Haus der Wannseekonferenz

The hardest aspect of any genocide is making sense out of what is senseless. It is the search for reason. As a premeditated genocide, the Holocaust is especially difficult to comprehend. The ability to kill six million people in a period of roughly four years can only be done through a well organized operation. More incredible is the fact that Germany was fighting a two front war. The Nazi party was still able to devote time, money, and resources to carry out the horrific genocide on their Jewish targets.

The Wannsee Conference, held on January 20, 1942, was the highest ranking military officers of the Nazi party of the special division in charge of the Jewish extermination. They met at 56-58 am Grossen Wannsee, a villa on the shore of lake Wann. This beautiful mansion was donated by a wealthy, energetic supporter of the Nazi party. It was here that officers crunched numbers and calculated exactly how to institute the Final Solution to the Jewish Question. For me to walk through that house  was eye-opening. The house and grounds were beautiful; it was just how it looked 71 years before, cold, elegant, and isolated. On display throughout the house were all the documents of the meeting, down to the minutes. I was expecting this to be a top secret plan, because the Final Solution, when implemented, seemed to be kept out of the world's eye until the end of the war. But this was instead like a corporate meeting, boring and mundane. The whole thing was weird. People being treated as numbers, more as of a commodity than humans.

Our group learned that the Final Solution did not explicitly discuss killing off the Jewish populations when it was first conceptualized. But Adolf Hitler's politics pitted leaders under him against one another to come up with a better plan. Someone would draft a plan, and then the next person would try to beat it, until the Final Solution was pushed to its extremities. I wonder if the officers at the conference saw the final results of their decisions at the camps.

I learned two lessons at Haus der Wannseekonferenz - First, it is easy to sit in comfort and treat people as numbers. Second, competition can bring out the most primitive evils.

Bahnhof Train Station - Deportation of Jews

On Thursday, the 17th of January, we took a train to the outskirts of the city. It was an especially cold morning. We exited the train at the Berlin-Grunewald stop and proceeded down the stairs of the old station to a brick tunnel. From there, we walked only a few meters and turned up another staircase, and went onto another track. This track was secluded from the other track we had just exited, so much so that you would not notice it standing on the other platform. Trees and vines gave this spot the privacy of an old relic. To my left, the soft hum of the Autobahn could be heard through the cold air, although you couldn't see it. Through the leafless trees to my right, a small villa with a coffee shop and a square could be seen.

Seventy years ago, this was just woods. The villa was farther down the road and there was no highway nearby. And where we stood, there was a railroad platform connecting Berlin to the rest of eastern Europe. Today, the railroad and platform still stand, but trees grow from the rusty tracks. An old brick administrative building sits dark and hollow off to the left. And as I stood there, I could feel the presence of a hundred thousand empty people being herded like livestock onto train cars.

This was the deportation site for the Jews in Berlin. It was here that they were taken to the ghettos of Theresienstadt and the gas chambers of Auschwitz, many never to be heard from again. The inscriptions on the tracks began in 1942. They ended a month before the invasion of Berlin, in 1945. They would read "21.2.1942 / 100 Juden / Berlin - Theresienstadt" and continue up and down the track. The date, the number of Jews, and the location to and from. 100 Juden, 50 Juden, 100 Juden, 100 Juden... day after day, month after month. It was meticulous; it was a premeditated, well organized act. Like "business," they had a quota, a count to meet.

At first, I could comprehend the amount of people. 100, 50, 100... but by 1943, the numbers jumped up to 500, 750, 1,000 per day. I was shocked. The platform was large, but for 1,000 people? No way. The Nazis must have been running multiple trains per day to get 1,000 people through this rural station seventy years ago. And this was a single platform. There were hundreds of these in Germany alone. But soon, as the War became turbulent and resources were diverted elsewhere, the consistency of numbers and dates began to decrease. There would be a month gap, then over 1,000 people would be transported out in a single day. By the end of 1944, the numbers were back under 100. There were not any more Jews left to transport.