Kinder polnischer Juden aus dem Gebiet zwischen Deutschland und Polen erreichen im Februar 1939 per Schiff London. © Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-S69279, CC-BY-SA 3.0
A Rescue Programme for Jewish Children
The Kindertransporte was one of the largest organized rescue efforts for the victims of Nazi persecution. Thousands of children fled to safety in Great Britain between 1938 and 1939 under this programme. At the urging of the Quakers and a number of influential British Jews, the British Home Secretary, Samuel Hoare, had agreed on 21 November 1938 to issue permits allowing the entry of “an entire generation”. In return, the British Jewish community was required to post a £50 bond per child, which was to be used to cover resettlement costs; the community was also required to arrange for the children to be settled across the country and to provide them with an education. On 28 November 1938, the then British Ambassador in Berlin, Sir Neville Henderson, was informed of the rescue plan.
The first Kindertransport train departed Berlin’s Schlesischen Bahnhof (now Ostbahnhof railway station) late in the evening of 30 November and passed through Friedrichstraße railway station. The train crossed the border to the Netherlands some 16 hours later at Venlo. The children arrived on British soil, together with a second group from Hamburg, on 2 December 1938.
Hundreds more transports to Great Britain, Belgium, the Netherlands, Sweden, France and Switzerland followed this initial evacuation. Many of the children who fled to Great Britain later joined the British Army and contributed to the defeat of the Nazi regime and the defence of democracy in Europe. Today, a monument at Friedrichstraße railway station commemorates the Kindertransporte.
Etwa 6000 junge Frauen und Männer, die mit den Kindertransporten Deutschland verlassen hatten, meldeten sich später freiwillig zur britischen Armee. So auch Raymond Newland alias Raimund Neumeyer (1. Reihe links), der 1939 als 14-Jähriger aus Dachau nach Großbritannien kam. Hier posiert er 1947 mit seinen Kameraden der Sonderermittlungsabteilung der britischen Militärpolizei in Hamburg. Viele der Freiwilligen verloren bei den Kämpfen ihr Leben und bezahlten damit einen hohen Preis für die Befreiung der Heimat, die sie aufgrund des nationalsozialistischen Terrors zuvor verlassen mussten. © Privat
Nearby, and within a stone’s throw of the Brandenburg Gate, the new British Embassy at Wilhelmstraße 70 is located on the site occupied by its predecessor before the Second World War. The British Passport Control Office, where many Jews applied for visas to leave the German Reich, was located at Tiergartenstraße 17. In the 1930s, this office was headed by Frank Foley, a British intelligence agent who used this official function as cover for his activities. He and other officials stationed in Berlin – including George Ogilvie-Forbes, Cecil Insall and Margaret Reid – helped thousands of people to flee. Foley’s interpretation of the British guidelines for the issuing of visas was generous, to say the least, and he also helped applicants to obtain forged papers and even hid Jews in his apartment. He was supported by a circle of trustworthy friends that included the Jewish businessman and MI6 agent Hubert Pollack, who had sources within the Gestapo, and Wilfrid Israel, the chairperson of the Relief Society of German Jews (Hilfsverein der Deutschen Juden).
Heute erinnern am Gebäude der britischen Botschaft in der Wilhelmstraße eine Inschrift und eine Plakette an die Verdienste des damaligen Botschaftspersonals. © Britische Botschaft
Today, a plaque in the courtyard of the British Embassy commemorates the efforts of Frank Foley. Inaugurated in 2000 by Queen Elizabeth II, the new embassy complex is located at the historic site at Wilhelmstraße 70. Another plaque, erected on the outer façade of the British Embassy by the Association of Jewish Refugees in May 2020, recognizes the contributions of consular officials such as Frank Foley and Margaret Reid, whose efforts saved thousands of lives.
Lisa Sophie Bechner, M.A. student at Touro College Berlin, and Evelin Meier, British Embassy Berlin
The Allied Museum
Since 1994, the Allied Museum has been examining world history as seen from the perspective of Berlin. The exhibition explains the role of the Western Allies Great Britain, France and the USA in the history of democracy in Germany. It covers the horrors of National Socialism, the course of the Cold War and ends with German unification in 1990.
Open to visitors since 1994: The historic Outpost Theater at Grunewald. © AlliiertenMuseum/Chodan
The Allied Museum’s programme appeals to all generations. © AlliiertenMuseum
Visitors can experience unique and original objects at the historic Outpost Theater of the US Army in Berlin-Zehlendorf: A British raisin bomber and Checkpoint Charlie’s guardhouse vividly showcase developments that had global implications. Every year, over 70,000 visitors immerse themselves in the history of the Berlin Airlift and the division of Germany. The Allied Museum also has an extensive event schedule and educational programme. These convey their subjects in a variety of forms to individual visitors, families, groups, and school classes.
In the decade ahead, the museum plans to move to the former Berlin Tempelhof Airport. The New Allied Museum (NAM) will be located in Hangar 7 at the southern end of the complex. The museum’s treasures and the latest media technology will offer a unique visitor experience. Using multiple perspectives, physical and social accessibility and inclusion, the NAM appeals to a broad international audience and also to younger generations. By examining the history of German post-war democracy during the Cold War, the NAM draws attention to a shared history that connects Germany with the world.
The new Allied Museum in Hangar 7 of the former Tempelhof Airport is a unique place to experience and learn about the history of democracy. © AlliiertenMuseum
www.alliiertenmuseum.de
Clayallee 135
14195 Berlin-Zehlendorf
U3 Oskar-Helene-Heim
115 Alliiertenmuseum
Free entry
Death marches and the liberation of the camps
In July 1944, the Red Army reached Lublin-Majdanek, the first Nazi camp on Polish soil. Piles of corpses and gas chambers were clear testimonies to the mass murder reported by the international press. The number of people who perished or were killed in Majdanek totalled around 78,000. They included 58,000 to 60,000 Jews as well as non-Jewish, Polish civilians, Soviet prisoners of war, detainees of various nationalities, and Sinti and Roma.
In summer 1944, the SS started vacating camps near the front all over the East and transferring tens of thousands of prisoners to other camps. They travelled in crammed cattle-trucks and open goods-carriages or on foot. Sometimes the journey took several weeks. At least 140,000 people died of cold, starvation or exhaustion during these marches before the war ended. The SS shot any prisoners who could no longer walk or who tried to escape. A few death marches ended in massacres, including one in Palmnicken in East Prussia and one in Jamlitz in Brandenburg. In other camps, such as Dachau, Sachsenhausen and Sonnenburg, members of the SS shot thousands of prisoners before retreating.
On 27 January 1945, the Red Army liberated Auschwitz. The Allies then reached ever more vacated camps. Everywhere – in Bergen-Belsen, Ravensbrück and Buchenwald – they found shocking scenes and groups of ‘living dead’. Epidemics spread. Many prisoners died during the first days and week after liberation of disease and malnutrition or because their bodies could not process the sudden intake of food after years of hunger. The unconditional surrender of the German Army on 8/9 May 1945 in Karlshorst, Berlin, ended the war. But liberation did not end the camp survivors’ suffering – the trauma of years of living in fear and imprisonment, forced labour and the loss of loved ones stayed with them.
Survivors of Auschwitz leaving the camp. The photo was taken by a Soviet photographer as part of a film about the liberation of the camp, February 1945.
© picture alliance/Mary Evans Picture Library
© picture alliance/Mary Evans Picture Library
Text: Foundation Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe
Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp
Sachsenhausen concentration camp was built in August 1936. The system was based on a “perfect design”: Its triangular layout, symmetrical structure, barracks grouped around the muster area and various special areas were a direct expression of absolute control. Sachsenhausen held a special position due to its proximity to Berlin and its function as a model and training camp for the SS. In April 1938, the “The Concentration Camps Inspectorate” administrative centre for all concentration camps, was even moved to Oranienburg.
World War II. Roll call of prisoners at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp (Germany). Around 1942.
© ullstein bild – adoc-photos
© ullstein bild – adoc-photos
Sowjet war prisoners in a “Special Camp” inside Sachsenhausen concentration camp, around 1943.
© ullstein bild – ullstein bild
© ullstein bild – ullstein bild
The first detainees were political opponents of the Nazi regime. These were followed by homosexuals, Sinti and Roma, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and criminals. As part of the “Arbeitsscheu Reich” (work-shy Reich) campaign by the Reichskriminalpolizeiamt (Reich Police Department) in March and June 1938, the SS sent around 6,000 people classified as “anti-social” to the camp. After the November pogroms in 1938, around 6,000 Jews were deported to Sachsenhausen. From the spring of 1939 and at the beginning of the Second World War, the camp was increasingly filled with prisoners from the occupied countries of Europe.
Living conditions deteriorated rapidly over this period. Thousands died of malnutrition, sickness, exhaustion and abuse, or were murdered by the SS. From October 1941, mass shootings of over 12,000 Soviet prisoners of war began using a specially designed “neck shot” system.
Countless prisoners fell victim to a policy of “extermination through work”. Tens of thousands were used for forced labour in SS-run factories and in more than 100 satellite camps. With greater involvement in war production from 1942 onwards, large armaments factories benefited from this forced labour.
With the Red Army advancing on the camp, on 20 April 1945, over 33,000 prisoners were forced on a “death march” towards the Baltic Sea that claimed around 6,000 lives. The survivors met American and Soviet troops near Schwerin in early May. About 3,000 sick prisoners left behind in the camp were liberated by Polish and Soviet units on 22 April 1945. Between 1936 and 1945, more than 200,000 people from over 40 nations were imprisoned at Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Several tens of thousands did not survive their time at the camp.
Prisoners of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp on forced labor in the clinker factory, 1939.
© ullstein bild – ullstein bild
© ullstein bild – ullstein bild
Soviet Victims of the War
It is said that every family in the Soviet Union was touched by suffering and loss in the “Great Patriotic War”, as the Second World War is still known in the post-Soviet countries. Fighting between the Red Army and Germany’s armed forces raged from 1941 to 1945 throughout Central and Eastern Europe – from the Caucasus to Berlin.
The number of Soviet casualties during that period amounts to a staggering 27 million people. The majority of these victims, around 15 million, were civilians rather than soldiers. Nazi Germany waged a brutal war of annihilation in the Soviet Union, with the aim of “exterminating the Slavic population”.
Soviet war grave, Northwestern Front, 1942.
Photo: Timofej Melnik © Museum Berlin-Karlshorst / Collection Timofej Melnik
Photo: Timofej Melnik © Museum Berlin-Karlshorst / Collection Timofej Melnik
Burning wooden houses in a village, Belarus, 1944.
Photo: Timofej Melnik © Museum Berlin-Karlshorst / Collection Timofej Melnik
Photo: Timofej Melnik © Museum Berlin-Karlshorst / Collection Timofej Melnik
In Belarus, around 600 villages and their inhabitants were destroyed as part of the Nazi “scorched earth” policy. The city of Leningrad was besieged by German forces for almost two and a half years and bombarded with heavy artillery. It was largely cut off and could only be supplied via the frozen Lake Ladoga. Around one million people starved to death. The Holocaust, the systematic annihilation of the Jewish population, also began under the cover of the German war of annihilation in the East – including mass shootings in Ukraine.
Der Vernichtungskrieg im Osten
In total, around 2.4 million Jews were murdered by the German Army, SA and SS on the territory of the Soviet Union. Around 11.5 million Red Army soldiers were killed in the fighting between 1941 and 1945 as the Soviet Union struggled to crush the Nazi regime. This includes around three million Soviet prisoners of war, who were either shot immediately upon capture or died in inhumane conditions in German prisoner-of-war camps. The war against the Soviet Union was not an ordinary war. It was characterized by war crimes and mass murder. Planned as a war of annihilation, it primarily targeted the civilian population, including many women and children.
Residents pull a coffin along Nevsky Avenue, Leningrad, undated.
Photo: Nikolaj Chandogin © Museum Berlin-Karlshorst / Collection Nikolaj Chandogin
Photo: Nikolaj Chandogin © Museum Berlin-Karlshorst / Collection Nikolaj Chandogin
Author: Christoph Meißner / German-Russian Museum Berlin-Karlshorst
The Nazi Rise to Power – The End of Democracy
Reich President Hindenburg hesitated for a long time before he appointed Adolf Hitler Chancellor on 30 January 1933. He wanted to avoid the appearance of a “seizure of power” as it was being celebrated in National Socialist propaganda. If Germany had been a functioning democracy in which the strongest party was tasked with forming the government and needed a parliamentary majority, Hitler might have been Chancellor in the summer of 1932 – or he might never have managed it as long as no other party was prepared to join the Nazis in coalition.
After being sworn in as Reich Chancellor, Adolf Hitler leaves the Reich Chancellery on Wilhelmstrasse, 30 January 1933.
Photo: Alfred Gross © ullstein bild – Alfred Gross
Photo: Alfred Gross © ullstein bild – Alfred Gross
Hitler greets his followers on Wilhelmplatz. The torchlight procession of SA men through the Brandenburg Gate was elevated into a major event by reporting on national radio, which had come under government control in 1932, and was re-enacted in subsequent anniversary celebrations.
© ullstein bild – ullstein bild
© ullstein bild – ullstein bild
Hitler needed the Conservatives and they needed Hitler. The Conservatives had formed the past two governments and failed miserably. Meanwhile, Hitler had mobilized a mass movement, but without the Conservatives, he was unable to translate his electoral success into power: Hindenburg would never have made him Chancellor. Hitler was compelled to accept a Conservative majority in his cabinet. The Nazi party had a single cabinet position with control over a single ministry, as well as another minister without portfolio. With catastrophic over-confidence, the Conservatives believed that they could control Hitler. As Vice-Chancellor Franz von Papen put it “…in two months, we’ll have pushed Hitler so far into the corner that he’ll squeak”. In reality, it took Hitler less than three months to turn his coalition partners into impotent puppets.
This alone might not have been the end of democracy. But the lethargy of the established political actors, the incredible brutality of the new regime against everything and everyone that could not or would not take its side, the flood of opportunists joining with the Nazi party, the pent-up violence of the SA, the creation of the first concentration camps – all these factors made concerted action against the Nazi regime extremely difficult. It is impossible to say what might have become of Germany’s first democracy if Hitler had not been named Chancellor. It always had a chance to succeed, however, and only parliamentary democracy – as flimsy as it had become – might have prevented the Enabling Act, which established the actual dictatorship on 24 March 1933.
Author: Bjoern Weigel
Commemorating the “Great Patriotic War”
Military parades on Red Square in Moscow, public commemorations at the tomb of the unknown soldier and silent, personal commemoration at the graves of the victims of war. The “Great Patriotic War”, as the Second World War was known in the Soviet Union from 1941–1945, is of great political significance in the post-Soviet states and in people’s private memories.
Citizens of Moscow lay flowers at the tomb of the unknown soldier, Moscow, 9 May 2014.
© Christoph Meißner
© Christoph Meißner
The Motherland Calls memorial complex in Volgograd commemorates the fallen Red Army soldiers of the Battle of Stalingrad. The complex was opened on 15 October 1967. It forms a triptych with the memorials in Magnitogorsk and Treptower Park in Berlin. The sword is forged in Magnitogorsk, raised in Volgograd, and lowered again in Berlin, Volgograd, 30 August 2015.
© Christoph Meißner
© Christoph Meißner
On 8 May 1945, Stalin declared 9 May “Victory Day” a national holiday. In the immediate post-war period, victory was primarily attributed to the leader of the Soviet Union, Josef Stalin, for taking the decisions that made victory possible. The cult of personality around Stalin officially ended after 1956, three years after Stalin’s death. This was part of a wider attempt to reappraise Stalin’s reign of terror over Soviet society. Nevertheless, he is still celebrated as a war hero in some segments of society. In the Soviet Union, it was primarily in cemeteries that personal acts of remembrance took place. From the mid-1960s onwards, however, there was an increase in the construction of gigantic memorial complexes, such as The Motherland Calls in 1967 in Volgograd (renamed from Stalingrad in 1961).
Victory Day was increasingly used in the Soviet Union to celebrate the heroes of the war. Little room was left for civilian victims of the war and ordinary Red Army soldiers. These tended to be commemorated in private. With perestroika under Michael Gorbachev from mid-1985 onwards, commemoration of the heroes broadened to include all victims of the war. In 1996, another day of remembrance and mourning was introduced on 22 June. This was an attempt to distinguish remembrance of the victims from celebration of victory and war. With the death of the last members of the generation that experienced the war, however, this distinction has become increasingly blurred. In Russia, in particular, remembrance of the suffering and victims of the war has been increasingly replaced by a commemoration of heroic victory. That victory is attributed mainly to the Soviet Union while the other three allies of the anti-Hitler coalition, the USA, United Kingdom and France, are mostly forgotten. Parades and the laying of wreaths remain a part of the annual remembrance ceremonies.
Laying of wreaths at the Soviet War Memorial in Berlin’s Tiergarten at the invitation of the Russian embassy on 9 May 2019.
© Margot Blank / Museum Berlin-Karlshorst
© Margot Blank / Museum Berlin-Karlshorst
Author: Christoph Meißner / German-Russian Museum Berlin-Karlshorst
The German-Russian Museum Berlin-Karlshorst Through the Years
The building of the present-day German-Russian Museum in Berlin-Karlshorst has witness various uses during very different eras of German history. Under the Nazi regime, the building hosted an entertainment programme as part of the neighbouring training centre for army pioneers. However, its historical importance dates to 8 May 1945, for it was here that the unconditional capitulation of the Wehrmacht was signed.
The building of the present-day German-Russian Museum Berlin-Karlshorst on the day of the signing of the unconditional capitulation on 8 May 1945. Later, the headquarters of the head of the Soviet Military Administration in Germany (SMAD) were located here until 1949. Thereafter, the Soviet Control Commission was housed here until 1955.
Photo: Timofej Melnik © Museum Berlin-Karlshorst / Collection Timofej Melnik
Photo: Timofej Melnik © Museum Berlin-Karlshorst / Collection Timofej Melnik
A tour for Soviet officers in the rooms of the “Historical Memorial Site – The museum of the Soviet armed forces in Germany”, which opened in 1967. This museum remained in existence until the withdrawal of the Soviet troops in 1990.
Photo: Ljudmila Petruchina © Museum Berlin-Karlshorst
Photo: Ljudmila Petruchina © Museum Berlin-Karlshorst
During the Soviet occupation, the building served as a residence for various soviet institutions until 1962. A museum was established for the first time in 1967 – the “Historical Memorial Site – The Museum of the Soviet Armed Forces in Germany”. It was a purely Soviet institution, in which the exhibition texts were initially presented in Russian only. The museum displayed the glorious fight of the Red Army through to the suppression of National Socialism. No mention was made of the Western Allied powers. As well as the Soviet soldiers who were based in the GDR, organized visitor groups also came from the GDR.
In 1990, in a gesture of reconciliation between the Soviet Union and reunited Germany, it was decided to develop a joint museum. On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the end of the war in Europe, the German-Russian Museum was opened on 10 May 1995. At the centre of the exhibition was the German war of annihilation against the Soviet Union, with some elements of the old exhibition remaining. In 1997, two large museums dedicated to the history of the Great Patriotic War, in Kiev and Minsk, joined the German-Russian association. Today, four nations commemorate the crimes of the National Socialist war of annihilation. It is the only museum in Germany in which former military opponents commemorate the war against the Soviet Union with a permanent exhibition.
The German-Russian Museum Berlin-Karlshorst today.
Photo: Thomas Bruns © Museum Berlin-Karlshorst
Photo: Thomas Bruns © Museum Berlin-Karlshorst
Author: Christoph Meißner / German-Russian Museum Berlin-Karlshorst
Capitulation, Occupation, and The Cold War
The end of the war in Europe in May 1945 marked the beginning of Germany’s occupation by the four victorious Allied powers: the Soviet Union, the USA, France and the United Kingdom. With the Berlin Declaration of 5 June 1945, the four powers jointly assumed supreme civil and military authority over Germany. After the Red Army had conquered Berlin in spring 1945 and governed the city for roughly two months, the three Western powers took control of their respective sectors on 4 July. Berlin was divided geographically and politically among the four victorious Allies, who would shape the city’s future in the months ahead, both in their respective sectors and jointly through the Allied Kommandatura and the four military commandants. The Kommandatura was subordinate to the Allied Control Council, which ruled on matters relevant to Germany as a whole.
Map of the occupation zones of Germany in 1945.
Source: Earl F. Ziemke, The U.S. Army in the Occupation of Germany, 1975. Library of Congress, Catalog Card Number 75-619027, public domain
Source: Earl F. Ziemke, The U.S. Army in the Occupation of Germany, 1975. Library of Congress, Catalog Card Number 75-619027, public domain
Tensions between the Western Allies and the Soviet Union led to the capital being sealed off by the Soviet military in 1948/1949. An airlift was organized to supply the western sectors of the city: Berliners watch an American C-54 landing at Tempelhof Airport.
Source: United States Air Force Historical Research Agency via Cees Steijger, USAF photo 070119-F-0000R-101, public domain
Source: United States Air Force Historical Research Agency via Cees Steijger, USAF photo 070119-F-0000R-101, public domain
In both bodies, the very differing views held by the four Allied powers on the future of Germany soon became clear. Differences arose between the three Western powers and the Soviet Union on the issues of the “democratization” of Germany. The currency reform of 1948 and the resulting blockade of West Berlin by the Soviet Union brought these tensions to breaking point. The blockade of the city and the subsequent Berlin Airlift was the first confrontation between the two newly formed power blocs in the Cold War.
In May 1949 the blockade of Berlin was lifted; following this, separate states were established in the Western and Soviet occupied zones. The Federal Republic of Germany was founded in May 1949 and was thereafter strongly integrated into Western European and transatlantic institutions, in particular with regard to foreign affairs, security and economic policy. Founded in October 1949, the German Democratic Republic was an important component of Soviet economic and security policy. Several years later the two German states joined different and opposing military alliances, with the Federal Republic joining NATO in 1955 and the GDR joining the Warsaw Pact in the same year.
“This’ll make it thrive!” Caricature by Fritz Meinhard, in: Meinhard, Fritz. Mit spitzer Feder, Karikaturen aus der Stuttgarter Zeitung. 1 éd. Stuttgart: Turmhaus Druckerei GmbH, 1950.
© Fritz Meinhard
© Fritz Meinhard
Author: Bernd von Kostka / The Allied Museum
The Red Army as a Multinational Army
Just one day after German armed forces attacked the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941, the conflict immediately became known in that country as the “Great Patriotic War”. The soldiers of the Red Army were joined by many volunteers and reservists. According to the sources, a total of 34.5 million people from 171 ethnic communities of the Soviet Union fought to defend their homeland and liberate Europe from the regime of National Socialist Germany. Around 60 percent of them were soldiers from the Russian Soviet Republic. When it was founded in 1922, the Soviet Union consisted of six union republics. As a result of territorial expansion as well as political and economic restructuring it comprised 16 Soviet republics at the beginning of the war in 1941. These were home to several hundred different peoples and ethnic groups.
Belarussian partisans in the Mazyr-Kalinkavichy region, November 1943.
Photo: Timofej Melnik @ Deutsch-Russisches Museum Berlin-Karlshorst / Sammlung Timofej Melnik
Photo: Timofej Melnik @ Deutsch-Russisches Museum Berlin-Karlshorst / Sammlung Timofej Melnik
Partisan group “For the Motherland”, Ukraine, 1943.
Photo: Iwan Schagin © Deutsch-Russisches Museum Berlin-Karlshorst / Sammlung Iwan Schagin
Photo: Iwan Schagin © Deutsch-Russisches Museum Berlin-Karlshorst / Sammlung Iwan Schagin
Many volunteers came forward, especially in the first months of the war. The records show that over 2.5 million people in Ukraine registered to defend the Soviet Union. In many Soviet republics, such as Belarus, the population also went over to partisan combat during the war: paramilitary units hid in the woods and fought as militias against the German soldiers.
But there was also collaboration with the Germans: In the Baltic region and in Ukraine, local forces collaborated with the German army in an attempt to use the war against the Soviet Union to form independent states.
The composition of the Red Army also reflected the Soviet Union’s multi-ethnic character. Units of volunteers were put together in a way that ensured that soldiers of the same ethnicity often fought together. For example, a unit from Astrakhan in southern Russia travelled to Berlin on camels because the use of horses was less common in their culture.
The soldiers of the many different peoples of the Soviet Union fought and died together on the battlefield. When you look at the countless graves of Soviet soldiers today, they reflect the diversity of the ethnic and geographical composition of the Red Army, which took the Soviet Union to victory in the “Great Patriotic War”.
The graves of fallen Red Army soldiers at the Soviet garrison cemetery in Dresden. Most of these soldiers fell during the taking of Dresden on 8 May 1945 or died as a result of their injuries in preceding combat engagements.
Photo: Christoph Meißner
Photo: Christoph Meißner
Author: Christoph Meißner / German-Russian Museum Berlin-Karlshorst
The Soviet Union in the “Great Patriotic War”
“Moscow calling!” – these were the first words of the daily radio reports from the front line in the Soviet Union – including on 22 June 1941. Early that morning, Germany’s armed forces had attacked the Soviet Union as part of “Operation Barbarossa”.
