This is the final (whew, because we are ALL exhausted) BErlin post.
Other Berlin sites we visited:
* The Topography of Terrors:
The first photo shows both the basement of the original building and the remaining outer (West Berlin side) Wall.
This extraordinary and free museum is built on the exact
place that headquartered the Gestapo and the SS. The basement level held cells
where people were tortured and executed. It consists of the sort of exhibits
(all of it translated into English) that can, and did, keep people like myself
absorbed for 4+ hours, explaining the rise of the Nazis, and the
development—and eventual end—of the Gestapo and SS. Actually, we got kicked out
after 4 hours, when the place closed. We had not finished. One of the exhibit
areas focused on what happened after the war to the many, many agents involved
in the police state. As most of you know, most of them were never prosecuted,
and most of them found “normal” places in society, as doctors, lawyers, judges,
etc. And, of course, the US found places for many of the Nazi scientists and
officers in our scientific and “intelligence” communities.
The site of the museum is just outside, on the West Berlin
side, of the Berlin Wall system. The segment of the Wall that shows in the
photo is the longest remaining continuous segment of outer wall, being
contiguous with the American sector. When the site was excavated and the
basement cells were discovered, the Americans and East Germans cooperated to
construct the first version of the exhibit. If you go to Berlin, you really
ought to visit this museum. It is an awesomely humble and honest gift to the
world by Germany/Berlin, not defensive, not hiding things, but offering an
in-depth look at how and why certain things happened. The most chilling parts
of the exhibits were these:
-The absolute joy and amusement on the faces of those
photographed shooting prisoners, along with no signs of being emotionally
traumatized on the faces of those engaged in mass murder. On the other hand,
the deadness in the eyes of the leadership right from the start gives one a
sense of who these men were;
-And the descriptions of how a society descends into horror,
which, I am sorry to say, remind me so much of things currently taking place in
the US—and in Western Europe—that it is pretty scary. Men like Rush Limbaugh
and the bullies on Fox News would have fit right in. I am not being political
here. The parallels of irrationality, rage, lying, the construction of ‘us’ vs
‘them,’ the persecution complex on the part of those not persecuted in the
least, the blaming-the-victim approach,
and the cruel, dehumanizing language used by men like Limbaugh are eerily
reminiscent of language used by the fascists during and after their rise to
power.
·
Wilhelmstrasse
Okay, I told you I would get to this
street, which runs from the grand boulevard of Unter den Linden past The
Topography of Terrors. During the Nazi
era, it was the location of many of the most important government ministries,
including Hitler’s Chancellery, in front of which he had the urban landscape
redesigned in order to construct a HUGE plaza where thousands could gather
while he spoke from the balcony (we have all seen film of this). Goebbel’s
Ministry of Propaganda Building was on this street, too. The Allies, of course,
concentrated bombing on this street, and all of the buildings are gone, except,
oddly (in my opinion), Goring’s Ministry of Aviation building which is today
the German Ministry of Finance. The East German government, understandably, had
torn down the ruins of the other buildings, but housed various ministries in
this one.
Also currently along Wilhelmstrasse: the
rebuilt British Embassy and the Czech Embassy; a memorial to one of the civilians
who attempted to assassinate Hitler; and, in a parking lot, a sign indicating
the approximate site that Hitler committed suicide in his bunker under the
Chancellery, after giving the order for the top leadership to evacuate Berlin.
The East Germans first, and then the unified Germany, blasted the entrance to
the site and then filled it with rubble so as to prevent it from becoming a
place of pilgrimage. It is only a block or two from the Memorial to the
Murdered Jews of Europe, built itself within the Berlin Wall Death Zone.
* Checkpoint Charlie,
and the Outdoor exhibit on the Cold
War at Checkpoint Charlie (there is also a museum of the Wall right there,
which we did NOT have time to go into, the Mauer Museum). Checkpoint Charlie needs no explanation,
other than to say that it was at this spot where East and West Berliners met
for the first time, filling the street there, when the Wall was opened. The
photo shows a young American soldier on the large photo above the checkpoint;
on the opposite side of the street is the same kind of photo of a young Eastern
bloc soldier. There is an informative free
outdoor exhibit (mounted on fencing) that explains and displays photos of big
moments in Cold War history.
