Well, Germany's had a dark past. This we knew. But like other matters merely of fact, there is very little emotional resonance, and experiencing part of it is much more vivid and the fact evolves into something that happened to real people.
I've now been to most of (I think) the major museums that outline the terror of the past:
-German National History Museum: incredibly thorough history of the country and a place where I learned a ton, even about WWI and WWII. The most memorable part, for me, was a small "architectural" sculpture that showed the Birkenau mass-execution building, with people waiting unbeknownst on one side of a wall and on another, masses of naked people packed together, screaming and writhing in agony as they were killed--most often by vehicle exhaust fumes, which took some 20-30 minutes. Other "able" inmates were forced to run the crematoria.
-The Wall: Y'know.
-Topography of Terror: Layout was more like a book hung up on placards--there was naught but text and pictures. It was built on the site of the old SS building, and everyone more-or-less decided it would be too awful to put anyone there, so they just had a museum about how evil these guys were. There were many quotes from leadership that can be summed up as: "We have an explicit policy to wholesale murder people in as horrible and evil a way as we can imagine. I know it is expensive and we're covered in debt but we have lots of people left to murder." Some SS members would even murder concentration camp victims as the last thing they did before fleeing allied advances because murdering people was the single most important thing on their minds. Just baffling.
This was near the site of Hitler's bunker in Berlin, where he killed himself (after marrying Eva Braun a day earlier) at the end of the war. The Soviets tried to eliminate it entirely with explosives, but being a bomb bunker this was pretty hard. Now it's an unmarked parking lot.
As Eddie Izzard described the scene:
Hitler: "Shall we get married, my darling?"
Braun: "Oh yes, mein furher! What shall our honeymoon be?"
Hitler: "Oh, you know: in a ditch, covered in petrol, on fire."
Bruan: "How romantic!"
-Holocaust Memorial & Museum: The memorial is abstract but quite moving. The museum itself mostly follows individuals and families throughout the entire holocaust process, from persecution to destruction. There were bits of poetry or diaries that do an amazingly terrifying job of describing what victims were thinking and feeling. It was also very important for this museum to make very clear how explicit the policies of genocide were, I think in order to eliminate any question about "whether it happened" or "was a Jewish conspiracy." Similar to the SS museum, a good part of it is dedicated to official documents and quotes from SS high-ups that make the "question" quite simple.
-Stazi Prison: (For those that don't know, the Stazi was the secret police of East Germany.) This one was the "sleeper" museum. In its own terrifying way, it was _awesome_. The (German) tours are led by old victims of the Stazi that actually suffered _in_ that prison. Our English guide was a clunky/awkward, but very passionate, young kid. The big takeaway for me from much of this and the other stuff I am hearing and reading about East Germany was that the Soviets/DDR just get way too big a break. I think they're entirely comparable to the Nazis in every bad way except obsession with racial genocide. But in our history I think we think of the Soviets as "enemies" and the Nazis as "an unacceptable, existential evil that had to be wiped off the face of the earth as soon as possible," when the Stalinist version probably fell more into the latter camp. (NB: the Soviets got a lot less horribly evil after Stalin's death, but seem to have remained quite evil.)
Anyway: the prison (one of 17, but the biggest) itself was used for political prisoners. The Stazi (remember, East Germany only) had 90,000 official agents and 180,000 "unofficial assistants" at its peak, compared to the Gestapo's peak of 7,000. The Stazi would round up some-but-not-all cases of dissent, although it probably knew most of what was going on (at its heyday it read almos tall mail, bugged most homes, could bug any call, etc). These dissenters (which included people like their own foreign and financial ministers) were usually sent to this prison. Pre-1961 they were stuffed into tiny cells with 10-15 people, a wooden bed, a bucket for a toilet. Even though the original cells could only hold a few hundred at a time, "thousands" (not sure of the exact count) died from malnutrition, horrible hygenic conditions (buckets were cleaned once per day but they never showered, never changed clothes), or abuse from guards. They weren't allowed to talk and had to simply stand in their cell (no sleeping) during the day. People went crazy from no sunlight, and if they started shouting or became agitated, guards would come to beat them.
The prison was used to extract confessions. They'd suddenly grab someone off the street (sometimes even in West Berlin!), stuff them in a truck with some fake company name, drive them around for hours to disorient them, and then throw them in the prison (prisoners never knew where they were). The Stazi already knew what was happening, but by getting confessions out of people, they could "legitimize" their rounding-up, as well as other behavior (they used extracted false confessions from this prison to justify building the Wall). They used torture methods like Chinese water torture, a "wet cell" (a small cell with ankle-high cold water), and just good ol' beating.