Destruction and street fighting in Stalingrad, Autumn 1942.
Photo: Timofej Melnik/© Museum Berlin-Karlshorst
Photo: Timofej Melnik/© Museum Berlin-Karlshorst
It was a huge shock for the nation and its leader Stalin, who had ignored any evidence of an impending attack. German forces overran the insufficiently prepared Red Army and were only brought to a standstill a few miles outside Moscow in the winter of 1941. The Red Army paid for this first success with massive casualties. Nevertheless, in the South, the Germans still managed to push forward as far as the Caucasus.
In the first two years of the war, vital Soviet industries were evacuated to the hinterland. This ensured that production critical to the war effort could continue. In addition to workers, prisoners from the Soviet gulag prison camp system were also involved in the war effort. Another important contribution was made by supplies of military equipment and food from the United States under the Lend-Lease agreement.
Leningraders collect water from the frozen Neva River, Leningrad, 1942.
Photo: Nikolaj Chandogin © Museum Berlin-Karlshorst
Photo: Nikolaj Chandogin © Museum Berlin-Karlshorst
Kiev’s main boulevard Khreshchatyk after liberation, probably 1945.
Photo: Timofej Melnik. © Museum Berlin-Karlshorst
Photo: Timofej Melnik. © Museum Berlin-Karlshorst
The Battle of Stalingrad brought about a decisive reversal, not least in its impact on morale. In February 1943, the Red Army relieved the besieged city and launched a counter-attack. The tank battle at Kursk followed in July 1943. Contrary to Soviet propaganda, it was not a devastating defeat for the Germans, but the front shifted westwards ever faster from the summer of 1943. With the liberation of Kiev and Minsk by the summer of 1944, the Soviet Union was liberated from German occupation. The Red Army continued to advance towards the German Reich, liberating Warsaw in January 1945. The subsequent advance westwards proceeded at pace and the Red Army was able to start the Battle for Berlin in April. This attack was also announced by well-known Soviet radio reporter Yuri Leviathan starting with the words “Moscow calling!”
Author: Christoph Meißner / German-Russian Museum Berlin-Karlshorst
The War in the Pacific
The Empire of Japan viewed the war in Europe as an opportunity to further its own pursuit of power. Efforts to expand Japanese hegemony in the early 1930s had stagnated following the occupation of large parts of China.
In the wake of the German occupation of the Netherlands and France in 1940, Japan conquered their respective colonies in South East Asia. The occupation of what are today Indonesia and Vietnam granted the Japanese access to much-needed raw materials. Japan hoped to protect these gains by swiftly defeating the United States and United Kingdom. On 7 December 1941, Japan attacked an American naval base at Pearl Harbor.
The war raged in China long before the outbreak of hostilities in Europe; this image shows a Chinese air defence installation, 1942-43.
Source: U.S. Army Signal Corps photograph, OWI 607-ZB. Office of War Information Photograph, public domain.
Source: U.S. Army Signal Corps photograph, OWI 607-ZB. Office of War Information Photograph, public domain.
US Marines raise the American flag during the bloody Battle of Iwo Jima.
Photo: Joe Rosenthal, Source: National Archives, National Archives Identifier: 520748, public domain
Photo: Joe Rosenthal, Source: National Archives, National Archives Identifier: 520748, public domain
The Japanese soon occupied Malaysia, Singapore, and the Philippines, but the Allies’ material superiority enabled them to halt the Japanese advance in June 1942. Carrier-capable aircraft were able to operate over long ranges and wielded considerable firepower. The United States made the construction of new aircraft carriers a top priority. In the summer of 1944, aircraft operating from US carriers defeated the Japanese fleet and captured the Mariana Islands. This victory put the Japanese homeland within range of US air power. B-29 long-range bombers were used to target Japanese industry and devastated major cities. The United States incurred heavy losses in the bloody battles for the islands of Iwo Jima and Okinawa. US military planners projected that an invasion of Japan would result in an enormous casualty toll and desperately sought alternatives.
At the Potsdam Conference in July 1945, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and the USA established the parameters of the post-war order in Europe and called on Japan to surrender. Determined to win the war as quickly as possible and to minimize the extent of Soviet influence in the post-war Pacific Region, US-President Harry S. Truman ordered the use of a new weapon: on 6 August 1945 an atomic bomb devastated the city of Hiroshima; three days later a second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. On the same day, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan and drove Japanese forces from northern China and Korea. Japan capitulated within a month, bringing the Second World War to an end.
Mushroom cloud over Nagasaki, 9 August 1945.
Photo: Charles Levy, Source: National Archives, National Archives Identifier: 535795, public domain
Photo: Charles Levy, Source: National Archives, National Archives Identifier: 535795, public domain
Author: Scott H. Krause / The Allied Museum
Hitler-Stalin-Pact
The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was the name of the non-aggression pact signed between the German Reich and the Soviet Union on 23 August 1939. One week later, Germany invaded Poland secure in the knowledge that the Red Army would not try to prevent it. Britain and France were treaty-bound to come to Poland’s aid but failed to actively intervene. They did, however, declare war on Germany. It was the beginning of the Second World War.
The non-aggression pact was one of a long series of treaties between various European nations, in which each sought to secure an advantage. The background to this situation was the Versailles Peace Treaty and the Polish-Russian Treaty of Riga, neither of which were able to guarantee secure borders in Europe. The pact took on lasting political significance due to a secret additional protocol. In this, the Soviet Union and the German Reich agreed on their respective spheres of interest.
Nazi Germany’s Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop during the signing of the German–Soviet Frontier Treaty as a secret addendum to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Non-Aggression Pact. (Standing, from right to left: Joseph Stalin, Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars Vyacheslav Molotov, the Soviet ambassador to Berlin Alexey Shkvarzev, and Soviet chief of staff Boris Shaposhnikov.)
© ullstein bild – adoc-photos
© ullstein bild – adoc-photos
The division of Poland into German and Soviet-occupied zones – “status: 28 September 1939” – sketched on a map.
Photo: akg-images © picture alliance / akg
Photo: akg-images © picture alliance / akg
Based on this agreement, the Red Army occupied Eastern Poland on 17 September. The new German-Soviet border was agreed on before the Polish campaign had concluded. The Soviet Union subsequently annexed the western parts of Belarus and the Ukraine. The present-day Republic of Moldavia was ceded by Romania. The previously sovereign Baltic states became Soviet republics. Finland fought back in the Winter War of 1939/40 and was able to avoid Soviet conquest.
In the spring of 1940, the Soviet NKVD – the secret police of the Interior Ministry of the Soviet Union – shot around 14,000 Polish officers in an attempt to eliminate the elite of the former Polish state. Close economic ties with the German Reich helped Stalin forget that Hitler was still planning a war of ideology against the Soviet Union. The German assault on the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941 found the country unprepared.
After the war, the Soviet leadership denied the agreements made with Nazi Germany until 1989. The publication of the secret additional protocol energized independence movements in the Baltic States during the Perestroika period. Since the accession of Poland and the Baltic States to the European Union, these countries have been strongly committed to commemorating the repercussions of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Since 2009, 23 August has been a European day of remembrance.
German-Soviet parade at the handover of the city of Brest-Litovsk in present-day Belarus. German General Heinz Guderian and General of the Red Army Semjon Kriwoschein survey the parade from the podium.
Photo: ullstein bild © picture alliance/ullstein bild
Photo: ullstein bild © picture alliance/ullstein bild
Author: Jörg Morré / German-Russian Museum Berlin-Karlshorst
Picture 1
Sachsenhausen concentration camp: Inmates pass through the camp’s gate as guards look on, 1936/1944.
© ullstein Picture – dpa
Picture 2
The Olympic Games in Berlin. 1936.
© ullstein Picture – adoc-photos
Picture 3
Prisoners lined up for roll call in Sachsenhausen concentration camp, 1942.
© ullstein Picture – adoc-photos
Picture 4
An aerial view of Sachsenhausen concentration camp, taken by the Royal Air Force, 20 May 1943.
Source: National Collection of Aerial Photography, public domain.
Picture 5
Prisoners in Sachsenhausen concentration camp line up for roll call 19 December 1938.
© ullstein Picture – Gerstenberg Archive
Picture 6
Jewish children who survived Auschwitz stand together with a nurse behind a barbed wire fence, February 1945.
© picture alliance / Mary Evans Picture Library
Picture 7
A room at the state hospital and nursing home in Hadamar, Hesse. Inhumane medical experiments were conducted here as part of the Nazi regime’s murderous ‘euthanasia’ programme, and countless people killed in gas chambers.
Image: dpa © dpa – Bildarchiv
Picture 8
Heinrich Himmler, Reichsführer SS (right) during a visit to the Buna works in Auschwitz III Monowitz, 17 July 1942.
© picture alliance / Mary Evans Picture Library
Picture 9
Hitler is greeted by cheering crowds on Hedemannstrasse on his way to the Reich Chancellery, Berlin 1938.
Image: Gisbert Paech © picture alliance/ullstein bild
Starving Berliners butcher the carcass of a horse as two Soviet soldiers drive past in the background, May 1945.
Photo: Iwan Schagin © Museum Berlin-Karlshorst / Collection Iwan Schagin
Photo: Iwan Schagin © Museum Berlin-Karlshorst / Collection Iwan Schagin
Starving Berliners butcher the carcass of a horse as two Soviet soldiers drive past in the background, May 1945.
Photo: Iwan Schagin © Museum Berlin-Karlshorst / Collection Iwan Schagin
Photo: Iwan Schagin © Museum Berlin-Karlshorst / Collection Iwan Schagin
Supply, Infrastructure, Reconstruction
The only things still operating at the end of Nazi rule were the mobile courts martial and their executioners, who roamed the city murdering “traitors” of all kinds, leaving their bodies on show to intimidate the rest of the population. Ordinary people were left to improvise and organise all aspects their everyday lives for themselves. Chalk marks on buildings served as telephone and news services. Soldiers’ helmets became cooking pots, and lawns became vegetable gardens.
Food was scarce in 1945. Its distribution was organized using rationing cards, with those undertaking heavy labour receiving the most generous allowance: 2,600 calories, including 600 grams of bread and 100 grams of meat per day. Children and elderly persons received half of this amount. Engineers, scientists, artists and high-ranking officials who had proved their “worth” were also the recipients of special rationing privileges. But privileged or not: the rations were never sufficient. Especially not for the refugees: they were not allowed to stay in Berlin for longer than 24 hours and were given just a bowl of soup and 100 grams of bread.
A street hawker near Alexanderplatz, June 1945. Foodstuffs and vegetable seedlings – as seen here – were highly desired, as the official rations were barely enough to survive on.
Image: Eva Kemlein © Stiftung Stadtmuseum Berlin
Image: Eva Kemlein © Stiftung Stadtmuseum Berlin
From shoes, bread, sugar and clothing through to coffee substitutes fuel and coal: everything was rationed in post-war Berlin. The rationing of food and fuel was introduced shortly before the war, and was later extended to clothing and, eventually, to everything else still available. It was not the occupying forces that first introduced rationing to Berlin. Stamps attached to the rationing cards were required for every purchase, making the cards valuable objects of exchange. A flourishing black market was the result. Among those who traded on the black market were Allied soldiers, who, ignoring military regulations and the threat of punishment, were willing to trade rationing cards for cameras and other technical devices.
Despite all the hardships, there was plenty of work for everybody. Immediately after the cessation of hostilities, the occupiers issued a mandatory work order for all able-bodied Berliners – including children and the now famous Trümmerfrauen (“rubble women”) to clear the streets of rubble. Even though bank debts, mortgages, wages and salaries were all abstract notions at that time, many Berliners continued to go to work – often walking for hours to get there.
Author: Bjoern Weigel
There was no shortage of scrap metal following the war. Kitchen utensils, such as those seen here, were frequently made from scrap metal in the post-war years.
Image: Eva Kemlein, Berlin, June 1945. © Stiftung Stadtmuseum Berlin
Image: Eva Kemlein, Berlin, June 1945. © Stiftung Stadtmuseum Berlin
Berlin by foot and without power
In the spring of 1945, an ordinary journey from A to B meant traversing a devastated landscape with mountains of rubble, collapsed buildings and craters everywhere. Most bridges had been blown up or were impassable. If you were lucky, an old barge would be offering a ferry service. The tram, once Berlin’s most important mode of transport, was out of action because the overhead wires had long been requisitioned as raw materials for a senseless war. Finding and getting on a bus was like winning the lottery, since only eighteen vehicles had survived the war. The metro system was crippled by bombed tracks and collapsed tunnels. On the final day of the war, the SS had blown up the North-South rail tunnel directly under Landwehr Canal. Getting from A to B usually meant walking, no matter how far, no matter the weather.
The collapse of Warschauer Brücke in the district of Friedrichshain cut both long distance and urban rail links. Image: Timofei Melnik, late April 1945
© Deutsch-Russisches Museum Berlin-Karlshorst, Sammlung Timofej Melnik
© Deutsch-Russisches Museum Berlin-Karlshorst, Sammlung Timofej Melnik
But all the other important infrastructure of everyday life had also collapsed: power and gas supplies were largely non-existent, water was often only available after waiting in long queues at the public street pumps. Post and telecommunication services were down, not to mention refuse collection. This situation was not only due to wartime destruction, however: shortly after the taking of Berlin, the Soviet occupation forces began dismantling the remaining functioning industrial and public utility plants. They were being taken as reparations for the devastation caused in the Soviet Union by German soldiers. However, their transportation to the Soviet Union often fell afoul of the damaged transport infrastructure …
Berliners were forced to queue for fresh water at pumps on the city streets. Image: Abraham Pisarek, Berlin, June 1945
© Stiftung Stadtmuseum Berlin
© Stiftung Stadtmuseum Berlin
The Second World War of 1939-1945. Soviet troops liberate the prisoners of the Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau (Poland).
© Olga Ignatovich / Sputnik
© Olga Ignatovich / Sputnik
The Second World War of 1939-1945. Soviet troops liberate the prisoners of the Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau (Poland).
© Olga Ignatovich / Sputnik
© Olga Ignatovich / Sputnik
The Persecution, Expulsion and Extermination of the German Jews
When the National Socialists came to power in 1933, they introduced the state persecution of Jews in Germany. For the first time, anti-Semitism became a part of government policy in a modern state. Jews were excluded from society and their persecution gradually intensified. State regulations, acts of violence by supporters of the regime and incitement by the National Socialist press combined to promote this persecution.
Legal protections of Jews as equal citizens were gradually removed. “Kristallnacht” in 1938 marked a turning point: On the night of 9-10 November, throughout the German Reich, synagogues were destroyed, retirement homes, orphanages and hospitals were set on fire, and Jewish businesses were looted. National Socialists and their sympathisers attacked Jewish families, ransacked their apartments, and murdered at least 100 people. There was hardly any resistance or protests. Up to 30,000 Jews were held for several weeks at concentration camps such as Sachsenhausen. They were to be forced to emigrate. Tens of thousands of German and Austrian Jews decided to flee. After the conquest of Poland in September 1939 and the campaigns in the North and the West in 1940, the regime intensified its anti-Jewish policies within the German Reich. In 1940 some of the first deportations from Germany took place. Systematic deportations to the East commenced after the emigration ban was announced for German Jews in autumn 1941 – first to ghettos, and then to the gas chambers of Auschwitz and other extermination camps starting in spring 1942. Even when the country began to reap what it had sown and German cities were reduced to ruins and ashes, the extermination of the Jews still took precedence. The final transport to the Theresienstadt concentration camp arrived on 15 April 1945. The German armed forces capitulated three weeks later. Of the 500,000 Jewish children, women and men who lived in Germany before 1933, up to 165,000 died in the Holocaust, 55,000 of them from Berlin.
Murders with poison gas
On 15 October 1939, the Nazi regime had the first patients murdered by asphyxiation with poison gas in Fort VII in Posen in occupied Poland. From January 1940 to August 1941, doctors killed over 70,000 people in six poison-gas institutions, set up expressly for the purpose on German Reich territory (‘Aktion T4’). One phase of the murder campaign especially targeted Jews. Following public protests, the Nazi regime abandoned its ‘euthanasia’ programme using gas and transferred the ‘specially trained’ staff to occupied Poland.
In November 1941, the SS task force ‘Sonderkommando Lange’ set up a murder site near the town of Kulmhof (Chełmno). Here, between December 1941 and the end of 1944, at least 152,000 Jews, including 2,600 from Berlin, and 4,300 Sinti and Roma were murdered in gas vans – converted goods vehicles with airtight bodies into which exhaust fumes were directed to asphyxiate victims. Under the codename ‘Aktion Reinhardt’, starting in early 1942, the SS built three extermination sites in remote areas with rail connections: Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka. Deportees were asphyxiated immediately after their arrival in gas chambers made with captured Soviet tank motors. By mid-1943, between 1.6 and 1.9 million Jews, mostly from Poland, but also from other European countries under German occupation, and tens of thousands of Sinti and Roma had died here.
In October 1941, the SS started building the extermination camp Auschwitz II-Birkenau. Following the Wannsee Conference on 20 January 1942, starting in spring 1942, transports were sent there from all over Europe. In 1942-43 the SS built more gas chambers. At the same time, the Nazi leadership extended its deportation and murder programme to include Jews from the West and southern Europe and, in spring 1944, from Hungary. By 1945, some 960,000 Jewish children, women, and men, up to 75,000 Polish political prisoners, 21,000 Sinti and Roma, 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war and at least 10,000 prisoners of other nationalities had been murdered in Auschwitz. More than half the six million murdered Jewish children, women, and men were killed with poison gas.
Mass shootings
The German Army’s invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939 marked the start of World War II. In the very first weeks of the campaign, tens of thousands of hostages, members of the Polish intelligentsia, infirm and disabled people, Jews, and captured soldiers were shot by units of the security police and the SS security service (SD), Wehrmacht, and other forces.
On 22 June 1941, the Wehrmacht and its allies invaded the Soviet Union in a declared internecine war. From the first day on, security police and SD task forces followed the troops fighting on the frontline. Assisted by local collaborators as well as German police and the armed SS, they shot thousands of communist functionaries and Jewish men. Political commissars and Jewish soldiers were singled out from among the hundreds of thousands of captured Red Army soldiers and murdered. From late July 1941 on, the occupying forces also murdered Jewish women and children. By the end of 1944, over two million Jewish children, women and men had died on Soviet soil in shootings or mobile gas vans – over a third of the total number of Holocaust victims. Some 30,000 Roma and 17,000 psychiatric patients also lost their lives in this way. In occupied Serbia, German Army units shot almost the entire Jewish male population and thousands of male Roma in ‘retaliatory measures’ responding to supposed or actual acts of resistance.
Ruth and Thea Fuss
Berlin, 1940/41, Aufnahme von Abraham Pisarek
© Bildarchiv Abraham Pisarek / akg images
© Bildarchiv Abraham Pisarek / akg images
Thea was born on 16 January 1930 and Ruth on 4 September 1931 in Berlin. They lived at Fehrbelliner Strasse 83 in Prenzlauer Berg. Their father, a tailor named Abraham Fuss, was from Mosciska in Galicia, which became part of Poland in 1918. On 28 October 1938, Abraham Fuss was deported – along with 17,000 other Jewish men, women, and children – from the German Reich to Poland. He returned to Berlin but was arrested again shortly after war broke out in 1939 and sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp. He was shot on 28 May 1942. The girls’ mother managed to flee to Sweden with forged documents. Her attempts to have her daughters join her there failed and Ruth and Thea were housed in the Jewish orphanage at Fehrbelliner Strasse 92. When the orphanage was closed in spring 1942, they were accommodated for some months at the Auerbach orphanage at Schönhauser Allee 162. Then, after a period in the Jewish home for the elderly at Grosse Hamburger Strasse 26, which the Gestapo used as an assembly camp for deportees, Ruth and Thea Fuss were sent on 19 October 1942 on the 21st ‘transport to the East’ – along with 957 other Jewish children, women, and men – to Riga. Three days after their arrival, they were shot in nearby woods. Ruth was eleven, Thea was twelve years old.
Cora Berliner
Berlin, um 1920
© Leo Baeck Institute, New York, Cora Berliner Collection, AR 1578
© Leo Baeck Institute, New York, Cora Berliner Collection, AR 1578
Cora Berliner, born on 23 January 1890 in Hanover, grew up in an educated, middle-class German environment. As a young woman, she excelled in male-dominated professional fields, becoming a high school teacher and a high-level ministry official. In 1933 the Nazis forced her to retire. She then worked for the National Representative Agency of German Jews (renamed National Reich Association in 1939). Here, among other things, she helped women and girls to emigrate, but decided not to leave Germany herself.
The Nazi authorities pursued an ongoing programme of deporting Jews to the East, including employees of Jewish facilities. By means of these ‘transports’, the Gestapo brutally reduced the Jewish workforce. In the morning of 19 June 1942, Cora Berliner was caught in a police trap. Not arriving at the office on the dot of 8 am, she and some colleagues were singled out as ‘superfluous’ staff members and given deportation orders. Outside Minsk, on 26 June 1942, Cora Berliner and almost 800 other deportees from Berlin and East Prussia were forced out of the train. The SS and police gassed those who could not walk in specially converted vans and shot the others in ditches in Blagovshchina Forest. The forest was part of the Maly Trostinets extermination site. At least 50,000 people were killed here under the Nazis’ mass murder programme. The address of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe bears Cora Berliner’s name. In the post-war period, only a few close friends worked to keep her memory alive; post-war German society showed no interest. Most of the perpetrators linked to Maly Trostinets went unpunished.
Mendel Max Karp
Als österreich-ungarischer Soldat, 1914–1918
© Jüdisches Museum Berlin, Inv.-Nr.: 2006/78/18
© Jüdisches Museum Berlin, Inv.-Nr.: 2006/78/18
Mendel Max Karp was born on 17 July 1892 in the village Ruszelczyce, which was then in Austria but became part of Poland in 1918. After the First World War, he moved to the German capital, where he lived near Alexanderplatz and worked as a sales representative. On 28 October 1938, Karp was deported along with some 6,000 other Jews from Berlin to Poland and interned in the Polish border town Bentschen (Zsbaszyn). It was not until 29 June 1939 that Karp was permitted to return to Berlin – on condition that he leave Germany for good by 24 August. By 23 August he had obtained all the necessary documents. But on 1 September 1939, World War II broke out, and Karp could no longer leave Berlin. On 13 September he was caught in a Nazi campaign targeting 1,000 Polish and stateless Jews and deported to Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where he was registered under the prisoner number 009060. He died there on 27 January 1940.
Leonore Tannenwald
Passfoto
© Yad Vashem, Hall of Names, Page of Testimony
© Yad Vashem, Hall of Names, Page of Testimony
Leonore Tannenwald, née Jessel, was born on 17 October 1870 in the Pomeranian capital and harbour town Stettin. Here she met her husband Jacob, who came from Rotenburg an der Fulda in Hesse. They had two children: Alice, born on 30 September 1893, and Gerda, born on 12 June 1900 in Stettin. Later, probably around 1933, Leonore and her husband moved to the capital of the German Reich, Berlin. On 5 November 1935 Jacob Tannenwald died and was buried in the Jewish Cemetery in Weißensee, Berlin. The Tannenwalds’ children and grandchildren were able to emigrate to the United States and Palestine. Now widowed, Leonore Tannenwald lived in the Schöneberg district of Berlin, at Innsbrucker Strasse 39. One day after her 71st birthday, she was taken from her home and sent on the first ‘Jew transport’ from Berlin, departing from Grunewald station, to the Litzmannstadt ghetto, formerly Lodz. Leonore Tannenwald endured the atrocious conditions there, living with other deportees in a closed quarter, separated from the Polish Jews, for half a year. On 8 May 1942, the SS had her killed by asphyxiation in a gas van in Kulmhof (Chełmno) and buried in a mass grave.
Margot Friedländer
Berlin, 1937: Mit ihrem Bruder Ralph (1925–1943) und der Cousine Anna Goldberger (1919–1943, ermordet in Auschwitz)
© Margot Friedländer
© Margot Friedländer
Margot Friedländer, née Bendheim, was born on 5 November 1921 in Berlin. Both her parents were Jewish. Her father Arthur moved out of the family home after his divorce in 1937 and on 17 June 1939 – following the pogroms of November 1938 – fled to France. On 10 August 1942 he was sent via Drancy transit camp to Auschwitz, where he was murdered. Margot lived with her brother Ralph, who was four years younger, and their mother Auguste Bendheim in Kreuzberg, Berlin. They made several attempts to emigrate. In January 1943 they were making renewed plans to flee when Ralph was arrested by the Gestapo. Their mother voluntarily went to the police to accompany her son to Auschwitz. The transport left Berlin on 29 January 1943. From then on, Margot lived in various hiding places. She dyed her black hair red, removed the yellow star from her clothing and wore a cross on a chain instead, and had her nose surgically altered. In spring 1944 she was caught by Nazi collaborators known as ‘grabbers’ – Jews who tracked down other Jews and handed them over to the SS. She was deported to Theresienstadt ghetto. Here she met Adolf Friedländer, whom she knew from the Cultural Federation of German Jews in Berlin and who had also lost his entire family. When the war ended, they married and, in 1946, sailed to New York, where they assumed US citizenship. In the United States, Margot worked as an alteration tailor and a travel agent, among other things. Adolf Friedländer died in 1997. Margot visited her hometown again for the first time in 2003. In 2010, after further visits, she decided to return to Berlin for good. She was given back her German citizenship and has worked tirelessly giving eye-witness talks, primarily in schools, ever since.
