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

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 …

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.

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.

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.

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 21^st ‘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, 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 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, 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, 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.

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 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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 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 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 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’.

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.

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.

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 …

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 20^th 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

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

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

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 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.

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.

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. 

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. 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

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.

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

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 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

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

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.