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The Nazis
Holocaust Memorial and Reichstag For obvious reasons most traces of the Nazi regime have been erased from Berlin, yet even where all evidence has been wiped, people are still drawn to these places in an effort to understand the horrific history of the Third Reich.
Anhalter Bunker One of the few surviving Nazi buildings is the huge air raid bunker at Anhalter, currently completely fenced off and hard to see (and closed to the public). Sixteen thousand civilians were crammed in here without any running water or sanitation by the time Hitler’s last birthday rolled around. Those brave enough to try had to dodge through Soviet bombs, mortar and artillery shells to a water standpipe beside the Anhalter Railway station opposite to collect a few bucket’s worth, and many were killed in the attempt.
Back of the Anhalter Bunker The Topography of Terror is a rock strewn field of remembrance on Niederkirchnerstraße. Along it runs the second longest stretch of surviving Berlin Wall. It was on this street, then called Prinz-Albrecht-Straße, that the offices and prison of the Gestapo stood, where Reinhard Heydrich was based (and his successor Ernst Kaltenbrunner) as was Adolf Eichmann’s Amt IV B4. On this street the holocaust was planned and implemented.
Topography of Terror All these buildings were flattened by allied bombing while ironically across the road on the corner Herman Göring’s Reichsluftfahrtministerium (designed by Albert Speer) stands largely intact (now the Ministry of Finance).
At the rear of an utterly unremarkable block of unification era social housing, a slow, 30 second stroll away from the Holocaust Memorial, tour parties and travellers come to wander round and stare at a patch of scrubby grass and a small car park on Gertrud-Kolmar-Straße. Although all physical evidence of it has been removed it was on this spot that Joseph Goebbels and his wife killed themselves, Eva Braun’s brother in law Hermann Fegelein was executed for desertion and Hitler and Braun (by then officially Frau Hitler) were hastily cremated in a petrol filled pit and later buried (wrapped in a bundle with Blondi, Adolf’s dead Alsatian dog). This is what the Soviets called the Lair of the Fascist Beast; the site of the Führerbunker where, deep underground the Nazis lived out their final fantasies as the Red Army grew ever closer leading ultimately to a spate of subterranean mass hysteria, suicides and filicide. The only acknowledgement of what took place here above and below ground is currently a small signboard mapping the (demolished) complex under your feet.
As Hitler’s body was burned one of the drunk SS guards called to Rochus Mirsch, the SS telephonist in the bunker, “The chief’s on fire. Do you want to come and have a look?” Quoted in Berlin. The Downfall 1945, by Anthony Beevor.If you are a wealthy Berliner who enjoys messing about in boats you’d love to own a home in Wannsee, a suburb made up of lakes and rivers in the south west of the city, just a 45 minute ride on the S-bahn from the centre of town. The landscape is rather flat and bland but the blue of the water surrounded by green forests, and freshness of the air gives it a certain attraction. The SS thought so and bought a lakeside Villa here at 16 Am Kleinen, to hold conferences and provide luxury accommodation for guests of the Thousand Year Reich.
Wansee LakeOn January 20th, 1942, Reinhard Heydrich (Chief of the Reich main Security Office) convened a noon conference in one small room in this largish building, inviting 13 delegates (7 of whom held doctorates) to announce the commencement of the “final solution of the European Jewish question” and to flaunt his written appointment from Herman Göring (at that time second only to Hitler in the Reich’s hierarchy) as chief bureaucrat in charge of this process.
VillaIn his capacity as Heydrich’s secretary, Adolf Eichmann made up the 15th man in the room that day, and would later go to great pains to claim “I voz only taking ze minutes!”, on that particular occasion. However he was already one of Hitler’s fanatical and tireless persecutors of the Jews, going above and beyond even the his boss Himmler (directly disobeying his superiors’ orders in October 1944) in his determination to murder as many Jewish men, women and children as his department could get its hands on.
The Wanssee Conference was such a major step on the Nazi’s journey to the normalisation (in their own minds) of murdering millions of Jews in an unprecedented industrial process (while still trying to keep it a secret) that it’s quite stunning to discover what a tiny little room the event took place in. As the space has altered so much over the years, like almost everything to do with the Nazis in Berlin today it takes a degree of meditation and imagination to even begin to comprehend what exactly happened here.
The conference roomJust outside the conference room but not completely detached from it is a sunny annex holding copies of Eichmann’s pre-trial testamony concerning the conference, a mini-library. It had been a longish walk in boiling weather to get here from the S-bahn station, so I gratefully took some time to sit down and read these transcripts. As I did so I could actually feel these Nazi Party functionaries wander slowly into the room behind me, hearty and grinning, glad to be in from the icy January weather, looking forward to lunch. They were Victors in Europe then, at the Gates of Moscow and had just declared war on the USA (the conference’s original date had been put back because of this). “Working towards the Führer”, they thought they could do whatever they wanted.
I’d visited Auschwitz and Birkenau just nine months previously and as I walked away from the Villa, surrounded by property telly, dream mansions on such a beautiful day, with the sounds of happy German families enjoying the holiday weather and barbecue aromas drifting over high hedges, the hair on my head suddenly stood on end in utter frozen horror.
"After the conference, as I recall, Heydrich, Müller and your humble servant sat cozily around the fireplace. I noticed for the first time that Heydrich was smoking. Not only that, but he had a cognac. Normally he touched nothing alcoholic... We all had drinks then. We sang songs." Adolf Eichmann. Life Magazine, November 28, 1960