Text: Foundation Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe
I survived – and now?
When does peacetime begin?
Peace does not begin with the end of war. When the weapons and air raid sirens fell silent in Berlin many people – whether long-time residents, soldiers or those brought here against their will by the Nazi regime – experienced their first “quiet” nights in a long time – though most were still forced to sleep in cellars and bunkers. But for most Berliners the relief they felt at having survived the war was tinged with fear at the thought of how they might treated by the city’s conquerors. Victims of the Nazi regime, including Jews who had survived the war in hiding, feared that they might even yet be tracked down and murdered by fanatics. Nor could the soldiers of the Red Army be certain that they would not fall victim to snipers. For all of them peacetime began with the gradual restoration of public life to something approximating normality. Not least the arrival of the Red Army’s soup kitchens – the only source of food in many parts of Berlin – marked a new way of coexistence.
Day-to-day life in Berlin: a woman halts traffic to allow a field train loaded with rubble to pass. Operating on makeshift rails, narrow-gauge field trains were used to transport rubble out of the city.
Photo: Eva Kemlein, Berlin, May 1945 © Stiftung Stadtmuseum Berlin
Photo: Eva Kemlein, Berlin, May 1945 © Stiftung Stadtmuseum Berlin
A city in ruins: smoke lingers over the scene of devastation on Friedrichstraße.
Photo: Timofei Melnik, early May 1945 © Museum Karlshorst / Timofei Melnik Collection
Photo: Timofei Melnik, early May 1945 © Museum Karlshorst / Timofei Melnik Collection
How to manage day-to-day life?
Living from one day to the next and coming up with extraordinary solutions to everyday problems had long become a routine for many Berliners. What would change with the arrival of the occupying forces? Nobody knew just how they intended to govern the city, its institutions and its population. Who would pay employees’ salaries? Where would they get their bread? Or medical assistance? Life was even more difficult for the thousands of forced labourers brought to Berlin against their will, who were now forced to fend for themselves in a foreign city without the assistance of friends and family – and all too often without any real knowledge of German or Russian. This was new territory for everyone. Even and especially for the soldiers of the occupying forces, who, after risking their lives in house-to-house fighting, were now called upon to rule a city of millions.
Author: Bjoern Weigel/Christian Mentel
Shall we dance? An organ grinder entertains a group of women as they take a break from clearing rubble in the Friedrichsgracht in Berlin-Mitte. Jungfernbrücke is visible in the background, as is the building housing the Reichsbank, which is now occupied by the Federal Foreign Office. Photographer unknown, probably June 1945.
© ullstein bild – Schirner
© ullstein bild – Schirner
Shall we dance? An organ grinder entertains a group of women as they take a break from clearing rubble in the Friedrichsgracht in Berlin-Mitte. Jungfernbrücke is visible in the background, as is the building housing the Reichsbank, which is now occupied by the Federal Foreign Office. Photographer unknown, probably June 1945.
© ullstein bild – Schirner
© ullstein bild – Schirner
Making art among the ruins
“Berlin is back – who would have thought that we could do it?” Brigitte Mira first performed this variation on the hit song “Berlin will always be Berlin!” on 1 June, and her optimism was dearly needed in light of the city’s widespread devastation.
A theatre in ruins: while the auditorium and stage of the Deutsche Theater suffered little damage during the war, the Kammerspiele in the adjacent building were severely damaged. Image: Eva Kemlein, May 1945
© Stiftung Stadtmuseum Berlin
Before WWII the area around Tauentzienstraße and Kurfürstendamm had been a bustling centre of high culture and light entertainment. Commandant Berzarin’s first order from 28 April 1945 reveals the importance afforded by the occupation forces to the restoration of Berlin’s cultural infrastructure: as the battle for the inner city raged, Berzarin authorised the re-opening of cinemas and theatres in the outlying districts and the staging of sporting events. The sense of normality instilled by the holding of cultural events and football games was a crucial step for the occupation forces. They offered the population both amusement and intellectual sustenance, but were also necessary to counteract years of vitriolic propaganda by the Nazi regime and enable the Soviets to exercise political power.
Steps were taken to revive Berlin’s arts and cultural sectors as quickly as possible: within a fortnight of the German surrender, Berzarin had gathered together the artists who would organise the restoration of Berlin’s intellectual life amid the ruins. By this time the first chamber concert had already taken place and public radio broadcasts had been restored. Films from the Soviet Union were screened at hastily repaired cinemas, dance halls and night clubs re-opened, and the first cabaret and revue shows hit the stages. On 27 May, the Renaissance Theater hosted the first dramatic performance of the post-war era. And July brought the opening of the first art exhibition, the Berlin Zoo and the harness racing track in Karlshorst.
But art was also a means of survival. Disabled veterans busked on the streets alongside organ grinders and other musicians. Like labourers employed in vital industries, artists, performers and creative intellectuals were granted special rationing privileges by the Soviet administration. But employment in the arts did not by necessity infer a democratic mind-set. In the case of many artists who had previously made their peace with the Nazi regime, the Soviet move to restore cultural life to the city was above all an opportunity to make a living under the Allied occupation.
Need is the mother of invention: an injured veteran playing on a self-made instrument mounted on one of his crutches. It was not easy to catch the attention of passers-by, but even the smallest of donations could make a difference. Image: Friedrich Seidenstücker, Berlin 1945
© bpk/Friedrich Seidenstücker
The handover of the Reinickendorf and Wedding districts from the British to the French administrations: General Jeoffroy de Beauchesne (right), the sector’s first commander, and Brigadier General Spurling (left) review a parade of French troops on Weddingplatz.
© ullstein bild – ullstein bild
© ullstein bild – ullstein bild
The handover of the Reinickendorf and Wedding districts from the British to the French administrations: General Jeoffroy de Beauchesne (right), the sector’s first commander, and Brigadier General Spurling (left) review a parade of French troops on Weddingplatz.
© ullstein bild – ullstein bild
© ullstein bild – ullstein bild
France: the ‘belated’ victorious power
For four years France found itself under German occupation. Those years of collaboration and resistance left in their wake a deeply divided society. Yet at the end of the war, France found itself included among the victorious Allies that occupied Germany.
In June 1940, following six weeks of battle, the German Wehrmacht installed a regime of occupation in Northern France and along the Atlantic coast.
The French city of Caen in the Normandy lays in ruins by the time of its liberation on 19 July 1944. Photo: Captain E.G. Malindine, No 5 Army Film & Photographic Unit, public domain
The south of the country remained unoccupied for the time being. This territory was controlled by the authoritarian regime of Marshal Philippe Petain, based in the town of Vichy. The Vichy regime collaborated with the occupiers and assisted in the deportation of 76,000 Jews. In November 1942, the Wehrmacht also marched into the southern zone of France. Both within France and among the French in exile, movements of resistance to the occupation were organised. Their attacks on the army of occupation were met with brutal reprisals from the Germans. In June 1944, the liberation of France began with the Allied landings on the Normandy coast. Just a few days earlier, a “Provisional Government of the French Republic” was formed under the leadership of Charles de Gaulle. This timing was not coincidental: its aim was to prevent an Allied military government taking power in France. The advance of the Allied forces was supported by French resistance fighters and soldiers. Between 1940 and 1945, approximately 230,000 French soldiers and 350,000 civilians lost their lives, either in combat or in Allied and German bombing raids. The liberation of Paris in August 1944 was an event of enormous symbolic significance, though the entire territory of France was not cleared of German forces until February 1945. The jubilation at the end of the German occupation soon gave way to the reality of grappling with major political problems. These included economic reconstruction, the political restructuring of the country, and healing the social divisions wrought by the war and occupation. Many French soldiers remained mobilised since France, with British and American support, was one of the four victorious powers occupying Germany.
Author: Uta Birkemeyer / The Allied Museum
Citizens line the Champs Élysées and cheer a parade of French soldiers following the liberation of Paris, 26 August 1944. Photo: Jack Downey, U.S. Office of War Information, United States Library of Congress’s Prints and Photographs ID fsac.1a55001, public domain
Picture 1
The ruins of the Reichstag after the end of the war, Berlin 1945.
© akg-images
Picture 2
The Reichstag burns: The building was devastated in the arson attack on the night of 27-28 February 1933.
Image: akg-images © picture alliance / akg
Picture 3
The Reichstag on the morning of 28 February 1933. This image is a montage: the flames and clouds of smoke were added to the original image.
© ullstein Picture – ullstein bild
Picture 4
The Reichstag Fire trial at the Reichsgericht Leipzig: The judgement was pronounced on 23 December 1933. The main defendent, Marinus van der Lubbe (here with head bowed), was sentenced to death and Ernst Torgler acquitted, Leipzig 1933.
Image: akg-images © picture alliance / akg
Picture 5
Berlin, 27 February 1933: The Reichstag Fire. In this Soviet caricature the convicted arsonist Marinus van der Lubbe is depicted as a Nazi henchman.
Image: akg-images © picture alliance / akg
Picture 6
The Kroll Opera with the Moltke monument in the foreground, Berlin March 1933.
© ullstein Picture – ullstein bild
Picture 7
During the parliamentary session held at the Kroll Opera, the Chancellor Adolf Hitler made a speech on the need for the “Law to Remedy the Distress of the People and the State” (Enabling Act), Berlin 23 March 1933.
© ullstein Picture – Süddeutsche Zeitung Photo / Scherl
Picture 8
On 23 March 1933, SPD politician Otto Wels delivered a statement on the behalf of the Social Democratic Party protesting Hitler’s Enabling Act, undated.
Image: dpa © dpa – Bildarchiv
Picture 1
Hitler’s speech to the Reichstag was broadcast outside the Kroll Opera. In the background, the Kroll Opera and the monument to Prussian General Helmut von Moltke are visible, Berlin 21 May 1935.
© ullstein Picture – Süddeutsche Zeitung Photo / Scherl
Picture 2
The publication of the “Law to Remedy the Distress of People and Reich” in the parliamentary gazette on 24 March 1933, Berlin 1933.
© ullstein Picture – Gerstenberg Archive
Picture 3
Book burning on Opernplatz, Berlin 10 May 1933.
© picture alliance / AP Images
Picture 4
In the days after the so-called “seizure of power”, the SA began to establish “wild” concentration camps in which they imprisoned and sometimes severely tortured political opponents, many of whom were well known to them after long years of political struggle. The entrance to a concentration camp operated by SA-Standarte 208 in Oranienburg, 1933.
© ullstein Picture – Süddeutsche Zeitung Photo / Scherl
Picture 5
SA members outside a Jewish business hold signs that read “Germans, defend yourself against Jewish atrocity propaganda; buy only from Germans!”, Berlin April 1933.
© picture alliance/Mary Evans Picture Library
Picture 6
Political opponents of the Nazi regime detained in the basement of an SA meeting place stand at a wall with their hands raised and bound, Berlin 1933.
© ullstein Picture – Süddeutsche Zeitung Photo / Scherl
Picture 7
Crowds on Wilhelmplatz await Adolf Hitler’s return to the Reich Chancellery following his speech to the Reichstag at the Kroll Opera on the occasion of the German invasion of Poland, Berlin September 1939.
© ullstein Picture – ullstein bild
Picture 8
Hans and Sophie Scholl, founders and members of the “White Rose” resistance group at Munich University (undated). The siblings were arrested on 18 February 18 1943 after they conducted a leaflet campaign against the Nazi regime. They were sentenced to death by the People’s Court and executed in Munich-Stadelheim on 22 February 1943.
Image: ADN ZentralPicture © dpa – Fotoreport
Picture 9
Millions of copies of this British leaflet reproducing the manifesto of the “White Rose” resistance group were dropped over Germany.
Image: ullstein Picture © picture alliance/ullstein bild
Picture 10
Guarded by German soldiers, these Soviet POWs arriving in the German Reich will be forced to work in the mining and armaments industries, November 1941.
Image: Bildarchiv der Eisenbahnstiftung / RVM © dpa
Picture 11
German soldiers inspect corpses in Warsaw Ghetto.
Image: Glasshouse Images © picture alliance/Glasshouse Images
Picture 1
Soviet soldier Meliton Kantaria hoists the Red Flag on the Reichstag building in Berlin, 2 May 2 1945.
Image: Yevgeny Khaldei © ullstein Picture – Voller Ernst / Jewgeni Chaldej
Picture 2
Soviet soldier Meliton Kantaria hoists the Red Flag on the Reichstag building in Berlin, 2 May 2 1945.
Image: Yevgeny Khaldei © ullstein Picture – Voller Ernst / Jewgeni Chaldej
Picture 3
Soviet soldier Meliton Kantaria hoists the Red Flag on the Reichstag building in Berlin, 2 May 2 1945.
Image: Yevgeny Khaldei © ullstein Picture – ullstein bild
Picture 4
Russian soldiers Yegorov and Kantaria raise the Soviet flag on the badly damaged Reichstag building, 2 May 1945.
Image: Yevgeny Khaldei © ullstein Picture – ullstein bild
Picture 5
Soviet war photographer Yevgeny Khaldei in front of the Reichstag in Berlin in May 1945. Many of his photos of World War II and the USSR are published in the 2008 collection “The Decisive Moment” (“Der bedeutende Augenblick”).
Image: Yevgeny Khaldei/Agentur Voller Ernst © dpa
Picture 6
The battle for the Reichstag, Berlin April 1945.
© ullstein Picture – SPUTNIK / Shagin
Picture 7
German soldiers captured during the fighting are disarmed and taken prisoner, Berlin 1 May 1945.
© ullstein Picture – SPUTNIK
Picture 1
Two Russian soldiers talking to US soldiers as the first American tanks roll through the streets of Berlin at the end of World War II, July 1945.
© ullstein Picture – mirrorpix
Picture 2
Troops of the U.S. Army and the Soviet Army at a ceremony outside the barracks of Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler to mark the arrival of the American troops in the city conquered by the Soviets on 2 May 1945. The flags of the USA and the Soviet Union fly above the building, Berlin 4 July 1945.
Image: dpa © picture alliance
Picture 3
Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, 7 December 1941.
© picture alliance / Photo12
Picture 4
Allied forces land in Normandy under the command of General Montgomery: US troops disembark from a landing craft; Allied tanks and military vehicles can be seen in the background, 6 June 1944.
Image: akg-images © picture alliance / akg-images
Picture 5
Soldiers of the 9th Army enter Mönchengladbach-Rheydt, March 1945.
Image: Gerstenberg Archive © picture alliance/ullstein bild
Picture 6
US soldiers raise the flag of the United States on Mount Suribachi, the highest mountain on the island of Iwo Jima, on 23 February 1945.
Image: Joe Rosenthal © ullstein Picture – ullstein bild
Picture 7
Title page: The unconditional surrender of Germany’s armed forces in the headquarters of General Eisenhower in Reims, signed by Jodl, Friedeburg and Oxenius, Reims 7 May 1945.
Image: akg-images © picture alliance / akg-images
Picture 8
The mushroom clouds over Hiroshima (left) and Nagasaki, 6 and 9 August 1945.
Images: George R. Caron/Charles Ley, United States Department of Energy, public domain
Picture 9
Women clearing rubble on Tauentzienstrasse in Berlin; the ruins of Kaiser Wilhelm Church are visible in the background. The signs on the left mark the boundary between the British occupied sector and the US sector.
© picture alliance / AP Images
Picture 1
Narrow-gauge trains were already used to clear rubble during the war. Here, Soviet tanks advance past improvised rails along Ebertstrasse in early May.
Image: Timofej Melnik © German-Russian Museum Berlin-Karlshorst / Timofej Melnik Collection
Picture 2
The German-Soviet trade agreement and non-aggression pact, a secret agreement on the division of Poland. Josef Stalin and Reich Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop (left), August 1938.
Image: akg-images © picture-alliance / akg
Picture 3
German forces invade the Soviet Union: Panzer grenadiers supported by armoured personnel carriers assault a village, July 1941.
© ullstein Picture – ullstein bild
Picture 4
The German campaign in Russia was supported by Hungarian forces: here, Hungarian infantry battle for control of a village in Ukraine, Soviet soldiers surrender, June 1942.
© ullstein Picture – ullstein bild
Picture 5
The war of annihilation against the Soviet Union: Tanks from an SS police regiment advance into a town, 21 March 1944.
© ullstein Picture – ullstein bild
Picture 6
The Battle of Stalingrad: Captured German soldiers are brought to the hinterland from Stalingrad, January 1943.
Image: ullstein Picture © picture alliance / ullstein bild
Picture 7
The siege of Leningrad is lifted following a major offensive by the Red Army: A woman hugs a soldier of the Red Army, 27 January 1944.
Image: akg-images picture © alliance/akg-images
Picture 8
Survivors leave the Auschwitz camp complex. This image was taken by a Soviet photographer as part of a film about the camp’s liberation, February 1945.
© picture alliance/Mary Evans Picture Library
Picture 9
Red Army field artillery on the streets of Berlin; seen here in an outlying suburb, April 1945.
Image: Berliner Verlag / Archiv © dpa
Picture 10
Field Marshall Wilhelm Keitel, Chief of the Armed Forces High Command, signs the ratified surrender terms for the German army on 8/9 May 1945 in Berlin-Karlshorst.
Image: Lt. Moore (US Army), National Archives, National Archives Identifier: 531290, public domain
Picture 11
The Adlon Hotel in Berlin was destroyed in World War II, 1945.
© dpa Bildarchiv
Picture 1
Soviet War Memorial in Treptower Park: “The Liberator” by Jewgeni Wutschetitsch depicts a Red Army soldier bearing a rescued child, with his sword lowered, and a broken swastika.
Image: Jochen Blume © picture alliance/ullstein bild
Picture 2
Members of the Red Army at the inauguration of the Soviet War Memorial in Treptower Park in Berlin on 8 May 1949.
Image: zbarchiv © dpa
Picture 3
Soviet occupation forces hold a parade to celebrate the 31st anniversary of the founding of the Red Army. A wreath-laying ceremony at the Soviet War Memorial in Berlin-Tiergarten: Soviet soldiers lay a wreath at the memorial on 23 February 1949.
Image: Hilbich © picture-alliance / akg
Picture 4
A collection point for the bodies of fallen Red Army soldiers at Lake Ilmen, Ushin (Soviet Union), February 1943.
© ullstein Picture – Süddeutsche Zeitung Photo / Scherl
Picture 5
A Soviet soldier (from Yakutia) armed with a submachine gun in Berlin towards the end of World War II, May 1945.
Image: Yevgeny Khaldei © ullstein Picture – Voller Ernst / Jewgeni Chaldej
Picture 6
An Red Army soldier armed with a submachine gun in front of the ruins of an historic building in Vienna, April 1945.
Image: Yevgeny Khaldei/Agentur Voller Ernst © dpa
Picture 7
A Soviet soldier tries to take a bicycle from a young woman, May / June 1945.
© ullstein Picture – ullstein bild
Picture 8
Soviet soldiers with camera equipment and a city map have their photograph taken in front of a damaged city sign, Berlin 1945.
Image: Berliner Verlag / Archiv © dpa
Picture 9
The uprising in East Berlin on 17 June 1953: Demonstrators throw stones at Soviet tanks on Potsdamer Platz.
Image: akg-images © picture alliance / akg-images
Picture 10
Barbed-wire barriers are erected at the Brandenburg Gate, Berlin 14/15 August 1961.
Image: akg-images / Gert Schuetz © picture-alliance / akg
Picture 11
In the early afternoon of 14 August 1961, the authorities in East Berlin sealed off the sector crossing at the Brandenburg Gate: Soldiers armed with carbines stand on the right, water cannons are positioned in the middle and an armoured scout car on the left, Berlin 1961.
Image: Konrad Giehr © picture alliance/dpa
Picture 12
Enthusiastic students bear a huge portrait of Stalin aloft during the World Festival of Youth and Students in Prague, 1947.
Image: Iljic Holoubek © picture alliance/CTK
Picture 1
Children talk to soldiers of the British Army joining the occupation force after the end of the war, July 1945.
© ullstein Picture – mirrorpix
Picture 2
Vehicles of the 7th Armoured Division – the first British troops to enter Berlin at the end of World War II – pass their commander General L.O. Lyne, July 1945.
© ullstein Picture – mirrorpix
Picture 3
The German invasion of Poland, September 1939.
© picture alliance / Photo12
Picture 4
Devastation in London following a German air raid: The dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral is visible in the upper part of the photograph, July 1940.
© picture alliance / Photo12
Picture 5
British Prime Minister Winston Churchill (1874-1965) makes the victory sign, 1940.
© picture alliance/Mary Evans Picture Library
Picture 6
Allied forces attack Berlin from the air: the French Cathedral on Gendarmenmarkt burns, 24 May, 1944.
Image: akg-images © picture alliance / akg-images
Picture 7
People dance in the streets of London on VE Day, 8 May 1945.
© ullstein Picture – mirrorpix
Picture 8
A soldier and a member of the auxiliary services dance on a London street on VE Day, May 8, 1945.
© ullstein Picture – mirrorpix
Picture 9
Tauentzienstrasse and the ruins of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, 1945.
Image: Fritz Eschen © ullstein Picture – Fritz Eschen
Picture 1
The Brandenburg Gate in Berlin after the capitulation, 1945.
© picture alliance / AP Images
Picture 2
Standing in front of a destroyed building at the Brandenburg Gate, Russian poet Yevgeniy Dolmatovsky (centre, on the tank) addresses soldiers of the Red Army on Pariser Platz in Berlin, 2 May 1945.
Image: Yevgeny Khaldei / Agentur Voller Ernst © dpa
Picture 3
German air raids devastated the inner city area around St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. Little remains of the buildings lining the street leading towards the cathedral. In the background the dome of St. Pauls rises skywards. The cathedral sustained only minimal damage.
© ullstein Picture – Pressefoto Kindermann
Picture 4
The devastated heart of Warsaw, 1945.
© ullstein Picture – dpa
Picture 5
People walk through the devastated streets of Coventry in the aftermath of an air raid in November 1940.
© ullstein Picture – mirrorpix
Picture 6
Burnt-out buildings in the Belarusian city of Minsk, July 1941.
© ullstein Picture – Süddeutsche Zeitung Photo / Scherl
Picture 7
An electrified barbed wire fence in Auschwitz concentration camp, 22 February 1945.
Image: Vladimir © picture alliance/Vladimir//dpa
Picture 8
A parade of the 3rd Guards Cavalry Corps watched by Soviet Lieutenant General Oslikowsky and US military officials from a grandstand on the banks of the Elbe River, 25 April 1945. Forward elements of the 1st US Army and the 5th Soviet Guards Army meet at Torgau on the Elbe in April 1945.
Image: Michail Bernstein © picture-alliance / RIA Nowosti
Picture 9
Conferences in Casablanca: American President Franklin D. Roosevelt (left) and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill before the final press conference. Members of the military staff stand in the background, from left: Henry H. Arnold, Ernest J. King, George C. Marshall, Sir Alfred Dudley Pound, Lord Alan Brooke (Viscount Alanbrooke), Sir Charles Portal, January 24, 1943.
Image: Heinrich Hoffmann © picture alliance / ullstein bild
Picture 10
The 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin: the Berlin Guards Regiment march through Brandenburg Gate towards Pariser Platz on the opening day, 1 August 1936.
Image: Herbert Hoffmann © picture alliance / ullstein bild
Picture 11
Cheering crowds celebrate on Victory in Europe Day in London, 8 May 1945.
© ullstein Picture – TopFoto
Picture 12
Protesters wave a caricature of Hitler as they celebrate victory in Paris on 8 May 1945.
© ullstein Picture – Roger-Viollet
Picture 13
American writer William R. Wilson and his brother, Corporal Jack Wilson, in Verdun (France) on the day of Germany’s surrender, 8 May 1945.
© ullstein Picture – Granger, NYC
Picture 14
Jubilation: Soviet soldiers celebrate alongside Czech resistance fighters in the streets of Prague following the May Uprising in 1945.
© ullstein Picture – Imagno / Votava
Picture 15
In Paris the newspaper “Libé Soir” reports on the German capitulation on 8 May 1945.
Image: akg-images / Paul Almasy © picture alliance / akg
Picture 16
The Soviet Army celebrates in Berlin with a victory parade on 20 May 1945: Marshal Zhukov (centre), commander of the Soviet occupation forces in Berlin, together with Field Marshal Montgomery (2nd from right), commander of the British armed forces in Germany.
Image: akg-images © picture alliance/akg-images
Picture 1
A handshake symbolizes the promise between two great allies – the United States and Russia. American sergeant Anthony Gioia and a Red Army soldier shake hands, 1944
© ullstein Picture – United Archives / UIG
Picture 2
German infantry pursue Soviet forces through a burning village in Russia, late 1941.
© ullstein Picture – Granger, NYC
Picture 3
The attack on Pearl Harbor: A small boat rescues a sailor from the burning battleship USS West Virginia, Hawaii, 7 December 1941.
