Crimes are perhaps most potently acknowledged at the scenes where they were committed. In the broad sense, all of Berlin, and for that matter all of Germany, could be viewed as a crime scene, but the former Reich capital had hundreds of specific sites that had been instrumental to the Hitler regime’s criminality. In addition to the above-mentioned Nazi government buildings, many other structures related to the Third Reich survived the war relatively intact, and the vast majority of these bore no indication of their role in the terror. Only occasionally did one encounter the odd plaque or sign, such as the (hopelessly inadequate) one at the Wittenbergplatz U-Bahn station, which lists the main concentration camps as if they were travel destinations, or the sculpture at Tiergartenstrasse 4, where the Third Reich’s euthanasia office was located.
Not surprisingly, the Germans preferred, especially in the early stages of the commemoration process, to focus on places where they could find something positive amidst all the horror. Hence the emphasis was on resistance to Nazi terror rather than on the terror itself. Berlin (both East and West) sought to highlight its role in the German resistance by naming streets after resisters and placing plaques on the houses where they had lived. In addition to such simple markers, there were also efforts to create more elaborate “memory sites,” where the opposition to Nazi criminality could be contemplated in some detail.
The first such site in West Berlin was erected at Plötzensee, a prison used by the Nazis as an execution center for political prisoners and resisters. Almost 3,000 men and women, including hundreds of foreign nationals, were hanged or guillotined there during the Third Reich. The most prominent victims were German opponents to the regime. On December 22, 1942, eleven members of the Schulze-Boysen-Harnack group, known as the “Red Orchestra,” were executed at the prison. As noted above, following the failed July 20, 1944, assassination attempt against Hitler, several participants in the plot were hanged at the prison. In 1952 the Senate of West Berlin turned the execution chamber into a memorial to the people who had died there, and, by extension, to all those who had sacrificed their lives opposing the Third Reich. Although the victims here were diverse, the emphasis in the exhibit—as in most of the Federal Republic’s resistance commemorations—was on conservative opponents to Hitler. The Plötzensee memorial was also an integral part of Bonn’s effort to employ the resistance legacy as a ticket of readmission to the civilized world. As President Theodor Heuss declared in a speech commemorating the tenth anniversary of the Twentieth of July plot: “The blood of the martyred resisters has cleansed our German name of the shame which Hitler cast upon it. [The resistance] is a gift to the German future.” Since the early 1950s the story of the Twentieth of July assassination attempt has been told time and again, and Plötzensee has become a well-visited stop on the memory trail. With German unification it served as the place where the resisters’ ideal of a morally responsible Germany could he highlighted.
Another major “memory site” focusing on the German resistance was installed in the Bendlerblock, where, as we have seen, Count Stauffenberg and some of the other military resisters were shot. A statue memorializing the resistance martyrs was erected in the courtyard in 1953. Interestingly, the sculptor who designed this idealized figure, Richard Scheibe, had also crafted heroic statuary for the Nazis. The name of the street on which the complex is located was changed in 1955 from Bendlerstrasse to Stauffenbergstrasse. As at Plötzensee, contemporary ideological issues colored interpretations of the past. In dedicating the Bendlerblock statue, West Berlin mayor Ernst Reuter coupled the Twentieth of July legacy with the uprising against the SED-regime that had just occurred in East Berlin. Reuter’s gesture fit into the Federal Republic’s campaign to portray the GDR as the principal legatee of the Third Reich—a mirror image of East German efforts to depict West German capitalists as the true heirs of Hitler. By the early 1980s ideological blinkers had been cast off sufficiently to allow a somewhat more inclusive interpretation of the resistance legacy. A small museum in the Bendlerblock that had originally been installed in the 1960s was expanded and revised to offer a more comprehensive picture of the German resistance, with the inclusion of noted Communists. Yet this very inclusiveness enraged conservatives, who insisted that Communists had no place in the resistance pantheon. Following unification, Defense Minister Volker Rühe demanded the removal from the exhibit of pictures of Walter Ulbricht and Wilhelm Pieck, who, he said, “merely replaced one unjust regime with another.” Indignation, however, came from the other end of the political spectrum as well. On the eve of a celebration marking the fiftieth anniversary of the Twentieth of July plot, in July 1994, leftist students occupied the Bendlerblock museum in protest against what they saw as a dangerous veneration of reactionary militarists who had turned against Hitler only because he was losing the war.
A very different memorial, one concerned more with the perpetrators of Nazi terror than with the victims, was installed on the grounds of the SS and Gestapo headquarters in the former Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse. As we noted above, excavated ruins on the site and a small museum had been patched together there as a “Topography of Terror” on the eve of Berlin’s 750th anniversary celebrations in 1987. The installation was primitive and makeshift, and its custodians encountered resistance to their efforts to construct a permanent study center at the site. Federal and local officials insisted that there was not enough money for the project. Obviously, they were uncomfortable with an undertaking that illustrated the Nazi terror’s prominence in Berlin’s political landscape. Although the “Topography of Terror” backers wanted improved facilities, they did not want changes so obtrusive as to obscure the site’s quality as an “open wound” in the heart of the new Berlin. A design competition was launched in the early 1990s for renovations of the installations, but no substantial work was done. The place remained a powerful but confusing experience for most visitors, many of whom apparently expected to see more in the way of physical evidence of torture. The visitors’ book contained comments like “Cool, but a bit tame on the gory bits.” The fact that a preserved section of the Berlin Wall stood nearby was a further source of confusion; visitors could conclude that Hitler must have built the Wall. It is fitting, however, that relics of both the Nazi regime and the GDR stood cheek to jowl at this place: the point was not to conflate these two regimes, but to grasp Berlin’s centrality to both.
A better-known site of Nazi criminality is the Villa Wannsee, or “Haus am Wannsee,” though only one significant political event took place there, the so-called Wannsee Conference (January 20, 1942), at which various bureaucratic details of the Holocaust were discussed. Adolf Eichmann’s record of the conference was discovered in 1947, but it took another forty-five years to “give this place its history back,” as Mayor Diepgen put it in his remarks at the opening of a documentation center at the site on January 20, 1992. The Soviet and American military authorities who had commandeered the villa after the war made nothing of its history, nor did the German officials who used it as a children’s recreation center from 1952 to 1988. In the 1960s the West Berlin government even turned down an offer of $5 million from the World Jewish Congress to establish a documentation center in the house. The Berlin Senate said that it feared attracting neo-Nazis to the site, but it is more likely that it feared a backlash from right-wing voters. Finally, in the late 1980s, the West Berlin authorities came to understand that it was more damaging politically to ignore the villa’s history than to acknowledge it, and the work that culminated in the documentation center began. The exhibit that was installed in the house is a cross between a museum and a memorial, which, like all such hybrid constructs, presents a problem in itself. As Ian Buruma has commented: “You can remember the Holocaust through art, through ceremony, or through analysis and discourse, but you cannot do all this at the same time, or in the same place.”