Wandering Through Germany…

…and learning how the people of that country dealt with the perpetration of the worst mass murder in the history of humans. 

My Bride and I just returned from a trip to the Netherlands to see our son and his family and also spent a week sightseeing in Germany. We were in Berlin for about three days and Frankfurt for about three days. 

According to DNA tests, both of us have some ancestors from that part of the world; in my case about 70% of mine is from Germany and the surrounding countries. I wasn’t surprised by that when the tests were run as an old family tree that had been passed along to me showed my earliest ancestor was my seven-times great grandfather, Johannes Keller. “Long John” as he was nicknamed (family lore has him at being six foot six inches tall) came to North America in 1730 at the age of 2. He was a veteran of the Revolutionary war and lived to the age of 102. I know this much to be true and I have some decent documentation to all of it. 

In any case, I was excited to go to Germany as I’d never been. I’d been told great things about Berlin and looked forward to seeing the sights. I hadn’t heard much about Frankfurt but we were staying there in preparation for taking a river boat cruise on the Rhine River to see the “parade of castles” that exist all along its length. 

We spent time on a hop on/hop off bus in Berlin to get a look at everything quickly and then spent 2 full days walking on our own. The Rick Steves books are always in hand when we go to Europe and his walking tours, as always, proved excellent for seeing the sights. We saw all the biggies on our walks – Brandenburg Gate, the remainder of the Berlin Wall, the Topography of Terror (home of the SS and Gestapo and their role in the rise of Naziism; it may be the most disgusting thing I’ve ever seen. I was physically ill by the end of our visit) the various parks, and the iconic TV Tower which provided us an opportunity to have brunch while overlooking the city from 218 meters up! 

Brandenburg Gate

TV Tower

Memorial to the Jews Murdered in Europe

We spent several hours at the Memorial for the Jews Murdered in Europe – that is its official name – and I’ll come back to it in a moment. After three nights in Berlin, we boarded a train to Frankfurt for the next three days. 

The Frankfurt Bahnhof (railroad station) is the busiest one in Europe. Trains are running through it nearly 24 hours a day on 21 tracks and platforms. Our hotel was an easy five minute walk from the station and gave us a downtown look at the city. While it was a four star location, according to Rick Steves, its location made for a bit of excitement. 

The Red Light District was about a block away which gives the area a much seamier feel. Coupled with that, the area in front of the train station is packed with the illicit drug trade of the city. We watched wide open drug deals going down nearly all day, especially in the evening, in full view of a large police presence. 

Interestingly, I never felt unsafe and MB hit the nail on the head when she mentioned that everyone seemed to be in a good mood and she knew we wouldn’t get shot because access to guns in Germany (and nearly all of Europe for that matter) is almost non-existent. 

Our river boat cruise was very nice. Since it was near the end of the season, it was a very small group on board and the host was attentive to all of us. He was very funny, a very nice man with a wonderful knowledge of all things German and very informative for our tour of the castles of the Rhine. 

We also found a wonderful Irish bar in Frankfurt with real Irish food, good drinks, excellent servers and a huge number of fans watching the Frankfurt football team engage in battle with another team to whom they eventually lost. (The bar cleared out quickly afterwards.) 

We eventually boarded a train back to the Netherlands where we had one last dinner with our son, daughter-in-law, and grandsons before heading home the next morning. 

But I want to take a moment to talk about how Germany addresses their role in WWII and the Holocaust because I think there is a lesson for us. 

After visiting the Topography of Terror Museum and learning about the Nazi regime (and being totally disgusted) we viewed the Holocaust from the Jewish side. 

I mentioned before about the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. This is a full city block that is covered in coffin sized stones of varying heights, 2,781 of them. The result is a series of walkways that are narrow and, in some cases, dwarfed by these stones. The sun casts interesting shadows throughout the course of the day. It makes for a quiet, very reflective stroll. You can almost feel the souls and hear the cries of the murdered Jews as you walk among the stones. 

Below ground, a museum exists – free to visit – that walks you through the holocaust from start to finish. Over the course of less than 15 years, the Nazis managed to murder over 6 million people; the vast majority were killed between 1941 and 1945. That’s two times the population of the city of Chicago. 

How was this carried out? 

Here’s my unknowledgeable take on it. Hitler, along with some of his cronies, determined that their Aryan race was superior to all others. In order to extend the life of the Third Reich, they decided that the Aryan Master Race must remain pure. To ensure that, they worked to eliminate the weakest they could think of and that was the Jewish population of the world. Hitler enlisted Heinrich Himmler to lead the genocide effort. It began with the passing of anti-Jewish laws in the 1930s, supplemented with an all-out propaganda campaign, continued with moving all Jews into “ghettos” and finally sending them to concentration camps where some were worked to death while others were simply murdered. 

Methods included lining people up and shooting them in cold blood, loading them into trucks with sealed compartments and pumping in the exhaust until they expired (a long, slow, painful death that took around 45 minutes) or herding them into specially designed gas chambers where they used hydrogen cyanide to quickly kill them. Since the Jews were forced to strip before entering the chamber, the bodies were either dumped into mass graves or were burned in giant burn pits. Some of those mass graves were eventually reopened by the Nazis and the bodies were stripped of gold fillings in their teeth prior to mass burning. 

I was brought up short reading about one town’s demise in the museum. Its population of 31,198 was completely murdered in one week. The Nazis came into town and began marching the townspeople out of town, lining them up and shooting them. Over 6,000 people per day, men, women, children, old and young, were lined up and murdered with machine guns. By the end of the week, the town was devoid of life. Why did they not just run away? Some were able to escape – that’s how we know this happened along with the Nazi’s diligent record keeping – but the town was locked down and people trying to escape were shot anyway. So, they waited and prayed and hoped for salvation that never came. 

In the final analysis, between 250,000 and 500,000 people were directly involved in the killing of the Jews, The German people have admitted this, worked to punish the perpetrators, made reparations to many survivors and the countries that they came from. They have also owned up to what happened and share it willingly in the hopes of it never happening again. Anywhere. May it be so. 

Why did I write this? There’s a part of me that wishes the United States would own up to slavery in the same way. Between 10 and 12.5 million African slaves were transported to the US over the course of about 100 years. (I had no idea it was that many until I just looked it up.) In 1790, slaves made up almost 18% of the US population, and yet they weren’t considered people, they were chattel. Like cows or horses. Yeah. 

In my life, I don’t recall seeing much in the way of apologies to families of former slaves. I haven’t seen any reparations. (Don’t give me that “40 acres and a mule” BS either.) 

Were some of those slaves murdered? No one knows the exact number, but the answer is yes, some were. In any case, their lives were horribly affected through their enslavement about which they had no control. 

I believe that there should be a way to officially apologize to the descendants of US slaves and provide reparations to them. 

They deserve nothing less.

What are your thoughts on this? Comments are open.