·
YES!!!!! I am now finished with the horrifying
sites of my visit to Berlin!!!!!
·
We also went on a tour boat cruise on the river,
which WOULD have been entirely worth it (German and English both spoken), but
last week seemed to be the height of German school trips to Berlin, and right
before our boat left the dock, about 60 teenagers got on board, and proceeded
to scream at each other for the entire ride, so no one could hear anything!!
Still, it was a cool place on a hot, sunny day, with the breeze on the river.
Our table-mates were a Norwegian family of four, whose two adult members had
married each other that day at the Norwegian Embassy in town, and who were all
still dressed up, enjoying ice pops.
Along the river, as well as in other places,
Berliners have created “beaches,” with beach lounging chairs, bars, music,
plenty of alcohol, and even, in at least one place we saw (across the street
from Checkpoint Charlie), sand!
·
The Willie Brandt museum. I popped into this on
our last day in Berlin, and only managed to see some of it (again, there were
English translations of the most important information). Willie Brandt was a
West German Social Democrat politician who became Chancellor of [West] Germany
in 1969, and who won the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1971 for his attempts to
normalize relations between East and West Germany, and West Germany and the
other Soviet Eastern European countries (“Ostpolitik”). He was Mayor of West
Berlin when the Berlin Wall began being built in 1961 (because over a million
East Germans had fled that country). He was a Socialist who fled the Nazis and
spent the pre-war years in Norway, and then (when Norway was invaded) Sweden
(on a Norwegian passport), writing and publishing articles against fascism. One
of his most famous writings of the period told the rest of the world that not
all Germans were Nazis.
Okay, one last comment before I leave behind Berlin. Can
someone please give me a GOOD reason why on earth the French were given control
of one of the Allied sectors of West Berlin, and why they had ANY say in
post-war business in Berlin? I know that De Gaulle had a French
government-in-exile, and there were free-French military, including pilots (my
step-dad Harry was part of a mission to deliver small American planes to the
French aviators—including Antoine se Saint-Exupery, author of The Little
Prince), but other European countries also had governments-in-exile and had military
units on the Allied side (The Belgians and Luxembourgians were granted minor
occupation zones with the French zone for a while). Neither the Brits nor the
Americans WANTED to include France, but De Gaulle pretty much made a pain of
himself until they finally gave in. One reason, besides their minor role in the
war, to EXclude them was because the
Germans and French pretty much hated each other. Were the French included because they HAD been
included in the post WW1 treaties?
I read about two things the French REALLY mucked up during
the post-war era there:
From Wikipedia: “
The original Allied plan to govern Germany as a
single unit through the Allied
Control Council broke down in 1946–1947 due to growing
tensions between the Allies, with Britain and the US wishing cooperation,
France obstructing any collaboration in order to unwind Germany into many
independent states, and the Soviet Union unilaterally implementing from early
on elements of its political-economic system (mass expropriations of land,
nationalisation of businesses).
Another
dispute was the absorption of post-war expellees. While the UK, the US, and the
Soviet Union had agreed to accept, house, and feed maybe six million expelled
German citizens from former eastern Germany and four million expelled and denaturalised Czechoslovaks, Poles,
Hungarians, and Yugoslavs of German ethnicity in their zones, France generally
had not agreed to the expulsions approved by the Potsdam agreement (a decision
made without input from France). Therefore France strictly refused to absorb
war refugees who were denied return to their homes in seized eastern German
territories or destitute post-war expellees who had been expropriated there,
into the French zone, let alone into the separated Saar protectorate.[4] However,
the native population, returning after Nazi-imposed removals (e.g., political
and Jewish refugees) and war-related relocations (e.g., evacuation from air
raids), were allowed to return home in the areas under French control. The
other Allies complained that they had to shoulder the burden to feed, house,
and clothe the expellees who had to leave their belongings to Poles and
Soviets.”
So, in other words, the division of Germany
into 2 countries was partly, at least, due to the damn French trying to
dismantle Germany into even MORE partitioned bits and pieces. And then they
refused to take in refugees other than those who had started out on French
soil.