In 1961 that part of the prison shut down as East Germany tried to gain international recognition and pretended it was not an evil evil dictatorship. A new "white torture" facility was built, with more humane conditions. Each prisoner had his own cell with glass "bricks" (allowing one to get light but not see anything), a shower once a week, food three times a day. One was not allowed to see other prisoners and never did (even in the halls--they coordinated to prevent this). This isolation, constant surveillance, etc, was used to "wear down" the prisoner until they would confess in the (nonviolent but still twisted) interrogation rooms. After "confessing" to disloyalty to the party, then it was off to the gulag for 20 years or so, unless they were purchased by the West (political prisoners became a major export for the bankrupt DDR by the 70's).
The craziest part for me was that occasionally former Stazi sneak into the tours, harass the tour guides (who were former prisoners!) and claim that these stories were fabricated! Apparently they have every legal right to do this but the tour guides can make them leave if they're sufficiently disruptive to the tour. Imagine, being an old, tortured victim, and some jerkwad Stazi runs around calling you a liar.
Part of the "deal" of the reunification of Germany was that the only crimes that could be prosectuted from the East were related to murder directly. Former Stazi and other state-sponsored criminals apparently live all over the place; some of them are apparently lawyers & judges. I'm not sure how many of them are "converted" and ashamed, and how many are still defensive of the old regime... but it sends chills down one's spine. I think it's another example where Nazis & Soviets are treated differently. You can't even legally deny most Nazi war crimes (mostly the Holocaust, I think), but you can run around and harrass ols prisoners if you're a Stazi guy.
So it was very much worth going to all these. I felt sad or angry or horrified at different points. But it's important that we never do it again. I think, for the modern age, we must be very careful of governments, policies, or majoritarian trends where alternative thought or belief is considered dangerous. These collectivist/statist states like Fascism and Soviet-ism depended, for their system to work, on a suppression of alternative opinions, values, thoughts, politics, etc; they needed scapegoats when their broken systems didn't work... and so these horrors of super-surveillance and political prison came about. Beware, my friends, curtailing our privacy, and beware participating in a cultural suppression of alternative thought.
I've now been to most of (I think) the major museums that outline the terror of the past:
-German National History Museum: incredibly thorough history of the country and a place where I learned a ton, even about WWI and WWII. The most memorable part, for me, was a small "architectural" sculpture that showed the Birkenau mass-execution building, with people waiting unbeknownst on one side of a wall and on another, masses of naked people packed together, screaming and writhing in agony as they were killed--most often by vehicle exhaust fumes, which took some 20-30 minutes. Other "able" inmates were forced to run the crematoria.
-The Wall: Y'know.
-Topography of Terror: Layout was more like a book hung up on placards--there was naught but text and pictures. It was built on the site of the old SS building, and everyone more-or-less decided it would be too awful to put anyone there, so they just had a museum about how evil these guys were. There were many quotes from leadership that can be summed up as: "We have an explicit policy to wholesale murder people in as horrible and evil a way as we can imagine. I know it is expensive and we're covered in debt but we have lots of people left to murder." Some SS members would even murder concentration camp victims as the last thing they did before fleeing allied advances because murdering people was the single most important thing on their minds. Just baffling.
This was near the site of Hitler's bunker in Berlin, where he killed himself (after marrying Eva Braun a day earlier) at the end of the war. The Soviets tried to eliminate it entirely with explosives, but being a bomb bunker this was pretty hard. Now it's an unmarked parking lot.
As Eddie Izzard described the scene:
Hitler: "Shall we get married, my darling?"
Braun: "Oh yes, mein furher! What shall our honeymoon be?"
Hitler: "Oh, you know: in a ditch, covered in petrol, on fire."
Bruan: "How romantic!"
-Holocaust Memorial & Museum: The memorial is abstract but quite moving. The museum itself mostly follows individuals and families throughout the entire holocaust process, from persecution to destruction. There were bits of poetry or diaries that do an amazingly terrifying job of describing what victims were thinking and feeling. It was also very important for this museum to make very clear how explicit the policies of genocide were, I think in order to eliminate any question about "whether it happened" or "was a Jewish conspiracy." Similar to the SS museum, a good part of it is dedicated to official documents and quotes from SS high-ups that make the "question" quite simple.