© picture alliance / AP Photo
Picture 4
The Yalta Conference: The Allies discuss the division of Germany into occupation zones and possible reparations. In this group picture, from left to right: Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin at Livadia Palace, February 1945.
Image: akg-images © picture alliance / akg-images
Picture 5
Tehran Conference: The “Big Three” Allied Powers reached an agreement on the future division of Germany and the revision of Poland’s borders at this meeting. From left to right: Josef Stalin (Soviet Union), Franklin D. Roosevelt (USA) and Winston Churchill (United Kingdom), late 1943.
Image: akg-images © picture alliance / akg-images
Picture 6
American and Russian soldiers meet at the Elbe Bridge in Torgau, April 1945.
© picture alliance / Photo12
Picture 7
Forward elements of the 1st US Army and the 5th Soviet Guards Army meet at Torgau on the Elbe. US and Soviet soldiers greet each other, 25 April 1945.
Image: akg-images © picture alliance / akg-images
Picture 8
The “Big Three”: Winston Churchill (United Kingdom), Harry S. Truman (USA) and Josef Stalin (Soviet Union) at the Potsdam Conference, 27 July 1945.
© ullstein Picture – SPUTNIK
Picture 9
The closing session of the Potsdam Conference at Cecilienhof Palace near Potsdam, 2 August 1945: Harry S. Truman (USA), Winston Churchill (United Kingdom) and their advisers at the conference table.
Image: akg-images © picture alliance / akg-images
Picture 10
A British armoured scout car stands in front of the Brandenburg Gate in West Berlin. British troops increased their presence along the border on the West Berlin side after tanks were positioned close to the border in East Berlin, 30 October 1961.
© ullstein Picture – SPUTNIK
Picture 1
Columns of refugees in the summer of 1945 in Berlin.
Image: akg-images © picture alliance / akg-images
Picture 2
Refugees from Berlin leaving the city in the direction of Brandenburg carry their belongings in suitcases and strollers over a temporary bridge. Many of the civilians are wearing white armbands, summer 1945.
Image: Yevgeny Khaldei / Agentur Voller Ernst © dpa
Picture 3
Refugees drag their only possessions through the streets of Berlin, probably May 1945.
Image: Ivan Shagin © German-Russian Museum Berlin-Karlshorst / Ivan Shagin Collection
Picture 4
Sudeten Germans held on a public square in Prague, including a man whose coat has been painted with a white swastika, await their deportation to Germany, July 20, 1945.
Image: CTK © dpa – Bildarchiv
Picture 5
Three prisoners of war released in Berlin Spandau, Lerschpfad, July 1945.
© ullstein Picture – ullstein bild
Picture 6
These so-called Nissen huts (corrugated iron huts with a semicircular roof) on Halenseestrasse in Berlin-Wilmersdorf provide emergency accommodation for homeless families, refugees, and displaced persons, circa 1950.
Image: akg-images / Hans Schaller © picture alliance / akg
Picture 7
Refugees at Lehrter Railway Station, May 1945.
Image: akg-images © picture alliance / akg-images
Picture 1
Berliners clear wrecked equipment from Charlottenburger Chaussee (today: Straße des 17. Juni) as Soviet soldiers look on, early May 1945.
Image: Ivan Shagin © German-Russian Museum Berlin-Karlshorst / Ivan Shagin Collection
Picture 2
A Red Army parade to honour the Banner of Victory before it is dispatched to Moscow: Troops on parade with the Banner of Victory at the Brandenburg Gate, 20 May 1945.
Image: Victor Kinelowski /akg-images © picture alliance/akg-image
Picture 3
A police officer directs traffic, Berlin June 1945.
Image: Yevgeny Khaldei © ullstein Picture – Voller Ernst / Khaldei
Picture 4
Soviet soldiers distribute soup to the starving population, Berlin May 1945.
Image: Berliner Verlag / Archiv © dpa
Picture 5
The cover of a brochure distributed at the “Great Anti-Bolshevik Exhibition” on the occasion of the NSDAP rally, Nuremberg 1937.
© ullstein Picture – adoc-photos
Picture 6
German soldiers on their way to Soviet POW camps following the capitulation, Berlin May 1945.
Image: akg-images © picture alliance / akg-images
Picture 7
Soviet soldiers and Russian prisoners liberated from German concentration camps, May 1945.
© ullstein Picture – Imagno / Votava
Picture 1
A panorama view of Alexanderplatz shortly after the fighting ended in Berlin, early May 1945.
© akg-images / Sputnik
Picture 2
An aerial view of the devastation of Berlin in May 1945.
© ullstein Picture – SPUTNIK
Picture 3
A plaque outside Steglitz Town Hall commemorates a German soldier hanged by the Nazis in the final days of the war, Berlin 1945.
© ullstein Picture – ullstein bild
Picture 4
Four generations: It is not known whether these women and girls are refugees from the former eastern territories of Germany or Berliners returning to the city. They were among millions of people criss-crossing Europe in the spring and summer of 1945.
Image: Abraham Pisarek, Berlin 1945. © Stiftung Stadtmuseum Berlin
Picture 5
Soviet tanks in a Berlin suburb. The slogan on the wall reads “Berlin stays German!”, late April 1945.
© ullstein Picture – AKG
Picture 6
Despite their severely damaged state, these apartments in Berlin were still occupied in August 1945.
© ullstein Picture – Heritage Images / Keystone Archives
Picture 7
Defeated: A seemingly endless train of German POWs marches eastwards out of the city on Frankfurter Allee as civilians look on.
Image: Timofej Melnik, early May 1945. © German-Russian Museum Berlin-Karlshorst / Timofej Melnik Collection
Picture 8
Survivors: German soldiers outside Spandau Town Hall; it is not known whether they are POWs or have been freed from a camp.
Image: Eva Kemlein, Mai 1945 © Stiftung Stadtmuseum Berlin
Picture 9
The Soviet commandant of the Red Army of the USSR in Berlin, Nikolai E. Berzarin, speaks to women tasked with clearing rubble in Berlin, 1945.
Image: Yevgeny Khaldei / Agentur Voller Ernst © dpa
Liberated “Ost-Arbeiter” at Brandenburg Gate, presumably with a member of the Soviet armed forces, Berlin, May 1945.
Photo: Gerhard Gronefeld © Deutsches Historisches Museum
Photo: Gerhard Gronefeld © Deutsches Historisches Museum
Liberated “Ost-Arbeiter” at Brandenburg Gate, presumably with a member of the Soviet armed forces, Berlin, May 1945.
Photo: Gerhard Gronefeld © Deutsches Historisches Museum
Photo: Gerhard Gronefeld © Deutsches Historisches Museum
Forced Labour in Berlin 1938–1945
Forced labourers in Berlin were accommodated at about 3,000 different locations around the city. As well as military-style barracks and camps, these also included former schools, cinemas, theatres, and restaurants. These locations could be found on nearly every corner of the city – making them impossible for the inhabitants of Berlin to overlook.
Even before the start of World War II, the Nazi authorities had started using various Berlin demographics for forced labour: Jews, Sinti, Roma, and those identified as “anti-social”. In these cases, forced labour was a means of persecution and just a prelude to deportation to the concentration and extermination camps.
Drawing by Polish forced labourer Jerzy Bukowiecki: Escape from a burning slit trench in Berlin-Köpenick, 1944.
© Nazi Forced Labour Documentation Centre / Collection Berlin History Workshop
© Nazi Forced Labour Documentation Centre / Collection Berlin History Workshop
Over the course of the war, an increasing number of people from occupied Europe were deported to Berlin as forced labourers. Around 500,000 men, women and children were used as forced labour: in the armaments industry, in small and medium-sized companies, for churches, the municipal and district authorities, and in private households.
Eastern European forced labourers were especially poorly treated, as these people were seen as particularly “inferior” in the racist ideology of National Socialism. They were subject to extremely strict rules; the slightest transgressions by Polish or Soviet forced labourers would be brutally punished by the Gestapo. The children of Eastern European women often died of malnutrition, while pregnant women were forced to have abortions.
Western European forced labourers generally had greater freedom of movement and were subject to less severe conditions. Nevertheless, many of them were sent to Gestapo punishment camps for minor offences or sentenced to death by the Berlin courts.
It was not until 2000 that forced labourers were officially recognized as victims of the Nazi regime, making them entitled – under certain circumstances – to financial reparations.
Many forced labour locations in Berlin are no longer visible. In recent years, however, significant labour camp locations have been uncovered again during construction projects. Since then, there has been an ongoing discussion about how Berlin’s history of Nazi forced labour can be made more visible.
Author: Christine Glauning / The Nazi Forced Labour Documentation Centre
The site of the Nazi Forced Labour Documentation Centre.
Photo: A. Schoelzel © Nazi Forced Labour Documentation Centre
Photo: A. Schoelzel © Nazi Forced Labour Documentation Centre
Red Army soldiers greet former Soviet forced labourers, May 1945.
© picture alliance/akg-images
© picture alliance/akg-images
Liberation of the NS Forced Labour Camp
When the city of Berlin capitulated to the Red Army on 2 May 1945, there were around 370,000 forced labourers in the entire metropolitan region. Thousands used the chaos at the end of the war to escape from the camps or their work detail. But insubordination, escape attempts, and theft were still punished severely until the very end. For fear of resistance or revenge, targeted murders of foreign forced labourers were carried out in Berlin and its environs, even in the last days of the war.
At the end of the war, most of the women and men who had been condemned to forced labour were still at their place of deployment. Many of them experienced May 1945 as a liberation. For others, the end of the war meant a time of uncertainty and waiting. The large number of so-called displaced persons – people who wanted to return to their homelands or who had become homeless due to the war – posed an enormous challenge to the Allied military administrations.
Most Germans wanted to get rid of the “foreigners” as quickly as possible. Influenced by xenophobia, racism, and the echoes of Nazi propaganda, they were fearful of looting and violent reprisals. There was a widespread fear that liberated forced labourers and concentration camp survivors would commit acts of revenge and retribution.
Many former “civilian workers” from western and southern Europe were able to return to their homelands in the summer of 1945, either alone or with the help of the Allies’ repatriation transports.
Other freed prisoners tried to resist being sent home. In some countries, many who returned were suspected of treason and of collaborating with the Germans. Countless former “Ost-Arbeiter”, or “Eastern workers”, and prisoners-of-war were subjected to extensive interrogation by the Soviet secret service in so-called “examination and filtration camps”. Many ended up in prison camps. Others in turn were recruited on site by the Red Army.
“On 20/21 April 1945 the fiery glow above Köpenick started to get bigger. We were sitting in a bunker beneath the factory while shots were thundering over our heads, and suddenly we heard an accent-free Russian voice: “Russians come out!” First we were scared (…), thought they were Germans who wanted to eliminate us. [But] they were our Russian soldiers. We wept for joy, kissed and embraced them.”
(Galina Ippolitowna Wertaschonok)
Letter by the former forced labourer Galina Ippolitowna Wertaschonok to the Berliner Geschichtswerkstatt of 28 August 1997. Nazi Forced Labour Documentation Centre, Collection of the Berliner Geschichtswerkstatt.
The history of the liberation of the Nazi forced labour camps in Berlin has still not yet been fully examined. The topic is currently the subject of a research project by the Nazi Forced Labour Documentation Centre. Several times a week diary extracts, memoirs and documents from spring 1945 are presented on the website “At an end but not over. Berlin Nazi Forced Labour Camps 1945” and on social media: www.zwangslager-berlin-1945.de/en
#zwangslager1945
Author: Niels Hölmer / The Nazi Forced Labour Documentation Centre
Soviet soldiers in front of a barrack in the liberated “GBI Camp 75/76” (now the Nazi Forced Labour Documentation Centre), Berlin-Schöneweide, July 1945.
© Privately owned
© Privately owned
Soldiers of the Red Army and the Polish armed forces conquer Berlin: Tanks manned by Polish soldiers on Berliner Strasse, April 1945.
© akg-images / Sputnik
© akg-images / Sputnik
Soldiers of the Red Army and the Polish armed forces conquer Berlin: Tanks manned by Polish soldiers on Berliner Strasse, April 1945.
© akg-images / Sputnik
© akg-images / Sputnik
The Battle of Berlin
On 16 April 1945, the Red Army began its assault on Berlin. After taking the Seelow Heights on the Oder, it entered what was then the district of Weißensee on 21 April; it reached the city’s “Ring” S-Bahn line which surrounds Berlin’s central districts by 26 April. In the heavy street battles that followed, the soldiers fought their way further into the city centre. In parallel, the Red Army had encircled Berlin completely by 25 April. The war had long been lost for Germany, but the fighting continued on Adolf Hitler’s orders. In Halbe, south of Berlin, thousands of surrounded troops fought to the death up to 28 April. Right up until 29 April, the German Army attempted to break the siege.
Soviet trench mortar crew in action at U-Bahn Station Bülowstrasse, Berlin-Schöneberg, end of April 1945.
Photo: Timofej Melnik © Museum Berlin-Karlshorst / Collection Timofej Melnik
Photo: Timofej Melnik © Museum Berlin-Karlshorst / Collection Timofej Melnik
Only after Hitler’s suicide on April 30 did the German side show any willingness to negotiate. But Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels and Chief of Staff of the Army Hans Krebs were also unable to bring themselves to accept the unconditional surrender that the Red Army demanded. Both committed suicide on 1 May. Early in the morning of 2 May, General Helmuth Weidling, commander of German forces in Berlin, arrived at the Soviet headquarters in Berlin-Tempelhof. In an apartment at Schulenburgring 2, he issued the order to end the fighting.
The Battle of Berlin was part of a major offensive by the Red Army along the entire length of the front ranging from the Baltic Sea and Görlitz. Roughly two million Red Army soldiers faced one million German defenders, of whom one quarter were child-soldier “anti-aircraft auxiliaries”, older men of the conscripted Volkssturm militia, and reservists.
Berlin, which was also the most heavily bombarded German city with around 370 air raids, lay in ruins at the end of the war. 70 percent of the city centre was destroyed.
Author: Jörg Morré / German-Russion Museum Berlin-Karlshorst
Soviet SU 152 self-propelled gun SU 152 in Oranienburger Strasse, Berlin-Mitte, end of April/beginning of May 1945.
Photo: Timofej Melnik © Museum Berlin-Karlshorst / Collection Timofej Melnik
Photo: Timofej Melnik © Museum Berlin-Karlshorst / Collection Timofej Melnik
The Race to Berlin
Germany’s armed forces were already on the defensive two years before the end of the war. After the Battle of Stalingrad in early 1943, the Red Army seemed to go from one victory to the next. In July 1944, they liberated the last German foothold in the Soviet Union. Almost simultaneously, on 6 June 1944, the Western Allies successfully landed in northern France, establishing the so-called Second Front in Europe. The landing of American troops on the southern tip of Italy in the summer of 1943 had been another crucial development.
Soldiers take shelter, Stalingrad 1942/43.
© picture alliance/arkivi
© picture alliance/arkivi
From a military perspective, Germany’s surrender could have come much sooner. But the failure of the Ardennes Offensive (the Battle of the Bulge) in 1944 showed that, even in the absence of success on the battlefield, Hitler could inspire resistance to the end. It was Nazi fanaticism, embodied above all by Hitler, which, in complete denial of any rational assessment of the military situation, elevated self-sacrifice to a virtue. With his call for a “total war” and the Nero Decree of 19 March 1945, Hitler exhorted the German people to continue to wage war, regardless of losses, for as long as possible. It was clear to the anti-Hitler coalition that the policy of seeking Germany’s unconditional surrender, adopted at the Casablanca Conference in 1943, was their only feasible option. Berlin, where Adolf Hitler had been holed up since mid-January 1945, had to be taken.
Stalin in particular had sought to inspire his soldiers with the prospect of a conquest of the German capital, and the battle cry “To Berlin!” loomed large in Soviet propaganda. But there was also a political dimension to the decision: British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in particular hoped to curb the future Soviet influence in Eastern and Central Europe in the post-war period. He urged President Franklin D. Roosevelt not to leave the capital to the Red Army alone. Roosevelt, however, was guided by military considerations, including a desire to avoid the undoubtedly large losses that Berlin’s capture would necessitate. American and British troops stopped on the banks of the Elbe River. On 25 April, the well-publicized “Meetings on the Elbe River” took place in Torgau as American and Soviet troops met for the first time in German territory.
By that time. the Red Army had already encircled Berlin. Soviet soldiers hurriedly fought their way through to the city centre. Stalin had set the commanding officers of the two attacking army groups against each other in a race for victory. The two Soviet marshals ruthlessly drove their troops onwards. In the end, it was one of Marshal Georgy Zhukov’s units that raised the Red Flag on the Reichstag as a symbol of victory. Zhukov appointed Nikolai Berzarin the first Commandant of Berlin and went down in Soviet history as the winner in the “Great Patriotic War”.
Author: Jörg Morré / German-Russian Museum Berlin-Karlshorst
On 25 April 1945, three American and three Soviet soldiers greeted each other on the ruined Elbe Bridge in Torgau. This encounter is known in the history books as the “Meeting on the Elbe”.
© picture alliance / Photo 12
© picture alliance / Photo 12
The handover of the Reinickendorf and Wedding districts from the British to the French administrations: General Jeoffroy de Beauchesne (right), the sector’s first commander, and Brigadier General Spurling (left) review a parade of French troops on Weddingplatz.
© ullstein bild – ullstein bild
© ullstein bild – ullstein bild
The handover of the Reinickendorf and Wedding districts from the British to the French administrations: General Jeoffroy de Beauchesne (right), the sector’s first commander, and Brigadier General Spurling (left) review a parade of French troops on Weddingplatz.
© ullstein bild – ullstein bild
© ullstein bild – ullstein bild
France: the ‘belated’ victorious power
For four years France found itself under German occupation. Those years of collaboration and resistance left in their wake a deeply divided society. Yet at the end of the war, France found itself included among the victorious Allies that occupied Germany.
In June 1940, following six weeks of battle, the German Wehrmacht installed a regime of occupation in Northern France and along the Atlantic coast.
The French city of Caen in the Normandy lays in ruins by the time of its liberation on 19 July 1944. Photo: Captain E.G. Malindine, No 5 Army Film & Photographic Unit, public domain
The south of the country remained unoccupied for the time being. This territory was controlled by the authoritarian regime of Marshal Philippe Petain, based in the town of Vichy. The Vichy regime collaborated with the occupiers and assisted in the deportation of 76,000 Jews. In November 1942, the Wehrmacht also marched into the southern zone of France. Both within France and among the French in exile, movements of resistance to the occupation were organised. Their attacks on the army of occupation were met with brutal reprisals from the Germans. In June 1944, the liberation of France began with the Allied landings on the Normandy coast. Just a few days earlier, a “Provisional Government of the French Republic” was formed under the leadership of Charles de Gaulle. This timing was not coincidental: its aim was to prevent an Allied military government taking power in France. The advance of the Allied forces was supported by French resistance fighters and soldiers. Between 1940 and 1945, approximately 230,000 French soldiers and 350,000 civilians lost their lives, either in combat or in Allied and German bombing raids. The liberation of Paris in August 1944 was an event of enormous symbolic significance, though the entire territory of France was not cleared of German forces until February 1945. The jubilation at the end of the German occupation soon gave way to the reality of grappling with major political problems. These included economic reconstruction, the political restructuring of the country, and healing the social divisions wrought by the war and occupation. Many French soldiers remained mobilised since France, with British and American support, was one of the four victorious powers occupying Germany.
Author: Uta Birkemeyer / The Allied Museum
Citizens line the Champs Élysées and cheer a parade of French soldiers following the liberation of Paris, 26 August 1944. Photo: Jack Downey, U.S. Office of War Information, United States Library of Congress’s Prints and Photographs ID fsac.1a55001, public domain
Befreiung der NS-Zwangslager
Als am 2. Mai 1945 die Stadt Berlin vor der Roten Armee kapitulierte, befanden sich rund 370.000 Zwangsarbeiter*innen im ganzen Stadtgebiet. Tausende nutzten das Chaos bei Kriegsende zur Flucht aus den Lagern oder vom Arbeitsplatz. Verstöße gegen die Anordnungen der NS-Führung, Fluchtversuche oder Diebstahl wurden jedoch bis zuletzt hart bestraft. Aus Angst vor Widerstand oder Rache kam es noch in den letzten Kriegstagen zu gezielten Mordaktionen an ausländischen Zwangsarbeitskräften in Berlin und im Umland.
Rotarmisten begrüßen ehemalige sowjetische Zwangsarbeiterinnen, Mai 1945.
Foto: akg-images © picture alliance/akg-images
Foto: akg-images © picture alliance/akg-images
Andere Befreite versuchten, sich der Rückführung zu widersetzen. In einigen Ländern standen die Rückehrenden unter dem Verdacht des Verrats und der Kollaboration mit den Deutschen. So wurden unzählige ehemalige „Ostarbeiter*innen“ sowie Kriegsgefangene in so genannten „Prüf- und Filtrationslagern“ des sowjetischen Geheimdienstes umfangreichen Verhören unterzogen. Nicht wenige wurden in Straflager verschleppt. Andere wiederum rekrutierte die Rote Armee noch vor Ort in die eigenen Reihen.
Bei Kriegsende befanden sich die meisten der zur Zwangsarbeit verschleppten Frauen und Männer nach wie vor an ihren Einsatzorten. Viele von ihnen erlebten den Mai 1945 als Befreiung. Für andere hingegen begann mit dem Ende des Krieges eine Zeit der Ungewissheit und des Wartens. Die große Zahl so genannter Displaced Persons – Menschen, die in die Heimat zurückkehren wollten oder durch den Krieg heimatlos geworden waren – stellte die alliierten Militäradministrationen vor enorme Herausforderungen.
Die meisten Deutschen wollten „die Ausländer“ möglichst schnell loswerden. Geprägt durch Fremdenfeindlichkeit, Rassismus und den Nachhall der NS-Propaganda befürchteten sie Übergriffe und Plünderungen. Die Angst vor Rache- und Vergeltungsaktionen durch befreite Zwangsarbeiter*innen und KZ-Häftlinge war weit verbreitet.
Viele ehemalige „Zivilarbeiter*innen“ aus West- und Südeuropa konnten noch im Sommer 1945 alleine oder mithilfe der Rückführungstransporte der Alliierten in ihre Heimatländer zurückkehren.
„Am 20./21. April 1945 begann sich der Feuerschein über Köpenick zu vergrößern. Wir saßen in einem Bunker unter der Fabrik, über den Kopf donnerten Geschosse, und plötzlich hörten wir eine akzentfreie russische Stimme: „Russen rauskommen!“ Wir hatten erst einmal Angst (…), dachten, es seien die Deutschen und sie wollten uns vernichten. [Doch] es waren unsere russischen Soldaten. Wir weinten vor Freude, küssten und umarmten sie.“
(Galina Ippolitowna Wertaschonok)
Brief der ehemaligen Zwangsarbeiterin Galina Ippolitowna Wertaschonok an die Berliner Geschichtswerkstatt vom 28. August 1997. Dokumentationszentrum NS-Zwangsarbeit, Sammlung Berliner
Die Geschichte der Befreiung der NS-Zwangslager in Berlin ist bis heute nicht umfassend aufgearbeitet. Aktuell widmet sich das Dokumentationszentrum NS-Zwangsarbeit dem Thema in einem Rechercheprojekt. Auf der Website „Zu Ende, aber nicht vorbei. NS-Zwangslager in Berlin 1945“ und in den Sozialen Medien werden mehrmals die Woche Tagebuchauszüge, Erinnerungsberichte und Dokumente aus dem Frühjahr 1945 vorgestellt: www.zwangslager-berlin-1945.de
#zwangslager1945
Autor*in: Niels Hölmer / Dokumentationszentrum NS-Zwangsarbeit
Sowjetische Soldaten vor einer Baracke im befreiten „GBI-Lager 75/76“ (heute Dokumentationszentrum NS-Zwangsarbeit), Berlin-Schöneweide, Juli 1945.
© Privatbesitz
© Privatbesitz
From Liberation to Occupation
At the Yalta Conference in February 1945, the Allies agreed on the total occupation of Germany. Each of the victorious powers – France was added shortly afterwards to Great Britain, the Soviet Union and the USA – was assigned a zone of occupation. The German capital, Berlin, was to be jointly administered. However, the subsequent division of the city was already presaged by the partition of the country into four zones of occupation and by the different ideologies and ideas of governance among the victorious powers.
On 14 August 1961, East Berlin authorities closed the sector crossing at the Brandenburg Gate. The previous day, under the watchful eyes of East German soldiers, workers had erected barriers of barbed wire and begun to build a wall to isolate the eastern sectors of Berlin from the western sectors.
Photo: Konrad Giehr © picture alliance/dpa
Photo: Konrad Giehr © picture alliance/dpa
A meeting of the Allied Control Council in Berlin on Potsdamer Strasse, 1948. Soviet delegation (front), French delegation (left), United States delegation (right), British delegation (back).
© ullstein bild – ullstein bild
© ullstein bild – ullstein bild
Following the suicide of Adolf Hitler, Germany was governed by a ‘caretaker government’. It gave the Army High Command the authority to capitulate. Through military victory, the Allies assumed powers of government almost by default. And so, throughout Germany public life was determined by military commanders. An Allied Control Council was instituted to jointly decide on political questions. But this only functioned until March 1948, when the Soviet representative withdrew from the council.
