Nazi's in Berlin

Berlin is a historic city with so much rich music and culture, however it is impossible to talk about Berlin without bringing up the Nazi's. Over our time in Berlin we learned a whole lot about the Nazi's from various wonderful guides and museums across our stay.

On our first full day in Berlin we were lead on a walking tour by a history student from America who had been living in the city for quite some time, named Jesse. He took us around the city and showed u various structures and monuments, showing us the bullet holes in facades of the buildings that remained standing. He connected the horrible acts committed in Terezin to the broader context of antisemitism that had fomented in Germany long before the first and second great wars, showing us propaganda from the 1920's depicting Jewish caricatures stabbing the German military in the back. The biggest thing I took from the tour was that Judaism was first able to be publicly worshiped in Germany as late as 1860, around the time slavery was legally abolished in the states. Many of the Jews that the Nazis murdered were people who's parents had fought for their civil rights, and I think this is really analogous to our current struggles in America today, especially in light of Martin Luther King Jr. day. People will point to the civil rights act that MLK fought for and cite that racism is over, the fight has been won, and that we can all pat ourselves on the back and look away from those who still face oppression. The story of the Holocaust tells us that the fight for justice never ends, and that "equal rights" will never be enough. Jews received their religious freedom and lost it all 70 years later, and we gave people of color equal rights under the law less than 60 years ago. We can't pretend it is over.

The next day, we went to the Wannsee house, where top Nazi officials organized the final solution. Our guide was a historian who studied the "murder of European Jews +". He gave us an overview of the war, and from his tour I took 2 main things: How we use our language to defer responsibility and dull the reality of horrors, and that the Nazi's were not monsters, they were human. He talked about a famous event that many of us have heard of, Kristallnacht ("The night of broken glass" where the police and others committed violence towards Jews all over Germany and Austria). The word kristallnacht has 2 parts to it: kristall, and nacht. Kristall, or glass, implies that the violence was only committed against property. We are lead to believe that it was just mass vandalism, when in reality a whole bunch of Jews were murdered or assaulted. The second part, "nacht", means night. It implies that the violence happened at night, whereas it took place over 4 days, both day and night. He dissected multiple words we use to describe these events and showed how they dulled the horror and personal responsibility of the acts (holocaust instead of "Mass murder of European jews +" for example). He humanized the Nazi's by making showing their faces, talking about how 70% integrated into German life after the war, and by remarking about how he had no clue what crimes his grandfather, who fought in the war, may have committed. It was a very impactful tour.

"When we say 'Never again,' we mean 'Never again, for anyone.'"