-Stazi Prison: (For those that don't know, the Stazi was the secret police of East Germany.) This one was the "sleeper" museum. In its own terrifying way, it was _awesome_. The (German) tours are led by old victims of the Stazi that actually suffered _in_ that prison. Our English guide was a clunky/awkward, but very passionate, young kid. The big takeaway for me from much of this and the other stuff I am hearing and reading about East Germany was that the Soviets/DDR just get way too big a break. I think they're entirely comparable to the Nazis in every bad way except obsession with racial genocide. But in our history I think we think of the Soviets as "enemies" and the Nazis as "an unacceptable, existential evil that had to be wiped off the face of the earth as soon as possible," when the Stalinist version probably fell more into the latter camp. (NB: the Soviets got a lot less horribly evil after Stalin's death, but seem to have remained quite evil.)
Anyway: the prison (one of 17, but the biggest) itself was used for political prisoners. The Stazi (remember, East Germany only) had 90,000 official agents and 180,000 "unofficial assistants" at its peak, compared to the Gestapo's peak of 7,000. The Stazi would round up some-but-not-all cases of dissent, although it probably knew most of what was going on (at its heyday it read almos tall mail, bugged most homes, could bug any call, etc). These dissenters (which included people like their own foreign and financial ministers) were usually sent to this prison. Pre-1961 they were stuffed into tiny cells with 10-15 people, a wooden bed, a bucket for a toilet. Even though the original cells could only hold a few hundred at a time, "thousands" (not sure of the exact count) died from malnutrition, horrible hygenic conditions (buckets were cleaned once per day but they never showered, never changed clothes), or abuse from guards. They weren't allowed to talk and had to simply stand in their cell (no sleeping) during the day. People went crazy from no sunlight, and if they started shouting or became agitated, guards would come to beat them.
This would house 10-15 people.
The prison was used to extract confessions. They'd suddenly grab someone off the street (sometimes even in West Berlin!), stuff them in a truck with some fake company name, drive them around for hours to disorient them, and then throw them in the prison (prisoners never knew where they were). The Stazi already knew what was happening, but by getting confessions out of people, they could "legitimize" their rounding-up, as well as other behavior (they used extracted false confessions from this prison to justify building the Wall). They used torture methods like Chinese water torture, a "wet cell" (a small cell with ankle-high cold water), and just good ol' beating.
In 1961 that part of the prison shut down as East Germany tried to gain international recognition and pretended it was not an evil evil dictatorship. A new "white torture" facility was built, with more humane conditions. Each prisoner had his own cell with glass "bricks" (allowing one to get light but not see anything), a shower once a week, food three times a day. One was not allowed to see other prisoners and never did (even in the halls--they coordinated to prevent this). This isolation, constant surveillance, etc, was used to "wear down" the prisoner until they would confess in the (nonviolent but still twisted) interrogation rooms. After "confessing" to disloyalty to the party, then it was off to the gulag for 20 years or so, unless they were purchased by the West (political prisoners became a major export for the bankrupt DDR by the 70's).
The craziest part for me was that occasionally former Stazi sneak into the tours, harass the tour guides (who were former prisoners!) and claim that these stories were fabricated! Apparently they have every legal right to do this but the tour guides can make them leave if they're sufficiently disruptive to the tour. Imagine, being an old, tortured victim, and some jerkwad Stazi runs around calling you a liar.
Part of the "deal" of the reunification of Germany was that the only crimes that could be prosectuted from the East were related to murder directly. Former Stazi and other state-sponsored criminals apparently live all over the place; some of them are apparently lawyers & judges. I'm not sure how many of them are "converted" and ashamed, and how many are still defensive of the old regime... but it sends chills down one's spine. I think it's another example where Nazis & Soviets are treated differently. You can't even legally deny most Nazi war crimes (mostly the Holocaust, I think), but you can run around and harrass ols prisoners if you're a Stazi guy.
So it was very much worth going to all these. I felt sad or angry or horrified at different points. But it's important that we never do it again. I think, for the modern age, we must be very careful of governments, policies, or majoritarian trends where alternative thought or belief is considered dangerous. These collectivist/statist states like Fascism and Soviet-ism depended, for their system to work, on a suppression of alternative opinions, values, thoughts, politics, etc; they needed scapegoats when their broken systems didn't work... and so these horrors of super-surveillance and political prison came about. Beware, my friends, curtailing our privacy, and beware participating in a cultural suppression of alternative thought.
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