By that time, most of the zones of occupation were gradually taking steps towards the institution of democratic systems. The Soviet zone of occupation was the only one to choose a path into a new dictatorship. Politics were determined by ideological imperatives, freedom of expression was largely curtailed, democratic elections abolished and the Soviet secret police intruded unchecked into whatever sphere of life it considered important.
The Soviet zone first suffered from the widespread plunder of economic assets, which the Russians stripped and shipped to rebuild their devastated country. Additionally, people were increasingly told what to think and liberties suppressed, up to the point of imprisonment and execution. Soviet military tribunals tried and condemned about 35,000 Germans. Around 150,000 Germans, among them many low-level Nazi party officials, were interned in so-called ‘special camps’ run by the Soviet occupation authorities. Even before the foundation of the GDR many people fled the Soviet zone. On its foundation in 1949, the German Democratic Republic (GDR) continued the same methods of political suppression. This state was only able to stem the mass exodus of its citizens by constructing the Berlin Wall in 1961.
The transportation of machines and factory equipment confiscated by the Soviet occupation force, 1951.
© ullstein bild – ullstein bild
© ullstein bild – ullstein bild
Author: Jörg Morré / German-Russian Museum Berlin-Karlshorst
Nikolai Berzarin – Berlin’s First Military Commander
Colonel-General Nikolai Berzarin was appointed as the Soviet military commander of Berlin on 24 April 1945, as street battles still raged in the city. Marshal Zhukov, who regarded himself as the conqueror of the Nazi German capital, was making a clear statement in appointing Berzarin to this post. Although it had already been agreed that, from July onwards, the city would be jointly administered by the four victorious powers, for the moment at least it was solely under Soviet control.
Colonel-General Nikolai E. Berzarin, the first City Commander of Berlin with the
war correspondents Vishnevski and Besymenski in front of the Reichstag, May 1945.
(c) Ivan Shagin / Museum Berlin-Karlshorst
(c) Ivan Shagin / Museum Berlin-Karlshorst
Soviet soldiers distributing food to the civilian population from an army field kitchen in the centre of Berlin. On Berzarin’s orders numerous soup kitchens were set up for the population in early May 1945.
(c) Timofei Melnik / Museum Berlin-Karlshorst
(c) Timofei Melnik / Museum Berlin-Karlshorst
Berzarin immediately revived the district administration offices. He was aided in this task by German anti-fascists led by Walter Ulbricht, who arrived from Moscow on 1 May. Under the command of Berzarin, the city very quickly regained a functioning government. The Commander ensured the provision of all essential services, from water and electricity to gas and transport. Soup kitchens run by the Red Army also helped to combat the ubiquitous food shortages. Even cultural life in the city had reawakened by mid-May. Berzarin’s commitment was genuine but was not entirely motivated by altruism. The Soviet army of occupation used the short timeframe before the arrival of the western Allied commanders to present themselves in the best possible light. But there was also a darker side: throughout the city Soviet soldiers looted and raped. The Soviet secret police also arrested numerous Nazi officials and war criminals. This was the Law of the Victor. Thus, the spring of 1945 was not a time free of fear for the people of Berlin.
Berzarin died on 16 June 1945 in a traffic accident. He was therefore not required to personally oversee the transition to joint administration of the city by the four victorious powers. Thirty years later, East Berlin expressed its gratitude to Berzarin for his commitment to returning life to the city after the war by awarding him posthumous honorary citizenship. Following German reunification, the Berlin Senate rescinded this award in 1992. Following a heated public debate, Nikolai Berzarin was reinstated as an honorary citizen of Berlin in 2003.
Commander Nikolai Berzarin chatting to Trümmerfrauen (German women clearing rubble from the streets), Berlin, May 1945
© Berliner Verlag
© Berliner Verlag
Author: Dr. Jörg Morré / Deutsch-Russisches Museum Berlin-Karlshorst
Victims of the Gestapo are exhumed in the courtyard of the Secret State Police Headquarters at Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse 8 in Berlin, October 1945.
Photo: ACME Emil Reynolds © ullstein bild – ullstein bild
Photo: ACME Emil Reynolds © ullstein bild – ullstein bild
Victims of the Gestapo are exhumed in the courtyard of the Secret State Police Headquarters at Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse 8 in Berlin, October 1945.
Photo: ACME Emil Reynolds © ullstein bild – ullstein bild
Photo: ACME Emil Reynolds © ullstein bild – ullstein bild
Berlin – The Headquarters of the Nazi Terror Regime
Until shortly before the end of the war, Berlin was the political, military and administrative power centre of the Nazi regime. Adolf Hitler and the Nazi elite had various headquarters here, though some also existed outside of the Reich capital. The head offices of the main SS and police institutions were located in Berlin. These included the secret police (Gestapo), the personal staff of SS leader Heinrich Himmler, the Security Service of the SS (SD), and the Criminal Police (Kripo). There were also various branch offices of the Gestapo, Kripo and SD at over thirty locations in Berlin, as well as at additional locations nearby.
An aerial view of the former headquarters of the Secret State Police (Gestapo), 1945/46. The Gestapo took up its offices in a former school for arts and crafts on Prinz-Albrecht-Straße (later renamed Niederkirchnerstraße) in 1933. Operations across the entire Reich and occupied European territories were directed from here. © picture-alliance / akg-images
The former government district, where many of the headquarters of the ‘SS state’ once stood, is now the site of the Topography of Terror documentation and exhibition centre. Between 1933 and 1945, this was the centre of a complex network of Gestapo, Kripo and SD offices throughout the territory of the Reich and the European regions occupied by the German Army. From here, the SS state organised, together with other institutions, the genocide of Europe’s Jews and of the Sinti and Roma peoples. These offices were also central to controlling and terrorizing political opponents of the Nazi regime, other persecuted groups, and millions of foreign slave labourers. Right up until the final weeks of the war, this state terror and the looting of victims’ possessions was largely initiated, coordinated and administered from Berlin. Right up until the end of the war, orders to kill various political opponents were issued from Gestapo HQ. The surviving Gestapo offices outside Berlin were even encouraged to continue mercilessly killing prisoners on their own initiative.
Just before the war ended, most of the highest ranking Nazi officials fled the capital. Most of the buildings belonging to the SS and Gestapo were damaged or destroyed in the war.
Author: Klaus Hesse / Topographie des Terrors
The heads of the SS and police at a meeting in Munich on 9 November 1939.
At centre Heinrich Himmler, Reichsführer-SS and Head of German Police, to the right Reinhard Heydrich, Head of the Security Police and the SD and Head of the Reichssicherheitshauptamtes, and Heinrich Müller, Head of the Gestapo. To the left of Himmler sits Arthur Nebe, Head of the Kriminalpolizei. © German Federal Archives, Image 183-R98680
End of the War, 1945: The Collapse of the “SS State”
With the fall of the Nazi regime came the collapse of the apparatus of terror consisting of SS and police. The leaders of the SS and Secret State Police (Gestapo), as well as the Criminal Police (Kripo) and Public Order Police (Ordnungspolizei), beat a hasty retreat as Soviet troops closed in on Berlin in late April 1945. Like the staff of the remaining central organs of state and the government ministries, they fled for those parts of the north and south of the country that had not yet been occupied by the Allies.
Main corridor in the former Gestapo headquarters, 1948. This building included a Gestapo remand prison. Thousands of people were imprisoned and interrogated here between 1933 and 1945. Shortly before the end of the war, the Gestapo murdered most of the remaining prisoners. A few prisoners were found in their cells when Soviet soldiers captured the building.
Photo: Norbert Leonard © SZ Photo
Photo: Norbert Leonard © SZ Photo
Heinrich Himmler, who bore the title of Reichsführer-SS and Head of the German Police, fled with some of his retinue to Flensburg. Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz, Hitler’s successor following his suicide on 30 April, was based there. Dönitz relieved Himmler of his offices, in order to be better able to negotiate with the western Allies on a partial capitulation. Himmler went into hiding under a false identity but was soon captured and, on 23 May 1945, committed suicide by taking poison while in British captivity.
Ernst Kaltenbrunner, who bore the titles of Head of the Reich Security Main Office and Head of the Sicherheitspolizei and SD, had moved with his staff to the south of the Reich. On 12 May 1945 he was arrested by the US Army at his hideout near Altausee in the Austrian province of Styria.
Gestapo Head Heinrich Müller had stayed on as Kaltenbrunner’s deputy in Berlin. He died, apparently in combat or through suicide, on 2 May 1945. In the weeks preceding his death he ordered the liquidation of numerous prominent political opponents of the Nazi regime in the concentration camps. On Müller’s orders, special commando units of the Gestapo killed most of the inmates in Berlin’s Gestapo prisons between 22 and 24 April 1945.
Throughout the remaining territory of the Third Reich, Gestapo and Kripo units carried out dozens of individual and mass executions of political opponents, slave labourers and other prisoners just before the end of the war. The SS also carried out numerous massacres of prisoners while dissolving the concentration camps. Thus, even in the final weeks of the war tens of thousands of people fell victim to the Nazi reign of terror.
Author: Kaus Hesse / Topographie des Terrors
Soviet soldiers at the former Gestapo headquarters, 2–3 May 1945.
After capturing the building, soldiers found handcuffs and chains that had been used to beat prisoners.
Photo: Yevgeny Chalday © ullstein bild – Voller Ernst / Chaldej
Photo: Yevgeny Chalday © ullstein bild – Voller Ernst / Chaldej
“Topography of Terror” – Destruction, Demolition and Rediscovery
The area of land between Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse (since renamed Niederkirchnerstrasse) and Wilhelmstrasse was where the headquarters of the Secret State Police (Gestapo), the SS, the Security Service (SD) and the Reich Security Head Office (Reichssicherheitshauptamt or RSHA) were located. It was from this point that the Nazi regime planned and organized its most monumental crimes and acts of terror.
The Berlin Wall runs along the northern edge of the site of the former headquarters of the Gestapo and SS, May 1977.
The photo shows the Berlin Wall from the west along Niederkirchnerstrasse (previously Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse). In the background at left are the ruins of the Museum of Decorative Arts (now the Martin-Gropius-Bau). In the foreground on the other side of the Wall is the former Reich Aviation Ministry (now the Federal Finance Ministry) and in the background the former Prussian parliament (today the Berlin legislative assembly). © Berlin State Archive
The photo shows the Berlin Wall from the west along Niederkirchnerstrasse (previously Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse). In the background at left are the ruins of the Museum of Decorative Arts (now the Martin-Gropius-Bau). In the foreground on the other side of the Wall is the former Reich Aviation Ministry (now the Federal Finance Ministry) and in the background the former Prussian parliament (today the Berlin legislative assembly). © Berlin State Archive
Following the end of the war, the buildings used by the Gestapo and SS were badly damaged. They were largely ignored, and by the mid-1950s they had been demolished. This approach to their legacy reflected the wish of most Germans to suppress the memory of their recent history. For decades, the crimes of the Nazi regime were either treated as taboo, relativized or denied. Many regime criminals avoided prosecution. They either went into hiding or found a comfortable place within the post-war communities of both German states. Most of the upper- and mid-level Nazi criminals settled in West Germany.
With the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961, the former site of the Gestapo and SS headquarters was truly pushed to the margins – to the border between the American and Soviet sectors. The site found various uses, including as a depot for a company that salvaged building rubble. From the early 1980s onwards, this ‘place of the perpetrators’ was gradually rediscovered. Gradually, and not without controversy, it has become anchored in the historical memory of Berlin and the Federal Republic of Germany.
The Topography of Terror documentation centre, which opened here in 2010, conveys the unique history of this historical site. In addition to critically reviewing the crimes of the Nazi regime, it also commemorates the suffering of its victims. The Topography of Terror on Niederkirchnerstrasse and Wilhelmstrasse is committed to this task in collaboration with numerous other memorial sites throughout Berlin and Brandenburg.
Author: Klaus Hesse / Topographie des Terrors
Excavated traces of the former Gestapo headquarters, September 1986.
In 1986, as part of the activities to celebrate the 750th anniversary of the city of Berlin, excavations along the western flank of the Berlin Wall (behind the trees) uncovered parts of the foundations and basement of the northern wing of the former Gestapo headquarters on Niederkirchnerstrasse. This is the current location of what is known as the exhibition trenches of the Topography of Terror documentation centre.
© Berlin State Archive
In 1986, as part of the activities to celebrate the 750th anniversary of the city of Berlin, excavations along the western flank of the Berlin Wall (behind the trees) uncovered parts of the foundations and basement of the northern wing of the former Gestapo headquarters on Niederkirchnerstrasse. This is the current location of what is known as the exhibition trenches of the Topography of Terror documentation centre.
© Berlin State Archive
The Persecution, Expulsion and Extermination of the German Jews
When the National Socialists came to power in 1933, they introduced the state persecution of Jews in Germany. For the first time, anti-Semitism became a part of government policy in a modern state. Jews were excluded from society and their persecution gradually intensified. State regulations, acts of violence by supporters of the regime and incitement by the National Socialist press combined to promote this persecution.
Legal protections of Jews as equal citizens were gradually removed. “Kristallnacht” in 1938 marked a turning point: On the night of 9-10 November, throughout the German Reich, synagogues were destroyed, retirement homes, orphanages and hospitals were set on fire, and Jewish businesses were looted. National Socialists and their sympathisers attacked Jewish families, ransacked their apartments, and murdered at least 100 people. There was hardly any resistance or protests.
Up to 30,000 Jews were held for several weeks at concentration camps such as Sachsenhausen. They were to be forced to emigrate. Tens of thousands of German and Austrian Jews decided to flee. After the conquest of Poland in September 1939 and the campaigns in the North and the West in 1940, the regime intensified its anti-Jewish policies within the German Reich. In 1940 some of the first deportations from Germany took place. Systematic deportations to the East commenced after the emigration ban was announced for German Jews in autumn 1941 – first to ghettos, and then to the gas chambers of Auschwitz and other extermination camps starting in spring 1942. Even when the country began to reap what it had sown and German cities were reduced to ruins and ashes, the extermination of the Jews still took precedence. The final transport to the Theresienstadt concentration camp arrived on 15 April 1945. The German armed forces capitulated three weeks later. Of the 500,000 Jewish children, women and men who lived in Germany before 1933, up to 165,000 died in the Holocaust, 55,000 of them from Berlin.
Author: Uwe Neumärker / Foundation Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe
The deportation of Sinti and Roma people in Asperg, 22 May 1940.
© Bundesarchiv, Bild R 165 Bild-244-48
© Bundesarchiv, Bild R 165 Bild-244-48
The deportation of Sinti and Roma people in Asperg, 22 May 1940.
© Bundesarchiv, Bild R 165 Bild-244-48
© Bundesarchiv, Bild R 165 Bild-244-48
The Genocide of the Sinti and Roma
Under the rule of the Nazi regime, hundreds of thousands of people in Germany and other European countries were persecuted as ‘Gypsies’ from 1933 to 1945. The largest of these groups in Europe were the Sinti and Roma. The aim of the Nazi state and its racial ideology was to destroy this minority: Men, women and children were abducted and murdered in their hometowns or in ghettos, concentration camps, and extermination camps.
An aerial view of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp complex. The so-called ‘gypsy camp’ is highlighted in red.
© British Government, public domain
© British Government, public domain
Discrimination against Sinti and Roma existed long before 1933. But in the Nazi era, antagonism became a state doctrine. The regime started sending Sinti and Roma to concentration camps, introduced forced sterilisations in 1934 and established forced labour camps. In Berlin, hundreds of people were sent to one of these camps in the Marzahn district two weeks before the opening of the 1936 Olympic Games. The camps were used to assess and register, isolate and recruit forced labour.
The camps also served to humiliate their victims: The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 instituted a series of racist restrictions, including marriage bans and exclusion from professions or the German armed forces. In January 1936, Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick was unequivocal about the groups targeted by these laws, singling out Jews and ‘Gypsies’ in particular.
Finally, a central office was set up at the Reichskriminalpolizeiamt (Central Criminal Investigation Police Department), which controlled and coordinated the registration and persecution of Sinti and Roma. By the end of the war, the Racial Hygiene Research Centre in Berlin-Dahlem had prepared almost 24,000 “racial hygiene files” that formed the basis for deportations to extermination camps.
The number of people persecuted as ‘Gypsies’ who fell victim to genocide under the National Socialist regime will probably never be precisely determined. Estimates range up to 500,000 murdered men, women and children.
Fight antiziganism!
Roma peoples have lived in Europe for over a thousand years. Their language, which includes numerous dialects that vary according to region and country of origin, is known as Romani. Those who have lived in the German-speaking countries for over 600 years generally refer to themselves as Sinti, while many in Eastern Europe use the term Roma. Numerous other names are used by this broad ethnic group to describe themselves. These include Manouche, Lalleri, Ashkali, and Lovari. Together they form Europe’s largest ethnic minority.
Demonstration in front of the Federal Criminal Police Office in Wiesbaden to protest against the continued special registration of the minority, 1983.
© Zentralrat Deutscher Sinti und Roma
© Zentralrat Deutscher Sinti und Roma
Their ways of life are diverse. For generations citizens of their respective countries, they also speak the national languages and, in most cases, belong to the majority religious confessions. Over the course of their centuries-long history, the Roma and Sinti have, for their part, contributed to the cultures and economies of Europe. For a long time they were denied the right to acquire land or enter many of the professions. Many Sinti and Roma responded by earning their livelihoods in areas such as trade or entertainment. In many cases they achieved great success in these economic niches. As German citizens Sinti fought in the German army in both World Wars. In the First World War, many were decorated for bravery. In the Second, they were eventually excluded from the Wehrmacht for “reasons of racial policy”.
Even following the genocide committed by Nazi Germany and its allies, Sinti and Roma continue to experience prejudice, social exclusion and disadvantage throughout Europe. Racism against Sinti and Roma is generally referred to as antiziganism. It draws on patterns of prejudice that have existed throughout Europe for centuries, continually taking on new forms. Those affected by this form of racism rarely have the opportunity to combat the negative stereotypes, though these have a hugely negative impact on their lives. Many Sinti and Roma deny their heritage for this reason. Racism against Sinti and Roma is a phenomenon that permeates all levels of society. Yet there is very little public awareness of the problem. In recent years it has gained force across the continent, resulting even in violent attacks and racially motivated murder. In Germany, too, Sinti who have lived here for generations, as well as those who have immigrated in recent decades or have come seeking asylum, are exposed to racism in all areas of life. It is our common responsibility as citizens to call out hostility to Sinti and Roma, to condemn it, and to protect and support those affected. Given Germany’s historical responsibility, the fight against antiziganism must be a guiding principle of political and social life.
Reinhold Laubinger
Lichtbilder der Kriminalpolizei Berlin, 1940.
© Landesarchiv Berlin, GuMS-Pr.Br.Rep.030-02-03, Nr.74, S.8
© Landesarchiv Berlin, GuMS-Pr.Br.Rep.030-02-03, Nr.74, S.8
Reinhold Laubinger was born on 22 August 1920 in Repplin, in the district of Pyritz in Pomerania. He moved to Berlin where he began work in underground construction. Laubinger appears to have been one of the approximately 600 Sinti forced by the police to live in the Marzahn ‘Gypsy camp’ (officially termed a ‘resting station’). The camp was set up on open land in advance of the Olympic Games of July 1936. The intention was to render the city’s Sinti residents invisible to visitors. As part of the “Reich anti-indolence campaign”, the Criminal Police arrested Laubinger, convicted him on 18 July 1938 of being “asocial”, and sent him to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. He had no prior criminal record. In Sachsenhausen, he was subjected to typhus experiments by camp doctors. Reinhold Laubinger ‘volunteered’ along with five other Sinti prisoners to defuse unexploded bombs following Allied bombing raids on Berlin. In recognition of this, on 2 December 1940 Himmler ordered that the six men be transferred to the Marzahn ‘Gypsy camp’. Laubinger was able to move into his mother Adelheid’s caravan. The hygiene conditions were appalling as the camp bordered on Berlin’s septic drain fields. Laubinger began working in a furniture factory in Berlin. In Autumn 1940, Hitler’s propaganda filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl began work on her movie Tiefland (Lowlands). In April 1942, shooting began at Babelsberg Studios with extras exclusively taken from the Marzahn camp, among them Reinhold Laubinger. On 27 March 1943, he was transported with his mother to the ‘Gypsy family camp’ in Auschwitz-Birkenau. They were registered there with the numbers Z-5591 and Z-4610. In order to make room for the impending arrival of a large number of Hungarian Jews, the SS set about dissolving the ‘Gypsy family camp’ on 16 May 1944. The inmates put up a fight, however, forcing the SS to briefly retreat. During the following weeks, they separated out all of the inmates who were capable of work – and of resistance – and sent them to other concentration camps. Reinhold Laubinger was sent to Dachau, where he was liberated by American troops in April 1945. He died in 1986.
Johann Wilhelm Rukeli Trollmann
Hannover, 1928: Norddeutscher Meister der Amateure beim Verein »Herus«.
© wikipedia / gemeinfrei
© wikipedia / gemeinfrei
Johann Wilhelm (Rukeli) Trollmann was born on 27 December 1907 in Wilsche, near Gifhorn, and grew up with his eight siblings in the centre of Hanover. He took up boxing at an early age. On 9 June 1933, Trollmann won a title fight in the Bockbrauerei in the Kreuzberg district of Berlin to become the German light heavyweight champion. The German Boxing Association (Verband deutscher Faustkämpfer) rescinded his title just eight days later, citing “squalid behaviour”. It threatened Trollmann with the revocation of his boxing license if he persisted with his “prancing Gypsy-like” and “un-German” boxing style. In protest, Trollmann entered the ring for his next fight with his hair dyed blond and wearing white facial makeup – the caricature of an ‘Aryan’ boxer. A few months later, Trollmann’s boxing license was revoked. On 1 June 1935 he married his fiancée Olga Frieda Bilda, with whom he already had a two-month-old daughter, Rita, in the registry office of Berlin-Charlottenburg. He was subsequently imprisoned under the name Heinrich Trollmann for several months in the Rummelsberg custodial workhouse in Berlin. The director of the institution applied for Trollmann to be forcibly sterilized, to which the Hereditary Health Court consented. On 23 December 1935, this young man was forced to undergo an operation rendering him sterile. Trollmann divorced his wife in order to protect his family. At the outbreak of the Second World War in Autumn 1939, the Wehrmacht conscripted Trollmann as a soldier. He was later wounded on the Eastern Front. In October 1942, he was discharged from the army as a “Gypsy unworthy of bearing arms” and sent to the Neuengamme concentration camp near Hamburg. There, Rukeli Trollmann was forced to perform hard labour. The camp guards recognised him as a former champion boxer and forced him to take part in humiliating staged bouts with SS men. In early 1944 he was beaten to death in the Wittenberge satellite camp by a kapo who had earlier challenged Trollmann to a fight and lost. He was 36 years old. In 2003, Johann Wilhelm Rukeli Trollmann had his champion’s title posthumously restored.
Erna Unku Lauenburger
Erna (Unku) Lauenburger was born on 4 March 1920 in the Reinickendorf district of Berlin. It was there that she met the writer Grete Weiskopf in the late 1920s. Weiskopf published the novel Ede and Unku, based on events from Erna Lauenburger’s life, under the pen name Alex Wedding in 1931. The book, about a friendship between a Sinti woman and a young working-class German man, was a popular success, both at the time and later in East Germany. In the 1930s, the Lauenburger family moved to Magdeburg. There, the photojournalist Hanns Weltzel, who spoke Romani, the language of the Sinti, took a series of photographs of their daily life.
Erna Lauenburger married Otto Schmidt from Luckenwalde. They lived – together with Erna’s mother and grandmother – in the ‘Gypsy camp’ at Holzweg in Magdeburg. Schmidt was arrested on 13 June 1938 during the “Reich anti-indolence campaign” and transported to the Buchenwald concentration camp where he was murdered on 20 November 1942. While in Sachsenhausen he was forced to take part in typhus experiments by medical staff of the Robert Koch Institute.
On 25 August 1938, Schmidt and Lauenburger’s daughter Marie was born. On 12 April 1939 Erna Lauenburger was summoned by the Criminal Police, questioned, and her photograph and fingerprints taken. At the outbreak of the war in 1939, the Holzweg camp came under the control of the SS. In July 1941, Robert Ritter from the “Research Centre for Racial Hygiene” in Berlin examined Erna Lauenburger and classified her in his ‘expert statement’ as a “mixed-race Gypsy (+)”. In February 1943 Ritter returned to the camp to update his files on the Sinti for the upcoming deportation. On 1 March 1943 the “Gypsy camp” in Magdeburg was liquidated by the police and Gestapo. All 160 Sinti, among them 125 children, were sent to the “Gypsy family camp” in Auschwitz-Birkenau. Erna Lauenburger was given the inmate number Z 633, her daughter Marie Z 635. A few weeks later, Erna Lauenburger died aged 24. On 27 January 2011, a street in the Friedrichshain district of Berlin was named after ‘Ede and Unku’.
