietá represents quite a different take on the classic form.
Bookheimer (15)
The NKVD’s interrogation of the camp commander Colonel Kainel confirmed that Senior Lieutenant Dzugashvili had been held three weeks in the camp prison and then, at Himmler’s directive, was transferred to the special camp, consisting of three barracks surrounded by a brick wall and high-voltage barbed wire. The inmates of barrack number 2 were allowed to walk in the early evening in the area outside their barracks. At 7:00 p.m., the ϟϟ guards ordered them to return to their barracks. All obeyed except Dzhugashvili, who demanded to see the camp commander. The guard’s repeated order went unheeded. As the ϟϟ guard telephoned the camp commander, he heard a shot and hung up. Dzhugashvili, in a state of agitation, had run across the neutral zone to the barbed wire. The guard raised his rifle ordering him to stop, but Dzugashvili kept on going. The guard warned that he was going to shoot; Dzhugashvili cursed, grabbed for the barbed-wire gate, and shouted at the guard to shoot. The guard shot him in the head and killed him. Clearly the unauthorised shooting of none other than Stalin’s son set off great apprehension in Sachsenhausen. He had been transferred in by Himmler himself, who hoped to use him as a pawn of some sort. Now, Stalin’s son was dead, and no one knew what the consequences would be. Dzhugashvili’s body lay stretched across the barbed wire for twenty-four hours while the camp awaited orders from Himmler. The Gestapo sent two professors to the scene who prepared a document stating that Dzhugashvili was killed by electrocution and that the shot to the head followed. The document stated that the guard acted properly. Dzhugashvili’s body was then burned, and the urn with his ashes was sent to the Gestapo headquarters. Indeed, it seemed irrelevant whether Yakov was killed by electrocution or by the bullet. Either way, it was he who committed suicide.Paul Gregory (65-66) Lenin's Brain
Inside the ruins of the crematorium. The first crematorium at Sachsenhausen was built at Station Z in April 1940 and construction on the new crematorium began on January 31, 1942; it was completed and opened for use on May 29, 1942. It had two rooms where Russian PoWs, who were Communist Commissars, were executed with a shot to the neck.
Station Z included a Genickschußanlage, a shooting pit, a gas chamber, and a multiple gallows with block and tackle. The structures had been kept low intentionally so as to block visibility and prevent anyone from looking in over the wall. The first provisional gas chambers in Birkenau were outside the camp, set up in former farmhouses. But the modern crematoria were built in close proximity to the camp. They were surrounded by barbed-wire fences and shielded from view by barriers of willow trees. Flower beds lent the facilities an innocuous air. The zones of death were disguised areas beyond the round of everyday camp routine. No one had access to them except the Sonderkommandos—the corpse carriers and oven stokers. The zone of death was taboo, a place of mystery where the power to kill could unfold unhindered.
In 1953, the crematorium building was deliberately blown up by the East German government, and today nothing is left except the ruins of the ovens. When the former Sachsenhausen camp was made into a Memorial Site in 1961, the brick wall separating the Industrial Yard from the camp was moved so that Station Z could be located inside the memorial.
Hitler and Goebbels visiting UFA's Neubabelsberg studios in 1935 during the making of the film
"Barcarole." As a result of the nationalist German spirit that already dominated the company, UFA was perfectly suited to serve the goals of Nazi propaganda in film. Hugenberg had been named Reich Minister of Economics immediately following the Nazi takeover of January 30, 1933, and made UFA openly available for Joseph Goebbels' propaganda machine, even though Hugenberg was removed from his post shortly thereafter (June 1933) under pressure from Hitler. In an act of anticipatory obedience to the Nazi regime, UFA management fired several Jewish employees on March 29, 1933. In the summer of 1933, the Nazi regime created the Film Chamber of the Reich, which adopted regulations officially excluding Jewish filmmakers from all German studios.
In March 1937, using precisely the methods that he had previously branded as Jewish, Goebbels took over the major Ufa film company for the Reich. As a warning to Ufa he had instructed the press to trash its latest production; the film flopped disastrously, and the company agreed to sell out. ‘Today we buy up Ufa,’ recorded Goebbels, ‘and thus we [the propaganda ministry] are the biggest film, press, theatre, and radio concern in the world.’ Dismissing the entire Ufa board, he began to intervene in film production at every level, dismissing directors, recommending actresses (like the fiery Spaniard, Imperio Argentina), forcing through innovations like colour cinematography, and rationalising screen-test facilities for all three major studios, Ufa, Tobis, and Bavaria. Depriving the distributors of any such in such matters he created instead artistic boards to steer future film production. Suddenly the film industry began to surge ahead. Blockbuster films swept the box offices. With a sure touch, Goebbels stopped the production of pure propaganda and party epics, opting for more subtle messages instead—the wholesome family, the life well spent.Irving (414-415) Goebbels
Fort Hahneberg
After the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871, four forts were planned to protect the Spandau Armaments Center as part of the citadel at Spandau. In the end only one of them was built, as the development of artillery, especially the introduction of explosive grenades, made such types of fortification useless. Fort
Hahneberg was thus completed in 1886 and put to use two years later serving, among other things, as a barracks and central archive for military medicine until 1945. In 1903 it served as a training center for the infantry. During the so-called Buchrucker putsch on October 1, 1923 when an attempt by the Black Reichswehr to overthrow the German government after it had ended passive resistance to the occupation of the Ruhr on September 26, 1923 occurred, the fort and the Spandau Citadel were briefly occupied by putschists who had to surrender to regular Reich defence units. From 1924 to 1934 the Flugtechnische Verein Spandau used some structures of the fort in order to build gliders there. 
With the establishment of the Wehrmacht in 1935, the fort became a training location again and was expanded. After the war parts of the brick walls and structures were broken up to make the fort unusable as a military
installation by blowing up the moat defences. The rubble was transported away as building material for the reconstruction of Berlin as residents
were given permission to demolish the Escarpemauer and other components
for material extraction for the repair of destroyed buildings or for the
construction of new houses. Before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the fort was located at the border crossing point on Heerstraße and was only been accessible to the public again since 1990. The Nazi eagle above the entrance has been allowed to remain.