Memorial to the Sinti and Roma of Europe murdered under National Socialism
The national memorial to the Sinti and Roma victims of National Socialism in Europe commemorates up to half a million people who were killed for being “Gypsies” in the years 1939 to 1945.
Memorial to the Sinti and Roma of Europe murdered under National Socialism.
© Memorial Foundation, Photo: Marko Priske
© Memorial Foundation, Photo: Marko Priske
Even in post-war Germany, Sinti and Roma experienced considerable legal discrimination and social exclusion. For a long time they were denied compensation as survivors of racial persecution. This necessitated a painful and gruelling campaign for recognition that lasted decades. In many cases, personal police files from the period of the Third Reich served as grounds for denying compensation. Following a long civil rights struggle by members of the Sinti and Roma communities, the West German authorities officially recognised the crime as one of genocide. In the context of the debate in the 1990s around the creation of a national monument to the murdered Jews of Europe, calls were also made for a monument to commemorate the murdered Sinti and Roma, especially from members of the minority community itself. In 1992 the German federal government expressed, for the first time, its intention to create such a memorial. In 1994, the Berlin senate proposed a location next to the Reichstag building at the edge of Tiergarten park in Berlin. On 20 December 2007, the upper house of the German parliament, the Bundesrat, approved the building of a monument designed by the Israeli artist Dani Karavan. Construction began in 2008, and the monument was finally unveiled on 24 October 2012.
It consists of a pool of water with a single flower that is replaced every day. The border of the pool is inscribed with the poem Auschwitz by the Italian Roma poet Santino Spinelli. On stone slabs that encircle the pool are written the names of the places where the genocide took place. A specially composed violin piece by Romeo Franz, entitled Mare Manuschenge, plays continually over loudspeakers. The site also includes a series of panels chronicling the events of the genocide. The memorial is maintained by the Foundation Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.
Chronology at the memorial
During the period of the Third Reich, from 1933 to 1945, hundreds of thousands of people were persecuted as ‘Gypsies’ in Germany and other European countries. Most of them identified as belonging to a particular ethnocultural group, such as Sinti, Roma, Lalleri, Lowara, or Manusch. The largest of these groups were the Sinti and Roma. The aim of the Nazi state and its racist ideology was the total destruction of this ethnic minority. Children, women and men were murdered in their home towns or in ghettos, concentration and extermination camps. Members of the Yenish and other endemic itinerant communities were also persecuted and victimised.
Sinti and Roma people suffer discrimination and are increasingly denied basic rights and excluded from society. This is followed by the imprisonment of individual Sinti and Roma in concentration camps and, from 1934, by the start of a compulsory sterilization programme.
In several German cities Sinti and Roma people are forced to live in police-run camps. In Berlin, hundreds of people are confined to one such camp in the Marzahn district two weeks before the opening of the Olympic Games. These camps serve to concentrate, detain, gather information and funnel people into slave labour.
In January 1936, on foot of the 1935 Nuremberg Race Laws, the Minister of the Interior Wilhelm Frick decrees that “All other races are to be classified as ‘foreign races’. In Europe, that typically means, in addition to the Jews, the Gypsies.” This forms the basis for a special legal provision mandating further racist discrimination. This includes the banning of mixed marriages, and exclusion from the professions and the army.
Over 2,000 Sinti and Roma from Germany and Austria, among them children above the age of 12, are abducted and imprisoned in Dachau, Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen, Ravensbrück, Mauthausen, and other concentrations camps between 1933 and 1939. On the orders of the Head of the SS and all German police Heinrich Himmler, a new section of the Criminal Police is created to gather information and coordinate the persecution of Sinti and Roma. In December, Himmler issues a decree “to tackle the Gypsy Question based on the fundamental nature of this race”. Its aim is the “final solution of the Gypsy Question”. A “Research Centre for Racial Hygiene” is given the task of gathering information. By the end of the war, it will have issued nearly 24,000 “expert opinions”, which provide the principal basis for the deportations to extermination camps.
At the outbreak of the Second World War, the Reichssicherheitshauptamt, the main organization responsible for the genocide, begins planning the deportation of all persons classified as “Gypsies”. To prepare for the deportations, all of those targeted are ordered “not to leave their home or current place of residence until further notice”.
On Himmler’s orders, the deportation of entire families to occupied Poland begins: “The first transport of 2,500 Gypsies to the General Governorate [German-occupied Poland] will begin in mid-May.” In camps and later in ghettos, they are forced to perform slave labour under brutal conditions. In many places Sinti and Roma are forced to carry special identification papers or wear armbands with the letter Z (for Zigeuner).
In the occupied Soviet Union and other German-controlled territories of eastern and southern Europe, systematic mass executions of Roma begin. One Einsatzgruppe of the Security Police and the SS Security Service reports as follows from Crimea: “The Gypsy question has been resolved”. Approximately 5,000 Roma and Sinti are deported from Burgenland in Austria to the Łódź ghetto in occupied Poland, and more than 600 of them perish there. The survivors are murdered in January 1942 in gas-chamber trucks at the Chełmno extermination camp.
Following a meeting with Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels on the handover of criminal suspects to the SS, Justice Minister Otto Georg Thierack notes that “Jews and Gypsies should simply be exterminated. The best way is to work them to death.”
Following a decree from Heinrich Himmler on 16 December 1942, the deportation of around 23,000 Sinti and Roma from all parts of Europe begins in February of the following year. Their destination is a section of Auschwitz-Birkenau designated by the SS as the ‘Gypsy Camp’. In the space of just a few months most die of hunger or disease, or are beaten to death by the SS guards. Numerous children become victims of experiments conducted by SS camp doctor Josef Mengele.
On 16 May many of the remaining 6,000 prisoners in the ‘Gypsy camp’ at Auschwitz rise up in resistance to their impending murder. Roughly half of them are sent as slave labourers to other concentration camps. The remaining survivors – mostly women, children and older people – are murdered in the gas chambers during the night of 2–3 August.
It will never be possible to determine the exact number of victims of the Nazi genocide of ‘Gypsies’. The upper estimates are of 500,000 men women and children.
Text: Foundation Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe
‚Red‘ Berlin? The NSDAP and SA before 1933
In 1933, Berlin was still a ‘young’ city. In 1920, seven towns, 59 country parishes and 27 rural districts were merged with Berlin, almost doubling its population and creating the third most populous city in the world. Greater Berlin was divided into 20 districts with very different political cultures and historical legacies. From a political perspective, Berlin was also extremely diverse and was to remain as such even into the Nazi period.
Nevertheless, the NSDAP and especially its district administrator for Berlin (Gauleiter) Joseph Goebbels never tired of pushing the myth of ‘red Berlin’: a communist stronghold that the Nazi party and its paramilitary wing, the SA, were called on to conquer. This strategy was aimed at smoothing over the constant tensions between the Party and its armed wing that had brought it to the brink of collapse several times. This struggle against the purported leftist hegemony provided a common cause right up to 1945.
SA propaganda march in the centre of the Spandau district, 1932
© Bundesarchiv, B 145 Bild-P049500/CC-BY-SA
© Bundesarchiv, B 145 Bild-P049500/CC-BY-SA
Meeting of the leadership of the German monarchist/nationalist group “Deutschbanner Schwarz Weiß Rot – Front der Kaiserlichen” in the Kriegervereinshaus in Berlin’s Chausseestrasse in 1931. This extreme right-wing association was just one of the many anti-democratic organisations operating during the Weimar Republic.
© bpk
© bpk
But how ‘red’ was Berlin really? What would a worker in Wedding have in common with an army officer in Steglitz? What could have connected an actress in Charlottenburg with a tram conductor from Lichtenberg? And what political views would the owner of a Köpenick villa share with a telephone operator in Siemensstadt, Spandau? The idea of ‘red Berlin’ was little more than a myth. In the well-to-do West and South West of the city, the NSDAP and SA could count on a large section of the population for support. They just had to mobilise it. In Steglitz and Zehlendorf, the conservative and anti-democratic German National People’s Party (Deutschnationale Volkspartei – DNVP) had been the clear winner of local elections in 1925 and 1929. In Steglitz, the NSDAP already had over 10 percent of the votes during elections in 1929. Spandau and Neukölln, on the other hand, were Social Democratic strongholds, while the Communists were in the lead in Wedding. From 1921 onwards, the Social Democrats (SPD) had always managed to win the city council elections, although never decisively: the Communists (KPD) and the Nationalists (DNVP) were always close behind.
The Communist Party (KPD) demonstrated on the “Workers’ Day of Action” on 1 May 1929 under the banner “Clear the streets! Red Wedding is coming!” (Wedding is a district of Berlin)
© bpk
© bpk
Berlin was nowhere near as ‘red’ as Nazi propagandists liked to paint it. It just wasn’t anywhere near as ‘brown’ (the colour symbolising the far right) as they wanted. During the parliamentary elections of 5 March 1933, the NSDAP was also the strongest party in Berlin, but with almost 10 percent less of the vote than the national average.
Author: Bjoern Weigel
A view of Hedemannstrasse in Kreuzberg, Berlin: The building on the left is the NSDAP’s district office for Berlin. At the front right are the editorial offices of Der Angriff, the propaganda publication run by Joseph Goebbels
Photo: Willy Römer © bpk/Kunstbibliothek, SMB, Photothek Willy Römer
Photo: Willy Römer © bpk/Kunstbibliothek, SMB, Photothek Willy Römer
Berliners were forced to queue for fresh water at pumps on the city streets. Image: Abraham Pisarek, Berlin, June 1945
© Stiftung Stadtmuseum Berlin
© Stiftung Stadtmuseum Berlin
Berliners were forced to queue for fresh water at pumps on the city streets. Image: Abraham Pisarek, Berlin, June 1945
© Stiftung Stadtmuseum Berlin
© Stiftung Stadtmuseum Berlin
Berlin by foot and without power
In the spring of 1945, an ordinary journey from A to B meant traversing a devastated landscape with mountains of rubble, collapsed buildings and craters everywhere. Most bridges had been blown up or were impassable. If you were lucky, an old barge would be offering a ferry service. The tram, once Berlin’s most important mode of transport, was out of action because the overhead wires had long been requisitioned as raw materials for a senseless war. Finding and getting on a bus was like winning the lottery, since only eighteen vehicles had survived the war. The metro system was crippled by bombed tracks and collapsed tunnels. On the final day of the war, the SS had blown up the North-South rail tunnel directly under Landwehr Canal. Getting from A to B usually meant walking, no matter how far, no matter the weather.
The collapse of Warschauer Brücke in the district of Friedrichshain cut both long distance and urban rail links. Image: Timofei Melnik, late April 1945
© Deutsch-Russisches Museum Berlin-Karlshorst, Sammlung Timofej Melnik
© Deutsch-Russisches Museum Berlin-Karlshorst, Sammlung Timofej Melnik
But all the other important infrastructure of everyday life had also collapsed: power and gas supplies were largely non-existent, water was often only available after waiting in long queues at the public street pumps. Post and telecommunication services were down, not to mention refuse collection. This situation was not only due to wartime destruction, however: shortly after the taking of Berlin, the Soviet occupation forces began dismantling the remaining functioning industrial and public utility plants. They were being taken as reparations for the devastation caused in the Soviet Union by German soldiers. However, their transportation to the Soviet Union often fell afoul of the damaged transport infrastructure …
Anti-fascist propaganda on the wreckage of a German tank, 1945/1946: “Guns before butter was the fascists’ slogan!”. © Bildarchiv Pisarek / akg-image
Anti-fascist propaganda on the wreckage of a German tank, 1945/1946: “Guns before butter was the fascists’ slogan!”. © Bildarchiv Pisarek / akg-image
From Liberation to the End of the War
World War II ended in Europe on 8 May 1945. In Asia, it went on until 2 September. In the interim, hundreds of thousands more soldiers fell, and civilians were killed, and two atomic bombs were dropped.
At the peak of their power, Nazi Germany and its European allies had occupied almost all of Europe and much of North Africa. Germany’s ally in Asia was Japan, which had pursued a policy of rigorous expansion since before the Second World War. During the war, many countries of the Far East – especially China and Korea – suffered under Japanese occupation. Like the German-occupied countries in Europe, they were treated with varying degrees of brutality and occupied for different lengths of time.
A twofold threat: Germany and Japan grasp for power – a poster from 1944. © picture alliance/Photo12
This shows the global dimensions of the Second World War. It also points to the key importance of the end of the war in the global history of the 20th century. It did not end at once. Countries were liberated – that is, hostilities ceased, and occupation stopped – at different times, some long before Germany capitulated.
But it is Germany’s capitulation on 8 May 1945 that made a global new start possible. It should not be confused with the myth of the ‘zero hour’. That never occurred. There were far too persistent continuities – both in authority and in society – to be able to wipe the slate clean. But the course towards a new order in Europe and the world, which led to the Cold War – confrontation between the Eastern and Western blocs – as well as to the de-colonization of large parts of Africa and the Middle East, was set with the end of World War II.
Author: Bjoern Weigel
The Capitulations – From Berlin to Berlin
In the early morning of 2 May 1945, after twelve days of intense street fighting, General Helmuth Weidling gave his forces in Berlin the long-overdue order to surrender. Two days earlier, the German Army was still trying to negotiate in the face of total defeat. In the end, they were forced by the overwhelming military superiority of the Red Army to capitulate. This pattern was repeated elsewhere until the final official surrender of all German forces on 8 May in Berlin-Karlshorst brought the war in Europe to an end.
Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel signing the German capitulation, Berlin-Karlshorst, 8–9 May 1945
© Timofej Melnik / Museum Berlin-Karlshorst
© Timofej Melnik / Museum Berlin-Karlshorst
Adolf Hitler evaded capture and accountability by committing suicide on 30 April. His immediate successor, Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz, initially continued his predecessor’s policy of fighting on all fronts. Only when British troops closed in on his headquarters near Flensburg did he begin to negotiate. In Lüneburg, he came to an agreement with the British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery to cease all hostilities in Northwest Germany from 5 May.
This partial capitulation created a diplomatic problem. The Allies had agreed in 1943 on the unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany as their common war aim. However, the leadership of the German Army resisted surrender for as long as militarily possible. And once it was too late to resist further, they tried to surrender only to the western Allies – not to the Red Army. For days they negotiated in Reims, the headquarters of the western Allied forces. In the early morning of 7 May, General Dwight Eisenhower, the supreme commander of the western Allies, forced the Wehrmacht generals to accept total surrender. He also insisted that this act of capitulation be repeated at the Soviet headquarters. It was thus that the repeat performance was enacted in Berlin-Karlshorst, where the supreme Soviet commander Georgy Zhukov had his headquarters.
Numerous historians have interpreted this gesture as a favour to Joseph Stalin. But it was much more than that. In Karlshorst much diplomatic finesse went into the creation and signing of a document that concluded the Second World War. It was consciously intended to regulate only the military aspects of the ceasefire. However, since the subsequent conference of the Allied Powers in Potsdam in the summer of 1945 failed to produce a peace treaty, the Karlshorst terms remained until 1990 the only legally binding document governing Germany’s surrender and occupation.
Author: Jörg Morré / German-Russian Museum Berlin-Karlshorst
Major Wilhelm Oxenius, Colonel-General Alfred Jodl and Admiral Hans-Georg von Friedeburg (left to right) signing the unconditional surrender of the Wehrmacht in Reims on 7 May 1945.
© picture alliance dpa
© picture alliance dpa
Violence before and after the capitulation
The Nazi regime’s propaganda machine successfully portrayed the final months of the war as a battle for all or nothing. “Victory or Bolshevism” was one of the many slogans with which the German people were bombarded. In a last ditch effort to turn the tide of the war, old men were conscripted into the Volkssturm militia, young boys from the Hitler Youth into the Werewolf partisan movement, and school children into anti-aircraft units. Anything seemed preferable to surrendering to the Red Army. Those who sought to escape this senseless slaughter were labelled traitors and deserters. Soldiers daring to openly question their orders to fight to the death were charged with defeatism – a crime for which the death penalty was imposed and for which soldiers were executed even in the final days of the war. The regime’s instruments of repression – among them the SS and Gestapo – went about their business as usual.
War crimes: this plaque marks the site where, shortly before the end of the war, a German soldier was hanged by “brutish Nazi beasts”, opposite Steglitz Town Hall, 15 June 1945.
© ullstein bild – ullstein bild
© ullstein bild – ullstein bild
Concentration camp prisoners were sent westwards on so-called “death marches”, costing the lives of thousands. Political prisoners were shot in their cells shortly before the arrival of the Red Army – as occurred on 22-23 April at the prison on Lehrter Straße and on 28 April at the Gestapo prison on Prinz-Albrecht-Straße (now Niederkirchnerstraße).
But the end of the war did not bring about an immediate end to the violence. The victors took what they wanted: alcohol, valuables, bicycles and more. Tens of thousands of women in and around Berlin were raped by Soviet soldiers. Any resistance was broken by force of arms. Only occasionally did officers intervene to prevent these assaults. The Soviet secret police, tasked with hunting down the “fascists”, began to carry out arrests in early May. Makeshift prisons – the dreaded “GPU cellars” – were set up in cellars in each of Berlin’s boroughs. Special camps were established in Hohenschönhausen and in Oranienburg north of Berlin. While the Soviet victors claimed that these arrests were part of the Allies’ denazification initiative, it was evident to observers that their overriding goals were to purge society of politically undesirable individuals and to install a new system.
Author: Jörg Morré / German-Russian Museum Berlin-Karlshorst
A barbed wire fence outside the Soviet internment camp at Sachsenhausen in Oranienburg, 1949
© ullstein bild – Perlia
© ullstein bild – Perlia
Unwanted, suspected, persecuted: In May 1933, Nazi students ransacked the library of the Institute for the Science of Sexuality established by Magnus Hirschfeld, a prominent advocate of liberal attitudes towards homosexuality. © ullstein bild – ullstein bild
Unwanted, suspected, persecuted: In May 1933, Nazi students ransacked the library of the Institute for the Science of Sexuality established by Magnus Hirschfeld, a prominent advocate of liberal attitudes towards homosexuality. © ullstein bild – ullstein bild
Persecuted and Forgotten
In 1935, the National Socialist regime decreed the extensive criminalisation of male homosexuality. The existing Paragraph 175 of the German Criminal Code of 1872 was tightened and expanded. By 1945 there were over 50,000 convictions. Several thousand homosexual persons were sent to concentration camps. They were forced to wear a pink triangle on their clothes for identification. Many of them died of hunger or disease, abuse or deliberate murder. The Nazis utterly destroyed the gay and lesbian world.
The Nazi regime developed a classification system to manage the prisoners held in concentration camps. Homosexuals had to wear a pink triangular badge. © United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, public domain
Gay victims of National Socialism were long excluded from the culture of remembrance in both German post-war states. In fact, the legal persecution of homosexuality continued for decades. In West Germany, Paragraph 175 remained in force in its revised form until 1969. It was not until 17 May 2002 that the German Bundestag decided to legally rehabilitate the homosexual victims of the Nazi regime. In many parts of the world, homosexuality remains punishable by law.
Erwin Keferstein
In Berlin, late 1920s. © Privat
Erwin Keferstein was born on 4 June 1915 in Stettin. At the age of 15 he left secondary school and started an apprenticeship with a dressmaker. For three years, he studied tailoring in the fashion salons of Falk and Lobel and completed his training with a Good grade. After his first sexual encounters with other boys were punished by his father with strict house arrest, Erwin Keferstein decided to move to Berlin. He earned his living by working independently preparing fashion drawings, among other things.
On 1 December 1934, he was arrested during a raid on a gay bar in Berlin. During his subsequent interrogation, he revealed to the Gestapo the names of the men with whom he had sexual contact. In January 1935, he was taken to the Lichtenburg concentration camp near Torgau and from there to the Columbia-Haus concentration camp at Tempelhofer Feld in Berlin. It was not until 3 February 1937 that he was found guilty of a violation of the anti-homosexual Paragraph 175 legislation. As the grounds for his arrest occurred more than two years in the past, his sentence was considered to have been served and he was released.
In 1942, Erwin Keferstein was threatened with the same charges again. It is possible that he was helped by his father’s contacts, ensuring he was sent to the front as a soldier. He was shot during an attack by partisans near Leningrad on 17 December 1943.
Elsa Conrad
Elsa Rosenberg was born on 9 May 1887 in Berlin. She completed a commercial apprenticeship and married the waiter Wilhelm Conrad in 1910; they were divorced in 1931. Around 1927, Elsa Conrad and her friend Amalie Rothaug opened the Monbijou des Westens, a fashionable club frequented by intellectuals and artists which was considered the “most interesting association of lesbian women in Berlin” at the end of the 1920s.
The Monbijou was closed at the beginning of March 1933, shortly after the National Socialists seized power, on the basis of a decree targeting gay clubs and meeting places. After being denounced, Elsa Conrad was arrested on 5 October 1935 and sentenced to one year and three months at Berlin’s Barnimstrasse and Kantstrasse women’s prisons for allegedly defaming the party and the state. Ten days after her release, she was taken to Moringen women’s concentration camp near Göttingen on 14 January 1937, in part because she had “lesbian tendencies” and had been in a relationship with a certain Bertha Stenzel for 14 years. In February 1938, Elsa Conrad was discharged sick, on condition that she emigrate in the same year. She travelled to Tanzania by ship and lived in Kenya from 1943 onwards. Seriously ill and destitute, she returned to West Germany in 1961 and died on 19 February 1963 in Hanau.
The memorial
In 1992, the first campaigns for a national memorial to persecuted homosexuals began in connection with the discussion about the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. On 3 May 2001, the “Commemorate the Homosexual Victims of Nazism” initiative and the Lesbian and Gay Federation in Germany (LSVD) launched a joint campaign.
Memorial to the Persecuted Homosexuals under National Socialism in Berlin-Tiergarten.
Photo: Marko Priske © Stiftung Denkmal
Photo: Marko Priske © Stiftung Denkmal
On 12 December 2003, the German Bundestag decided to build the memorial. According to the parliament, the aim of the memorial is to:
- honour the persecuted and murdered victims
- keep the memory of injustice alive
- create a lasting symbol against intolerance, hostility, and the exclusion of the LGBT community.
The winners of the artistic competition were Michael Elmgreen (Denmark) and Ingar Dragset (Norway). The memorial was opened to the public on 27 May 2008. It consists of a concrete stele displaying a short film of a same-sex kissing scene. The film, which has been shown since 2018, was created by Israeli artist Yael Bartana. The site is cared for by the Foundation Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.
Text: Foundation Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe
One of the notorious “gray buses” outside the Hartheim Euthanasia Centre in Austria, 1940. The buses were used to transport ill and disabled persons to the euthanasia killing centre.
© Oberösterreichisches Landesarchiv (OÖLA), LG Linz, Sondergerichte, Vg 8 Vr 2407/46
© Oberösterreichisches Landesarchiv (OÖLA), LG Linz, Sondergerichte, Vg 8 Vr 2407/46
One of the notorious “gray buses” outside the Hartheim Euthanasia Centre in Austria, 1940. The buses were used to transport ill and disabled persons to the euthanasia killing centre.
© Oberösterreichisches Landesarchiv (OÖLA), LG Linz, Sondergerichte, Vg 8 Vr 2407/46
© Oberösterreichisches Landesarchiv (OÖLA), LG Linz, Sondergerichte, Vg 8 Vr 2407/46
“Aktion T4” and “Euthanasia”
After the German invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939, Adolf Hitler issued a decree in October ordering the extermination of “life unworthy of life” in the German Reich. It was dated back to the beginning of the war. Against the backdrop of the war abroad, a domestic war was unleashed on the weak and supposed “enemies of the common good”. The murder of tens of thousands of patients in sanatoriums and care facilities, as well as of “racially” and socially undesirable individuals, was the first systematic mass crime of the National Socialist regime. It is considered the prelude to the extermination of European Jews.
Mass murder by decree: Adolf Hitler backdated his order to Philipp Bouhler (Chief of the Chancellery of the Führer of the NSDAP) and the doctor Karl Brandt, authorizing the involuntary euthanasia programme to 1 September 1939, the beginning of the Second World.
© ullstein bild – Süddeutsche Zeitung Photo / Scherl
© ullstein bild – Süddeutsche Zeitung Photo / Scherl
The “euthanasia” murder programme was developed by an agency of the “Führer’s Chancellery” with over 60 staff. Its planning and administration centre was located first in the Columbus Haus building on Potsdamer Platz; from April 1940, it moved to Tiergartenstrasse 4, the source of its codename “Aktion T4”. From here, doctors and administrative staff organised the registration and selection of patients, as well as their transportation and murder at six specially designed extermination locations across the German Reich. Up to 1941, doctors killed over 70,000 people. By 1945, another 90,000 were killed via withdrawal of food, neglect, or medication. The total number of victims in German-occupied Europe was around 300,000. The Philharmonie, inaugurated in 1963 and built by Hans Scharoun (1893–1972), now stands on the site of of Villa Tiergartenstrasse 4 and its neighbouring houses.
Visitors to the exhibition “Erbgesund-Erbkrank” (Hereditarily Healthy—Hereditarily Diseased) at Invalidenstrasse 138 in Berlin 1934. As early as 1934 the Nazi regime organized propaganda exhibitions that prepared the ground for the programme of mass murder launched in 1939 in the shadow of World War II.
© ullstein bild – Süddeutsche Zeitung Photo / Scherl
© ullstein bild – Süddeutsche Zeitung Photo / Scherl
Otto Hampel
Otto Hampel was born in Breslau, Silesia in 1895. He attended elementary school and trained as a typesetter. In 1915 he was drafted into military service. He was decorated multiple times for his conduct at the front. After the First World War, Otto Hampel worked as a sales representative in Berlin. During his time in Berlin, he was sentenced multiple times to short prison terms for burglary, theft, and other offences. In the 1930s, he was treated for a nervous disorder at the Berlin-Wittenau sanatorium and – despite an improvement – finally quit his job. After Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, Hampel joined the NSDAP and for a short time he was active as a political leader.
In 1937, the Berlin district court sentenced him to prison for several months ‘for continued homosexual acts’ and ordered his admission to a sanatorium. After serving his sentence at Plötzensee prison, Otto Hampel was admitted to Berlin-Buch sanatorium. His petitions for release were denied “despite impeccable conduct”. On 30 March 1940, doctors transferred Hampel to the Brandenburg Euthanasia Centre where he was murdered with the use of carbon monoxide.
Medical records from Berlin-Buch sanatorium
Alma P.
Alma P. grew up as the daughter of a Jewish livestock trader in Göritz an der Oder. She attended elementary school, and then a secondary school for girls. During the First World War, she fell ill with dyspepsia, but despite severe complaints she trained in infant care and worked part-time as a teacher. After suffering acute gastric bleeding, Alma P. first began to express delusional ideas in 1931. She believed she was being “poisoned, hypnotized and controlled”. Insulin treatment at the East Brandenburg sanatorium in Landsberg an der Warthe had to be stopped due to her weakened condition. In 1932, she was provisionally released to the care of her parents.
Two years later, she had to be readmitted due to changes to her mental state. She was sterilized by the state against her will and remained in hospital treatment with several interruptions until the summer of 1940. During “Aktion T4”, doctors moved Alma P. from Landsberg to a collection point set up at the Berlin-Buch sanatorium in July 1940 as part of a “special campaign” targeted at Jewish patients. Soon afterwards she was murdered at the Brandenburg Euthanasia Centre.
Medical records from Berlin-Buch sanatorium
Remembrance and Commemoration
Only a few of the perpetrators and accomplices of the “euthanasia” murders committed under the Nazi regime were brought to justice. Many of the doctors involved in the crimes continued to work after the end of the Second World War. Both East German and West German authorities refused to recognize the victims. It was not until the 1980s that memorial sites and signs of commemoration were put up at the former extermination centres and other locations.
Open-air exhibition on the Memorial and Information Point for the Victims of National Socialist “Euthanasia” Killings.
Photo: Marko Priske © Memorial Foundation
Photo: Marko Priske © Memorial Foundation
A memorial plaque has been on display at the site of the planning centre at Tiergartenstrasse 4 since 1989. In 2007, a round table was established with the stated mission of considering a redesign of the T4 memorial location. As a result of this initiative, the temporary memorial to the grey buses by Horst Hoheisel and Andreas Knitz was placed in front of the Philharmonie in 2008. In November 2011, the German Bundestag decided to build a memorial for the victims of the “euthanasia” murders at the historic site of the planning centre. The winning design was developed by architect Ursula Wilms, artist Nikolaus Koliusis and landscape architect Heinz W. Hallmann. The memorial site was opened to the public on 2 September 2014. It is cared for by the Foundation Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.
Text: Foundation Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe
A Jewish family carries the Star of David as a sign of their Jewish descent amidst other passers-by on a street. In Germany, the wearing of the Star of David had become obligatory for all Jews over the age of six by a police regulation that came into force on 19 September 1941. The public stigmatisation by the palm-sized yellow star signalled the beginning of the scheduled deportation to the death camps.
© ullstein bild
© ullstein bild
A Jewish family carries the Star of David as a sign of their Jewish descent amidst other passers-by on a street. In Germany, the wearing of the Star of David had become obligatory for all Jews over the age of six by a police regulation that came into force on 19 September 1941. The public stigmatisation by the palm-sized yellow star signalled the beginning of the scheduled deportation to the death camps.
© ullstein bild
© ullstein bild
From Prejudice to Genocide – The Persecution of Jews in Berlin
Anti-Semitism did not originate in 1933. But the Nazis knew how to use widespread anti-Semitic stereotypes for their own purposes. With Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, anti-Semitism became state doctrine.
A moving van in 1930. The company operating this van – A. Schäfer Spedition & Möbeltransport – was classified as a ‘Jewish enterprise’ and its owners were forced to sell the business to a non-Jew in 1939. It is not known whether the company was involved in the deportation of Jews from Berlin. Some freight forwarders in Berlin reaped considerable profits from the deportations.
© ullstein bild – ullstein bild
© ullstein bild – ullstein bild
Discriminatory measures against the Jewish population started immediately. In Berlin, with by far the largest Jewish community in Germany at around 160,000 people, the Nazi Party staged a so-called boycott on 1 April 1933: Members of the SA stood outside the premises of Jewish businesses, lawyers’ offices, and medical practices. They wanted to prevent customers and clients from entering. What had been planned as a disciplined propaganda stunt was, in fact, often characterised by violence.
From that point, the Nazis tried to conceal the increasing disenfranchisement and violence against the Jewish population from the foreign press, which was strongly represented in Berlin. The German press had already been muzzled. The legal aspect of that disenfranchisement, embodied in the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, was accompanied by pogrom-like riots in the same year. These were as little discussed in the press as the systematic expulsion of Jewish tenants from their homes from 1937 onwards or the pogrom of June 1938. However, the public acts of violence in the November pogroms of 1938 could not be concealed. The shocked international public was presented with an official German propaganda fairy tale about a “spontaneous act of public rage”. But the day-long pogroms had been orchestrated at the highest levels: The pogroms, euphemistically known as “Kristallnacht” (“Night of Broken Glass”) were a completely new escalation in the violence perpetrated against the Jewish population and an unprecedented and predatory act of theft carried out by neighbours they had previously considered harmless.
A series of bans were then issued in Berlin, sometimes by the police, sometimes by the city administration or by individual officials. As a result of the various measures adopted against them since 1933, Jewish people in Berlin were increasingly deprived of any future prospects and, above all, of their economic livelihoods. The deportations began in 1941: Around 55,000 people were transported to and murdered in extermination camps, mainly in Auschwitz.
Author: Björn Weigel
Pictures of the Holocaust from Berlin
Berlin was the Third Reich’s window to the world. It was here that all major international news and photo agencies had their offices. From no other German city – with the possible exception of Nuremberg or Munich – were so many photos taken for international newspapers as in the Capital of the Reich.
The Nazis – in particular the Gauleiter of Berlin and newly appointed Minister for Public Information and Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels – frequently railed against what they termed the Lügenpresse, or ‘lying press’. At the same time, they tried to manipulate reporters to their own ends, for example by staging the so-called boycott of Jewish stores, medical and legal practices on 1 April 1933 in Berlin for the global public. On Leipziger Strasse and Kurfürstendamm, smiling SA men posted signs written in English as well as German.
When that approach failed to have the desired effect, Goebbels took steps to prevent photographs being taken of anti-Jewish activities, without explicitly forbidding this. Even embassy employees had cameras ripped from their hands as they tried to take pictures of the violence perpetrated against Jewish citizens. The Nazis were afraid that such images would quickly spread around the world through press and photo agencies. Very few images survive of the coordinated assaults on Jewish businesses that took place in Berlin in the summer of 1935. The two dozen or so surviving photos of the November 1938 Kristallnacht pogroms do not depict any scenes of violence. They show destroyed display windows but hide the accompanying scenes of SA men with iron bars and of Jews beaten and baited, in many cases to death. While there are some photos of the Jewish deportations from several smaller cities, there is not a single comparable image from Berlin; this, despite the fact that over 50,000 people were abducted in 184 separate transportation convoys.
Author: Christoph Kreutzmüller / Memorial and Educational Site House of the Wannsee Conference
The Holocaust Memorial
Since May 2005, the field of stelae that is the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe has been a key landmark – along with the Reichstag building and the Brandenburg Gate – in the centre of the German capital. Until 1945, the site, covering some 19,000 m², was part of the Minister Gardens. When the Berlin Wall was built in 1961, the Gardens fell into a stretch of the “death strip”.
Field of Stelae of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.
Photo: Marko Priske © Memorial Foundation.
Photo: Marko Priske © Memorial Foundation.
The initiative for the memorial was provided by a group of committed citizens around historian Eberhard Jäckel and writer Lea Rosh in what was then West Berlin. In the 1990s, while commentators were still hotly debating whether, how and for whom such a national monument should be built, two architectural competitions were held. On 25 June 1999, during one of the last parliamentary sessions in Bonn, the former West German capital, the German Bundestag ruled – after lively debate, by a cross-party majority – to have a Holocaust Memorial built according to a design by New York architect Peter Eisenman, supplemented by an information centre, and maintained by a newly founded federal foundation. With this memorial, Germany wishes to “honour the murdered victims, to keep alive the memory of these unimaginable events in German history, and to warn all future generations to never again infringe human rights, to always defend the democratic constitutional state, to uphold the equality of all people before the law, and to resist tyranny.”
On 10 May 2005, Germany’s national memorial to the victims of the Holocaust was opened to the public. Since then, the field of plinths has become an important sight and the information centre one of the most-visited exhibitions in Berlin. They are run by the special foundation Stiftung Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas.
Text: Foundation Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe
Entrance hall of the information center.
Photo: Marko Priske © Memorial Foundation
Photo: Marko Priske © Memorial Foundation
Soviet SU 152 self-propelled gun SU 152 in Oranienburger Strasse, Berlin-Mitte, end of April/beginning of May 1945.
Photo: Timofej Melnik © Museum Berlin-Karlshorst / Collection Timofej Melnik
Photo: Timofej Melnik © Museum Berlin-Karlshorst / Collection Timofej Melnik
Soviet SU 152 self-propelled gun SU 152 in Oranienburger Strasse, Berlin-Mitte, end of April/beginning of May 1945.
Photo: Timofej Melnik © Museum Berlin-Karlshorst / Collection Timofej Melnik
Photo: Timofej Melnik © Museum Berlin-Karlshorst / Collection Timofej Melnik
The Battle of Berlin
On 16 April 1945, the Red Army began its assault on Berlin. After taking the Seelow Heights on the Oder, it entered what was then the district of Weißensee on 21 April; it reached the city’s “Ring” S-Bahn line which surrounds Berlin’s central districts by 26 April. In the heavy street battles that followed, the soldiers fought their way further into the city centre. In parallel, the Red Army had encircled Berlin completely by 25 April. The war had long been lost for Germany, but the fighting continued on Adolf Hitler’s orders. In Halbe, south of Berlin, thousands of surrounded troops fought to the death up to 28 April. Right up until 29 April, the German Army attempted to break the siege.
Soviet trench mortar crew in action at U-Bahn Station Bülowstrasse, Berlin-Schöneberg, end of April 1945.
Photo: Timofej Melnik © Museum Berlin-Karlshorst / Collection Timofej Melnik
Photo: Timofej Melnik © Museum Berlin-Karlshorst / Collection Timofej Melnik
Only after Hitler’s suicide on April 30 did the German side show any willingness to negotiate. But Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels and Chief of Staff of the Army Hans Krebs were also unable to bring themselves to accept the unconditional surrender that the Red Army demanded. Both committed suicide on 1 May. Early in the morning of 2 May, General Helmuth Weidling, commander of German forces in Berlin, arrived at the Soviet headquarters in Berlin-Tempelhof. In an apartment at Schulenburgring 2, he issued the order to end the fighting.
The Battle of Berlin was part of a major offensive by the Red Army along the entire length of the front ranging from the Baltic Sea and Görlitz. Roughly two million Red Army soldiers faced one million German defenders, of whom one quarter were child-soldier “anti-aircraft auxiliaries”, older men of the conscripted Volkssturm militia, and reservists.
Berlin, which was also the most heavily bombarded German city with around 370 air raids, lay in ruins at the end of the war. 70 percent of the city centre was destroyed.
Author: Dr. Jörg Morré
Deutsch-Russisches Museum Berlin-Karlshorst
Fighting on Frankfurter Allee, Berlin-Friedrichshain, 28 April 1945.
Photo: Ivan Shagin © Museum Berlin-Karlshorst
Photo: Ivan Shagin © Museum Berlin-Karlshorst
Shall we dance? An organ grinder entertains a group of women as they take a break from clearing rubble in the Friedrichsgracht in Berlin-Mitte. Jungfernbrücke is visible in the background, as is the building housing the Reichsbank, which is now occupied by the Federal Foreign Office. Photographer unknown, probably June 1945.
© ullstein bild – Schirner
© ullstein bild – Schirner
Shall we dance? An organ grinder entertains a group of women as they take a break from clearing rubble in the Friedrichsgracht in Berlin-Mitte. Jungfernbrücke is visible in the background, as is the building housing the Reichsbank, which is now occupied by the Federal Foreign Office. Photographer unknown, probably June 1945.
© ullstein bild – Schirner
© ullstein bild – Schirner
Making art among the ruins
“Berlin is back – who would have thought that we could do it?” Brigitte Mira first performed this variation on the hit song “Berlin will always be Berlin!” on 1 June, and her optimism was dearly needed in light of the city’s widespread devastation.
A theatre in ruins: while the auditorium and stage of the Deutsche Theater suffered little damage during the war, the Kammerspiele in the adjacent building were severely damaged. Image: Eva Kemlein, May 1945
© Stiftung Stadtmuseum Berlin
Before WWII the area around Tauentzienstraße and Kurfürstendamm had been a bustling centre of high culture and light entertainment. Commandant Berzarin’s first order from 28 April 1945 reveals the importance afforded by the occupation forces to the restoration of Berlin’s cultural infrastructure: as the battle for the inner city raged, Berzarin authorised the re-opening of cinemas and theatres in the outlying districts and the staging of sporting events. The sense of normality instilled by the holding of cultural events and football games was a crucial step for the occupation forces. They offered the population both amusement and intellectual sustenance, but were also necessary to counteract years of vitriolic propaganda by the Nazi regime and enable the Soviets to exercise political power.
Steps were taken to revive Berlin’s arts and cultural sectors as quickly as possible: within a fortnight of the German surrender, Berzarin had gathered together the artists who would organise the restoration of Berlin’s intellectual life amid the ruins. By this time the first chamber concert had already taken place and public radio broadcasts had been restored. Films from the Soviet Union were screened at hastily repaired cinemas, dance halls and night clubs re-opened, and the first cabaret and revue shows hit the stages. On 27 May, the Renaissance Theater hosted the first dramatic performance of the post-war era. And July brought the opening of the first art exhibition, the Berlin Zoo and the harness racing track in Karlshorst.
But art was also a means of survival. Disabled veterans busked on the streets alongside organ grinders and other musicians. Like labourers employed in vital industries, artists, performers and creative intellectuals were granted special rationing privileges by the Soviet administration. But employment in the arts did not by necessity infer a democratic mind-set. In the case of many artists who had previously made their peace with the Nazi regime, the Soviet move to restore cultural life to the city was above all an opportunity to make a living under the Allied occupation.
The Battle of Berlin
On 16 April 1945, the Red Army began its assault on Berlin. After taking the Seelow Heights on the Oder, it entered what was then the district of Weißensee on 21 April; it reached the city’s “Ring” S-Bahn line which surrounds Berlin’s central districts by 26 April. In the heavy street battles that followed, the soldiers fought their way further into the city centre. In parallel, the Red Army had encircled Berlin completely by 25 April. The war had long been lost for Germany, but the fighting continued on Adolf Hitler’s orders. In Halbe, south of Berlin, thousands of surrounded troops fought to the death up to 28 April. Right up until 29 April, the German Army attempted to break the siege.
Soviet SU 152 self-propelled gun SU 152 in Oranienburger Strasse, Berlin-Mitte, end of April/beginning of May 1945.
Photo: Timofej Melnik © Museum Berlin-Karlshorst / Collection Timofej Melnik
Photo: Timofej Melnik © Museum Berlin-Karlshorst / Collection Timofej Melnik
Soviet trench mortar crew in action at U-Bahn Station Bülowstrasse, Berlin-Schöneberg, end of April 1945.
Photo: Timofej Melnik © Museum Berlin-Karlshorst / Collection Timofej Melnik
Photo: Timofej Melnik © Museum Berlin-Karlshorst / Collection Timofej Melnik
Only after Hitler’s suicide on April 30 did the German side show any willingness to negotiate. But Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels and Chief of Staff of the Army Hans Krebs were also unable to bring themselves to accept the unconditional surrender that the Red Army demanded. Both committed suicide on 1 May. Early in the morning of 2 May, General Helmuth Weidling, commander of German forces in Berlin, arrived at the Soviet headquarters in Berlin-Tempelhof. In an apartment at Schulenburgring 2, he issued the order to end the fighting.
The Battle of Berlin was part of a major offensive by the Red Army along the entire length of the front ranging from the Baltic Sea and Görlitz. Roughly two million Red Army soldiers faced one million German defenders, of whom one quarter were child-soldier “anti-aircraft auxiliaries”, older men of the conscripted Volkssturm militia, and reservists.
Berlin, which was also the most heavily bombarded German city with around 370 air raids, lay in ruins at the end of the war. 70 percent of the city centre was destroyed.
Fighting on Frankfurter Allee, Berlin-Friedrichshain, 28 April 1945.
Photo: Ivan Shagin © Museum Berlin-Karlshorst
Photo: Ivan Shagin © Museum Berlin-Karlshorst
Author: Jörg Morré / German-Russian Museum Berlin-Karlshorst
Berlin – The Headquarters of the Nazi Terror Regime
Until shortly before the end of the war, Berlin was the political, military and administrative power centre of the Nazi regime. Adolf Hitler and the Nazi elite had various headquarters here, though some also existed outside of the Reich capital. The head offices of the main SS and police institutions were located in Berlin. These included the secret police (Gestapo), the personal staff of SS leader Heinrich Himmler, the Security Service of the SS (SD), and the Criminal Police (Kripo). There were also various branch offices of the Gestapo, Kripo and SD at over thirty locations in Berlin, as well as at additional locations nearby.
Gestapo headquarters in Berlin, 1933.
The headquarters of the secret police was located, from 1933 onwards, in the former College of Decorative Arts (Kunstgewerbeschule) in Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse (since renamed Niederkirchnerstrasse). This was the nerve centre for all Gestapo activities throughout the Reich, as well as in German-occupied Europe. © Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-R97512
An aerial view of the former headquarters of the Secret State Police (Gestapo), 1945/46. The Gestapo took up its offices in a former school for arts and crafts on Prinz-Albrecht-Straße (later renamed Niederkirchnerstraße) in 1933. Operations across the entire Reich and occupied European territories were directed from here. © picture-alliance / akg-images
The former government district, where many of the headquarters of the ‘SS state’ once stood, is now the site of the Topography of Terror documentation and exhibition centre. Between 1933 and 1945, this was the centre of a complex network of Gestapo, Kripo and SD offices throughout the territory of the Reich and the European regions occupied by the German Army. From here, the SS state organised, together with other institutions, the genocide of Europe’s Jews and of the Sinti and Roma peoples. These offices were also central to controlling and terrorizing political opponents of the Nazi regime, other persecuted groups, and millions of foreign slave labourers.
Right up until the final weeks of the war, this state terror and the looting of victims’ possessions was largely initiated, coordinated and administered from Berlin. Right up until the end of the war, orders to kill various political opponents were issued from Gestapo HQ. The surviving Gestapo offices outside Berlin were even encouraged to continue mercilessly killing prisoners on their own initiative.
Just before the war ended, most of the highest ranking Nazi officials fled the capital. Most of the buildings belonging to the SS and Gestapo were damaged or destroyed in the war.
The heads of the SS and police at a meeting in Munich on 9 November 1939.
At centre Heinrich Himmler, Reichsführer-SS and Head of German Police, to the right Reinhard Heydrich, Head of the Security Police and the SD and Head of the Reichssicherheitshauptamtes, and Heinrich Müller, Head of the Gestapo. To the left of Himmler sits Arthur Nebe, Head of the Kriminalpolizei. © German Federal Archives, Image 183-R98680
Author: Andrea Riedle / Topography of Terror
Podcast “To Berlin and Beyond”
Take a walk through Berlin: Join experts, reporters, and prominent public figures as they visit locations across Berlin where the final days of the war played out. Each of the seven episodes tackles a different topic – from anti-fascism to moral courage – exploring past events and highlighting their relevance to us today. Learn more about the history behind both familiar and lesser-known sites, including the Reichstag and Alexanderplatz, but also the Olympic Stadium and the memorial at the site of the former concentration camp for Sinti and Roma in Berlin-Marzahn. Other locations include a tunnel in Berlin’s Tiergarten Park and the famous Kurfürstendamm boulevard.
New episodes will be released daily during the anniversary week on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and on this webpage. Hosted by Katja Weber of Radio Eins and Deutschlandfunk reporter Markus Dichmann. This podcast is available in German only.
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00:00
Podcast “To Berlin and Beyond”
Take a walk through Berlin: Join experts, reporters, and prominent public figures as they visit locations across Berlin where the final days of the war played out. Each of the seven episodes tackles a different topic – from anti-fascism to moral courage – exploring past events and highlighting their relevance to us today. Learn more about the history behind both familiar and lesser-known sites, including the Reichstag and Alexanderplatz, but also the Olympic Stadium and the memorial at the site of the former concentration camp for Sinti and Roma in Berlin-Marzahn. Other locations include a tunnel in Berlin’s Tiergarten Park and the famous Kurfürstendamm boulevard.
New episodes will be released daily during the anniversary week on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and on this webpage. Hosted by Katja Weber of Radio Eins and Deutschlandfunk reporter Markus Dichmann. This podcast is available in German only.
#06: Tunnel unter der Straße des 17. Juni & Siegessäule: Die Kapitulation
Protagonisten: Dietmar Arnold, Gründer und Vorsitzender des Berliner Unterwelten e.V. und Sascha Keil sowie Dr. Bjoern Weigel
© Melanie Sapina/Kulturprojekte
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Podcast “To Berlin and Beyond”
Take a walk through Berlin: Join experts, reporters, and prominent public figures as they visit locations across Berlin where the final days of the war played out. Each of the seven episodes tackles a different topic – from anti-fascism to moral courage – exploring past events and highlighting their relevance to us today. Learn more about the history behind both familiar and lesser-known sites, including the Reichstag and Alexanderplatz, but also the Olympic Stadium and the memorial at the site of the former concentration camp for Sinti and Roma in Berlin-Marzahn. Other locations include a tunnel in Berlin’s Tiergarten Park and the famous Kurfürstendamm boulevard.
New episodes will be released daily during the anniversary week on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and on this webpage. Hosted by Katja Weber of Radio Eins and Deutschlandfunk reporter Markus Dichmann. This podcast is available in German only.
#05: Alexanderplatz: Antifaschismus damals und heute
Protagonist: Kaspar Nürnberg, Geschäftsführer des Aktiven Museums Faschismus und Widerstand in Berlin
© Melanie Sapina/Kulturprojekte
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Podcast “To Berlin and Beyond”
Take a walk through Berlin: Join experts, reporters, and prominent public figures as they visit locations across Berlin where the final days of the war played out. Each of the seven episodes tackles a different topic – from anti-fascism to moral courage – exploring past events and highlighting their relevance to us today. Learn more about the history behind both familiar and lesser-known sites, including the Reichstag and Alexanderplatz, but also the Olympic Stadium and the memorial at the site of the former concentration camp for Sinti and Roma in Berlin-Marzahn. Other locations include a tunnel in Berlin’s Tiergarten Park and the famous Kurfürstendamm boulevard.
New episodes will be released daily during the anniversary week on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and on this webpage. Hosted by Katja Weber of Radio Eins and Deutschlandfunk reporter Markus Dichmann. This podcast is available in German only.
#04: Zwangslager Marzahn: Diskriminierung damals und heute
Protagonistin: Annegret Ehmann, Historikerin, wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin der Gedenkstätte Zwangslager Berlin-Marzahn e.V.
© Melanie Sapina/Kulturprojekte
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Podcast “To Berlin and Beyond”
Take a walk through Berlin: Join experts, reporters, and prominent public figures as they visit locations across Berlin where the final days of the war played out. Each of the seven episodes tackles a different topic – from anti-fascism to moral courage – exploring past events and highlighting their relevance to us today. Learn more about the history behind both familiar and lesser-known sites, including the Reichstag and Alexanderplatz, but also the Olympic Stadium and the memorial at the site of the former concentration camp for Sinti and Roma in Berlin-Marzahn. Other locations include a tunnel in Berlin’s Tiergarten Park and the famous Kurfürstendamm boulevard.
New episodes will be released daily during the anniversary week on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and on this webpage. Hosted by Katja Weber of Radio Eins and Deutschlandfunk reporter Markus Dichmann. This podcast is available in German only.
#03: Ku’damm & Gedächtniskirche: Mondänes Berlin als Zerr- und Vorbild
Protagonist*innen: Dr. Christoph Kreutzmüller, Historiker und Pädagoge, Gedenk- und Bildungsstätte Haus der Wannsee-Konferenz & Kathrin Oxen, Theologin, Pfarrerin an der Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche
© Melanie Sapina/Kulturprojekte
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Podcast “To Berlin and Beyond”
Take a walk through Berlin: Join experts, reporters, and prominent public figures as they visit locations across Berlin where the final days of the war played out. Each of the seven episodes tackles a different topic – from anti-fascism to moral courage – exploring past events and highlighting their relevance to us today. Learn more about the history behind both familiar and lesser-known sites, including the Reichstag and Alexanderplatz, but also the Olympic Stadium and the memorial at the site of the former concentration camp for Sinti and Roma in Berlin-Marzahn. Other locations include a tunnel in Berlin’s Tiergarten Park and the famous Kurfürstendamm boulevard.
New episodes will be released daily during the anniversary week on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and on this webpage. Hosted by Katja Weber of Radio Eins and Deutschlandfunk reporter Markus Dichmann. This podcast is available in German only.
#02: Olympiastadion: Sport und Politik, Gewalt und Polizei
Protagonist: Dr. Ralf Schäfer, Historiker mit Schwerpunkt Sport und Antisemitismus
© Melanie Sapina/Kulturprojekte
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Podcast cover “To Berlin and Beyond”
Photograph: © Deutsch-Russisches Museum Berlin-Karlshorst, Sammlung Timofej Melnik
Photograph: © Deutsch-Russisches Museum Berlin-Karlshorst, Sammlung Timofej Melnik
Podcast cover “To Berlin and Beyond”
Photograph: © Deutsch-Russisches Museum Berlin-Karlshorst, Sammlung Timofej Melnik
Photograph: © Deutsch-Russisches Museum Berlin-Karlshorst, Sammlung Timofej Melnik
Podcast “To Berlin and Beyond”
Take a walk through Berlin: Join experts, reporters, and prominent public figures as they visit locations across Berlin where the final days of the war played out. Each of the seven episodes tackles a different topic – from anti-fascism to moral courage – exploring past events and highlighting their relevance to us today. Learn more about the history behind both familiar and lesser-known sites, including the Reichstag and Alexanderplatz, but also the Olympic Stadium and the memorial at the site of the former concentration camp for Sinti and Roma in Berlin-Marzahn. Other locations include a tunnel in Berlin’s Tiergarten Park and the famous Kurfürstendamm boulevard.
New episodes will be released daily during the anniversary week on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and on this webpage. Hosted by Katja Weber of Radio Eins and Deutschlandfunk reporter Markus Dichmann. This podcast is available in German only.
# 1 – BRANDENBURGER TOR & REICHSTAG
Ende April 1945 rollten die Panzer der Roten Armee von beiden Seiten auf das Brandenburger Tor zu. Am späten Abend des 30. April wehte auf dem zerbombten Reichstag eine Rote Fahne – nur Stunden nach Hitlers Selbstmord im Führerbunker. Bis heute stehen das Brandenburger Tor und der Reichstag symbolisch für die Befreiung Europas vom Nationalsozialismus. Hier startet „Nach Berlin“ – der Podcast. Am Brandenburger Tor trifft Reporter Markus Dichmann den Historiker Bjoern Weigel, der die virtuelle Ausstellung „Nach Berlin“ der Kulturprojekte Berlin betreut. In einem Spaziergang zum Reichstag sprechen sie über die letzten Kriegstage, wie an solchen Orten Geschichte geschrieben und Symbole geschaffen werden, und wie eigentlich das berühmte Foto von den sowjetischen Soldaten entstanden ist, die die Rote Fahne auf dem Reichstag hissten. Außerdem hören wir von Kultursenator Klaus Lederer, was der 8. Mai für ihn bedeutet.
© Melanie Sapina/Kulturprojekte
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Forced Labour in Berlin 1938–1945
Forced labourers in Berlin were accommodated at about 3,000 different locations around the city. As well as military-style barracks and camps, these also included former schools, cinemas, theatres, and restaurants. These locations could be found on nearly every corner of the city – making them impossible for the inhabitants of Berlin to overlook.
Even before the start of World War II, the Nazi authorities had started using various Berlin demographics for forced labour: Jews, Sinti, Roma, and those identified as “anti-social”. In these cases, forced labour was a means of persecution and just a prelude to deportation to the concentration and extermination camps.
Verpflegung sowjetischer Zwangsarbeiterinnen im Durchgangslager Berlin-Wilhelmshagen, 12. Dezember 1942.
Foto: Gerhard Gronefeld © Deutsches Historisches Museum
Foto: Gerhard Gronefeld © Deutsches Historisches Museum
Zeichnung des polnischen Zwangsarbeiters Jerzy Bukowiecki: Flucht aus einem brennenden Splitterschutzgraben in Berlin-Köpenick, 1944.
© Dokumentationszentrum NS-Zwangsarbeit/Slg. Berliner Geschichtswerkstatt
© Dokumentationszentrum NS-Zwangsarbeit/Slg. Berliner Geschichtswerkstatt
Over the course of the war, an increasing number of people from occupied Europe were deported to Berlin as forced labourers. Around 500,000 men, women and children were used as forced labour: in the armaments industry, in small and medium-sized companies, for churches, the municipal and district authorities, and in private households.
Eastern European forced labourers were especially poorly treated, as these people were seen as particularly “inferior” in the racist ideology of National Socialism. They were subject to extremely strict rules; the slightest transgressions by Polish or Soviet forced labourers would be brutally punished by the Gestapo. The children of Eastern European women often died of malnutrition, while pregnant women were forced to have abortions.
Western European forced labourers generally had greater freedom of movement and were subject to less severe conditions. Nevertheless, many of them were sent to Gestapo punishment camps for minor offences or sentenced to death by the Berlin courts.
It was not until 2000 that forced labourers were officially recognized as victims of the Nazi regime, making them entitled – under certain circumstances – to financial reparations.
Many forced labour locations in Berlin are no longer visible. In recent years, however, significant labour camp locations have been uncovered again during construction projects. Since then, there has been an ongoing discussion about how Berlin’s history of Nazi forced labour can be made more visible.
Das Gelände des Dokumentationszentrums NS-Zwangsarbeit.
Foto: A. Schoelzel © Dokumentationszentrum NS-Zwangsarbeit
Foto: A. Schoelzel © Dokumentationszentrum NS-Zwangsarbeit
Author: Christine Glauning / The Nazi Forced Labour Documentation Centre
Pictures of the Holocaust from Berlin
Berlin was the Third Reich’s window to the world. It was here that all major international news and photo agencies had their offices. From no other German city – with the possible exception of Nuremberg or Munich – were so many photos taken for international newspapers as in the Capital of the Reich.
The Nazis – in particular the Gauleiter of Berlin and newly appointed Minister for Public Information and Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels – frequently railed against what they termed the Lügenpresse, or ‘lying press’. At the same time, they tried to manipulate reporters to their own ends, for example by staging the so-called boycott of Jewish stores, medical and legal practices on 1 April 1933 in Berlin for the global public. On Leipziger Strasse and Kurfürstendamm, smiling SA men posted signs written in English as well as German.
When that approach failed to have the desired effect, Goebbels took steps to prevent photographs being taken of anti-Jewish activities, without explicitly forbidding this. Even embassy employees had cameras ripped from their hands as they tried to take pictures of the violence perpetrated against Jewish citizens. The Nazis were afraid that such images would quickly spread around the world through press and photo agencies. Very few images survive of the coordinated assaults on Jewish businesses that took place in Berlin in the summer of 1935. The two dozen or so surviving photos of the November 1938 Kristallnacht pogroms do not depict any scenes of violence. They show destroyed display windows but hide the accompanying scenes of SA men with iron bars and of Jews beaten and baited, in many cases to death. While there are some photos of the Jewish deportations from several smaller cities, there is not a single comparable image from Berlin; this, despite the fact that over 50,000 people were abducted in 184 separate transportation convoys.
Author: Christoph Kreutzmüller / Memorial and Educational Site House of the Wannsee Conference
From liberation to victory: European memories of the end of the Second World War
The Italian Anniversario della Liberazione on 25 April, the Dutch Bevrijdingsdag on 5 May and the French Fête de la victoire on 8 May are just a few examples of how differently European nations commemorate the end of the Second World War. While the war in Europe as a whole came to an end on 8 May 1945 with the unconditional surrender of the German Wehrmacht, it ended on different days and in different ways in various countries. The liberation from Nazi German occupation also did not signify true freedom for all countries, as many Eastern European nations fell under the sway of the Soviet Union.
When, where and how the end of the war is commemorated depends both on how it was experienced and on differences in social and political developments post-1945.
Bevrijdingsdag in Amsterdam, 5 May 1955.
Photo: Unknown/Anefo, Source: Nationaal Archief, CC0, public domain
Photo: Unknown/Anefo, Source: Nationaal Archief, CC0, public domain
Celebrations for the sixtieth anniversary of the Warsaw Uprising: A family at the “Mokotów Fights” memorial (Polish: Mokotow Walczy, Mokotów is a district in Warsaw) in Orlicz-Dreszera-Park, following a commemorative event on 1 August 2004.
© ullstein bild – CARO / Andreas Bastian
© ullstein bild – CARO / Andreas Bastian
In Great Britain, VE-Day (Victory in Europe Day) on 8 May commemorates the victory over the German Reich. In France, the Fête de la victoire has been a national holiday since 1981. Other countries prefer to celebrate their own liberation from German occupation rather than the end of the war itself. For example, Italy celebrates the triumphant entry of Italian partisans into Milan on 25 April, marking the country’s liberation from German occupation. In the Netherlands, 5 May has been an official holiday since 1990. Various events and parades take place to commemorate the capitulation of German occupation forces in the Netherlands and the consequent liberation.
Until the end of the Cold War, many Eastern European countries followed the Soviet tradition of celebrating 9 May as Victory Day. In Poland, this date now commemorates the transition from German to Soviet dictatorship. The 1 August 1944 has become a more important date of commemoration in Poland, as it marks the Warsaw Uprising against the German occupation.
Whereas in the years following the war, heroic narratives of each country’s role in liberation and victory dominated the ceremonies, today the emphasis is on remembering the victims. This approach might pave the way for a common European culture of remembrance.
A military parade on the Champs Elysées in Paris celebrates the Fête de la Victoire on 8 May 2015.
Public domain
Public domain
Author: Uta Birkemeyer / The Allied Museum
The Potsdam Conference
Two months after the end of hostilities in Europe, the “Big Three” – the leaders of the victorious Anti-Hitler Coalition – came together at a summit meeting. Following previous summits in Tehran in 1943 and Yalta in February 1945, this third summit was to take place in Berlin. In light of the city’s widespread devastation, however, Potsdam was chosen as the venue. The summit was hosted by the Soviet leader Josef Stalin. US President Harry Truman, whose predecessor, Franklin D. Roosevelt, had died in April, was a newcomer in this circle, as was Clement Attlee, who replaced Winston Churchill as Britain’s Prime Minister during the course of the conference.
British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, President Harry S. Truman, and Soviet leader Josef Stalin in the garden of Cecilienhof Palace before meeting for the Potsdam Conference in Potsdam 1945.
Source: National Archives, National Archives Identifier: 198958, public domain
Source: National Archives, National Archives Identifier: 198958, public domain
American and Russian Chiefs of Staff meet at the Potsdam Conference in November 1945.
Source: National Archives, National Archives Identifier: 198955, public domain
Source: National Archives, National Archives Identifier: 198955, public domain
Codenamed “Terminal”, the Potsdam Conference ran from 17 July through to 2 August 1945 and aimed to achieve agreement among the Allies on the outcome of the Second World War and the post-war order. In many parts of the world, the facts on the ground conflicted with previous arrangements agreed by the “Big Three”. The conquest of almost all of Eastern and Central Europe by the Red Army and the ‘Sovietization’ of these regions was among these facts. In the Pacific region, on the other hand, the war still raged. The United States’ final ultimatum to Japan was sent from Potsdam – as was President Truman’s order to use the atomic bomb against Japan.
Discussions at the summit were characterized by mutual distrust. Was Moscow hoping to establish a foothold in Asia by entering the war against Japan on the side of the USA? The agreement that was ultimately concluded at the summit seemed incomplete and left Germany’s future undecided, instead dividing the conquered country into separate zones but treating it as a single economic entity. On the other hand, the agreement acknowledged the Soviet Union’s territorial gains, at the expense of Poland in particular, whose borders were shifted westward to the Oder and Neisse rivers. The indirect consequences of this included the expulsion of millions of Germans and the establishment of an “Iron Curtain” across Europe.
In 1989–90, the Potsdam Conference was on everyone’s lips once again. The end of Germany’s division, the collapse of the Soviet empire, and even the end of the Cold War were all widely viewed as corrections of the shortcomings of the agreement forged at the Potsdam Conference.
President Harry S. Truman greeting Soviet leader Josef Stalin at the start of the third day of the Potsdam Conference. Source: National Archives, National Archives Identifier: 198806, public domain
Truman and Stalin at the Potsdam Conference.
Source: National Archives, National Archives Identifier: 7865578, public domain
Source: National Archives, National Archives Identifier: 7865578, public domain
Author: Florian Weiß / The Allied Museum
The “Axis Powers” versus the “Anti-Hitler Coalition”
Nazi Germany and Benito Mussolini’s Fascist regime in Italy first established cooperative ties with the signing of the 1936 Rome-Berlin Axis Agreement, which was superseded in 1939 by the more formal Pact of Friendship and Alliance. This so-called “Berlin-Rome Axis” loomed large in the propaganda of both regimes. In September 1940, Nazi Germany concluded the Tripartite Pact with Italy and Japan, establishing the “Berlin-Rome-Tokyo Axis”. Crucially, the three countries acknowledged their respective claims to Eastern Europe, the Mediterranean, and South East Asia in this agreement. The three Axis Powers were joined in Southeastern Europe by Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, Yugoslavia and Croatia, and in Northern Europe by Finland. Albania, Thailand and those areas of China occupied and controlled by Japan are also, nominally at least, counted among the Axis powers.
The flags of the Axis powers Japan, Germany and Italy on the building of Japan’s leading newspaper: “Tokyo Yomiuri”, 3 December 1937.
© picture-alliance / Imagno
© picture-alliance / Imagno
The political leaders of the United Kingdom, the USA and the Soviet Union (from left to right Winston Churchill, Harry S. Truman, Josef Stalin) at the Potsdam Conference in November 1945.
© picture alliance/Photo12
© picture alliance/Photo12
Ranged against the Axis powers in the Second World War was the “Anti-Hitler Coalition”, also referred to as the Allies. This coalition was established following the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 and was strengthened by the United States’ declaration of war in December 1941. However, American support for the United Kingdom preceded this, not least of all because the two countries shared a common vision of the post-war order. With the accession of the Soviet Union, the Anti-Hitler Coalition became an alliance of convenience forged upon the sole common goal of defeating Nazi Germany.
The Allies were supported by a host of other states, 26 in total, which affirmed their support for the Anti-Hitler Coalition in the “Declaration of the United Nations”, signed in January 1942.
In the absence of broader common goals and shared values, mistrust grew among the partners of the Anti-Hitler Coalition and relations were increasingly strained well before the defeat of their common foe, the Nazi regime, in the spring of 1945.
Poster of the United States Office of War Information, 1943. Source: United States Office of War Information, public domain
Author: Bernd von Kostka / The Allied Museum
The United Kingdom in the Second World War
Germany broke several of the provisions of the Treaty of Versailles following Adolf Hitler’s accession to power in 1933. The response of the other major European powers – France and the United Kingdom – to these violations was shaped to a large degree by the policy of appeasement pursued by the government of the United Kingdom. Seeking to avoid a military confrontation, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain signed the Munich Agreement in September 1938, under which the region of Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia was ceded to Germany.
Observer Corps aircraft spotter on the roof of a building in London during the Battle of Britain, with St. Paul’s Cathedral in the background.
Source: National Archives, National Archives Identifier: 541899, public domain
Source: National Archives, National Archives Identifier: 541899, public domain
German Invasion Of Poland, 1 September 1939.
© picture alliance/Photo12
© picture alliance/Photo12
But Chamberlain’s hope of securing lasting peace in Europe proved to be a fatal delusion and Germany went on to invade Poland in September 1939. This development led France and the United Kingdom to declare war on Germany.
Within a month, the British Commonwealth states of Australia, India, Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa also declared war on Germany.
The largest air battle of the Second World War – the Battle of Britain – was fought between July and October 1940 and resulted in the first major defeat of the German Luftwaffe. As well as targeting British infrastructure and military installations, the Luftwaffe also dropped bombs on London. The British Royal Air Force responded by launching an air raid on Berlin. From then on, cities and civilian populations were targeted in numerous air raids. Despite their numerical superiority – both in terms of aircraft and pilots – the German Luftwaffe was unable to gain air superiority over England and the campaign ground to a halt after roughly three months.
In the further course of the war, British troops achieved successes in North Africa under General Montgomery, and also in Sicily and Italy. During the D-Day invasion of Normandy, the United Kingdom played a key role as a bridgehead from which Allied troops reached France and went on to liberate the countries of Western Europe.
The central London area around St. Paul’s Cathedral was devastated by German air raids. The ruins of the buildings lining the street leading towards the cathedral, undated.
© ullstein bild – Pressefoto Kindermann
© ullstein bild – Pressefoto Kindermann
Author: Bernd von Kostka / The Allied Museum
Laurel Coleman Steinhice (born 1936 in Chattanooga, died 2011 in Nashville) talks about what her mother experienced in the air-raid shelter in London. 1:20 min
© AlliiertenMuseum/Filmhaus Berlin GmbH 2009
© AlliiertenMuseum/Filmhaus Berlin GmbH 2009
Laurel Coleman Steinhice (born 1936 in Chattanooga, died 2011 in Nashville) talks about her cinema experience of the victory celebrations at the end of the war in London. 2:40 min
© AlliiertenMuseum/Filmhaus Berlin GmbH 2009
© AlliiertenMuseum/Filmhaus Berlin GmbH 2009
France: the ‘belated’ victorious power
For four years France found itself under German occupation. Those years of collaboration and resistance left in their wake a deeply divided society. Yet at the end of the war, France found itself included among the victorious Allies that occupied Germany.
In June 1940, following six weeks of battle, the German Wehrmacht installed a regime of occupation in Northern France and along the Atlantic coast. The south of the country remained unoccupied for the time being. This territory was controlled by the authoritarian regime of Marshal Philippe Petain, based in the town of Vichy. The Vichy regime collaborated with the occupiers and assisted in the deportation of 76,000 Jews. In November 1942, the Wehrmacht also marched into the southern zone of France.
Both within France and among the French in exile, movements of resistance to the occupation were organised. Their attacks on the army of occupation were met with brutal reprisals from the Germans.
The German occupation of France: German soldiers in front of the triumphal arch in Paris, July/August 1940. © picture alliance/ullstein bild
The French city of Caen in the Normandy lays in ruins by the time of its liberation on 19 July 1944. Photo: Captain E.G. Malindine, No 5 Army Film & Photographic Unit, public domain
In June 1944, the liberation of France began with the Allied landings on the Normandy coast. Just a few days earlier, a “Provisional Government of the French Republic” was formed under the leadership of Charles de Gaulle. This timing was not coincidental: its aim was to prevent an Allied military government taking power in France. The advance of the Allied forces was supported by French resistance fighters and soldiers. Between 1940 and 1945, approximately 230,000 French soldiers and 350,000 civilians lost their lives, either in combat or in Allied and German bombing raids.
The liberation of Paris in August 1944 was an event of enormous symbolic significance, though the entire territory of France was not cleared of German forces until February 1945. The jubilation at the end of the German occupation soon gave way to the reality of grappling with major political problems. These included economic reconstruction, the political restructuring of the country, and healing the social divisions wrought by the war and occupation. Many French soldiers remained mobilised since France, with British and American support, was one of the four victorious powers occupying Germany.
Citizens line the Champs Élysées and cheer a parade of French soldiers following the liberation of Paris, 26 August 1944. Photo: Jack Downey, U.S. Office of War Information, United States Library of Congress’s Prints and Photographs ID fsac.1a55001, public domain
Author: Uta Birkemeyer / The Allied Museum
The Role of the USA in the Second World War
The USA remained neutral over the first two years of the war; however, this stance was the subject of intense political debate. With the adoption of the Lend-Lease Act in 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt agreed to supply armaments and other materials to countries fighting against Nazi Germany. As part of its preparations for war, the United States introduced compulsory military service, initiated a nuclear weapons programme and increased its presence in the Atlantic. These activities were flanked by efforts to promote a new global order for the post-Hitler era, which was subsequently embodied in the vision of the United Nations established in 1945.
On 7 December 1941, Japan attacked the USA and “Pearl Harbor” became a national trauma. The United States’ entry into the war transformed the war in Europe into a “world war” that the USA was compelled to fight on two separate fronts and across two oceans.
A small boat rescues a seaman from the USS West Virginia burning in the foreground in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, after the Japanese aircraft attacked the military installation, 7 December 1941.
© picture alliance / AP Photo
© picture alliance / AP Photo
Soldiers of the Third U.S. Army run through the smoke-filled streets of Wernberg, Germany in April 1945.
Source: National Archives, National Archives Identifier: 195342, public domain
Source: National Archives, National Archives Identifier: 195342, public domain
Determined to emerge victorious, the United States mobilized enormous resources for its war effort, tripling industrial output and enlisting some 16 million citizens in the armed forces. The USA soon became the largest arsenal in the world, a development from which both the United Kingdom, and to a lesser extent the Soviet Union, profited enormously. It was this military aid, together with the common goal of defeating Nazi Germany, that held the Anti-Hitler Coalition together.
Between 1942 and 1944, American forces landed in North Africa, Italy, and France as part of the Allied campaign in Western Europe and Africa against Nazi Germany. The bombing war against German industrial facilities, infrastructure and the civilian population supported military operations on land and sea.
In the war against Imperial Japan, the USA adopted a strategy of combined naval and air warfare to dislodge the enemy from occupied territories, with US forces suffering more casualties here than in Europe. Roosevelt’s successor, Harry Truman, believed that the need to minimize American casualties justified the use of the atomic bomb. The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki also served as a warning to the Soviet Union that it would be unwise to contest the United States’ new role as a global “superpower” in the wake of the Second World War.
Mushroom cloud over Nagasaki, 9 August 1945.
Photo: Charles Levy, Source: National Archives, National Archives Identifier: 535795, public domain
Photo: Charles Levy, Source: National Archives, National Archives Identifier: 535795, public domain
Author: Florian Weiß / The Allied Museum
Symbols of Victory
Staged at the Reichstag by Soviet war reporter Yevgeny Chaldej on 2 May 1945, the photograph of a soldier perched on the windswept rooftop of the devastated building as he raises the Soviet flag above Berlin is one of the most iconic images of the end of the war and of the victory over Nazi Germany.
A soldier of the Red Army raises the flag of the Soviet Union above the Reichstag on 2 May 1945.
Photo: Jewgenij Chaldej © ullstein bild – Voller Ernst / Jewgeni Chaldej
Photo: Jewgenij Chaldej © ullstein bild – Voller Ernst / Jewgeni Chaldej
Soviet soldiers record their victory on the walls of the Reichstag, Berlin-Tiergarten, 2 May 1945.
Photo: Timofej Melnik © deutsch-Russisches Museum Berlin-Karlshorst / Sammlung Timofej Melnik
Photo: Timofej Melnik © deutsch-Russisches Museum Berlin-Karlshorst / Sammlung Timofej Melnik
The Reichstag was seen as the symbol of the National Socialist regime and every soldier in the Red Army knew that the hoisting of the Red Flag above its ruins would spell victory and the end of the war. Following this military success, the Reichstag, which had been severely damaged in the battle for Berlin, became a site of pilgrimage for the victorious soldiers of the Red Army. The numerous graffiti in Cyrillic on the restored building’s interior walls testify to this today.
The Soviet flag hoisted on the roof was eventually removed from the building in the course of a small parade on 20 May 1945 and is still exhibited in Moscow as the “Banner of Victory”. But symbols are subject to constant change and in 1949 the Soviet War Memorial in East Berlin’s Treptower Park was inaugurated as a new symbol of victory in Berlin. The complex is typical of many Soviet war memorials.
The complex is typical of many Soviet war memorials. Over 7,000 Red Army soldiers are interred in mass graves at the site, making the war memorial a place of mourning. At the center of the complex is a statue of Soviet soldier bearing a German child in his arms as he smashes the symbol of National Socialism – the swastika – with his sword: an image of the liberation of Germany from National Socialism by the Red Army.
Over the decades, the statue became a popular symbol and is still frequently depicted on stamps, coins and other devotional items marking major anniversaries of the end of the war. The memorial remains the first stop for tourists from the post-Soviet countries who travel to Berlin to commemorate the Soviet victory. A festival featuring a variety of commemorative ceremonies is held at the memorial each year around 9 May.
Commemorations for the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II at the Soviet War Memorial in Treptower Park on 9 May 2015.
© Cordula Gdaniec
© Cordula Gdaniec
Author: Christoph Meißner / German-Russian Museum Berlin-Karlshorst