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~ 1945-1949

Postwar Germany

Tag Archives: nazi

Slave labor and living history

09 Wednesday Mar 2016

Posted by Anika in Crime, general, Soviets

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Tags

germany, history, nazi, postwar, Russians, slaves, students

Here in Germany, my kids aren’t old enough to learn about the Nazi era in school yet. So I recently jumped at the chance to see what high school-age students were doing. It’s hard enough getting young people interested in all that old stuff. And anything short of virtual reality probably wouldn’t impress them, right?

So off I went to what the press was calling a “lecture performance” of 12th graders from the Burggymnasium in Essen. The venue piqued my interest too; the performance took place in the wartime air raid bunker under the city archive.

Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-B25447 / CC-BY-SA 3.0

Soviets deported to Germany, June 1942. Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-B25447 / CC-BY-SA 3.0

But first we crowded into the archive’s foyer in front of a table where two students in blouses and braided hair sat working. Cheerful period music was echoing in the hall, and it made me feel a little uneasy. We were there to learn about forced labor in wartime Germany – hardly cheerful. In clipped tones, the students called for us to get in line. It was dawning on some of us that the performance had already started.

When we entered the building, we were handed a card with a number and had been told it would be used to divide up the groups since the bunker space was so small. But once we got to the table in the foyer, we gave up the first number and were given another — mine was 721 — written on white tape. “Wear it in a visible place,” they told us. I slapped mine on my coat without asking what the number was for. I had a pretty good idea.

Numbered, I had to walk alone between two students in white shirts and dark pants. They stood at the foot of the stairway leading down to the basement. They held file folders, and as each of us walked by, they said in a bland tone, “Follow the directions.” Always this firm, impersonal tone. I was impressed and a little uneasy the students managed it so well.

In the narrow basement hallway, more students in white ordered us to go right or left. I joined the group waiting quietly in the right-hand hall. Maybe the others felt the same way I did, caught off balance by how quickly we obeyed what seemed like random orders.

Ukrainian women examined by German officials for work. May 1942. Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-B19880 / Knödler / CC-BY-SA 3.0

A door opened. This wasn’t the bunker yet, but a medium-sized room where thirty of us crowded inside. The windows were covered for the blackout. There were students in white shirts at a table with a scale, some bread and a cooking pot. There were students in baggy or shabby clothes lined up, their heads bowed. The “man in charge” talked to us then, complained about how hard it was to feed these people — the shabby ones, the Ukrainians dragged to Germany to work. When he had a question for us, he barked, “How much did a slave worker eat per day, number 721?” We looked down at the numbers on our coats, trying to remember who (what?!) we were. He talked about duty, and how if he wasn’t firm, if he failed in his duty, his own family would suffer. At which point he gave one of the student-slaves a mock kick and walked off.

The slaves spoke too — at first about home. How much they missed it, how their home gave them strength to endure. One scrubbed the floor as she talked about her fear of getting sick, of not being able to work anymore. It was uncomfortable having to look down on her the whole time. An air raid and sudden darkness, and we were evacuated out of the room.

To the bunker. Through a narrow door, we climbed into a nest of rooms with bare and dusty walls. Here and there, someone had stenciled the capacity the rooms had — 25 people, for instance, in a space too small to be comfortable. As we wandered from room to room, students acting as slaves told their stories of being snatched from their villages in the Ukraine or Russia. The journey to Germany in freight trains and the yearning for fresh air, space and freedom. Their work — sometimes with German families who treated them kindly; more often in factories, especially in Essen, where they were worked to exhaustion or death. Two students were closed into a replica of the famous steel locker used as an isolation cell and punishment for forced labor. There was poetry and artwork and period photos beamed on the walls. A group of students sang about home in German and Russian to a guitar accompaniment.

When we left the claustrophobic nooks and crannies of the bunker, the performance was over. My first thought was — these 12th graders put together one of the most informative and moving bit of living history I’d ever experienced. They had studied the testimony of forced labor and the Germans in charge of them to understand what went on in their own words. Students who spoke Russian translated some documents fully into German for the first time. But it was the performance itself, creating it, writing it and performing, that brought the students closer to the tens of thousands of slave workers forced to come to Essen more than 70 years ago.

An excellent performance and a great experience. Bravo.

 

8 million Nazis

24 Monday Feb 2014

Posted by Anika in Denazification

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Tags

berlin, document, germany, munich, nazi, party

After the war, when Germany went into denial (which lasted quite a few years, if Bundesarchiv_Bild_183-M1129-300,_Berlin,_Document_Centernot decades), many people insisted they had never been in the Nazi Party. Their papers, they thought, were destroyed, or unavailable in the eastern lands then controlled by the Soviets. Impossible to confirm their claim, right?

One German’s gutsy gamble in the last days of the war spoiled this game.

His name was Hans Huber, manager of a paper mill in Munich. On April 15, 1945, Hans had a visitor who informed him a large amount of paper would arrive soon that must be destroyed — immediately.

Three days later, the trucks began to arrive. Twenty trucks per day, nine days long. Each contained mounds (or rolls) of paper.

But not just any old paper. The central membership register of the Nazi Party.

Every party member from the NSDAP’s founding had a duplicate card stuck in the register and stored in steel cabinets in Munich’s Arcissstraße. Everyone including Hitler.

But there was more. The party applications themselves, with personal information, photos,and signatures also fell into Huber’s hands. SS documents too, handwritten notes from Himmler, Gestapo papers. In all, he had 50 tons of paper that could incriminate big and small Nazis alike.

When he realized what he had, Huber – no Nazi – decided to bluff. He delayed pulping the paper. He claimed he didn’t have enough coal, or his machines broke down because they didn’t have spare parts. Two weeks later, the Americans took Munich.

You’d think they would have jumped on such a treasure. But at first, the army was looking for real treasure — gold and art — not paper. Huber said he approached the Americans in May 1945, but no chance. They didn’t want paper.

In the fall, he finally came across an army archivist who took a look at the paper. “Any damn idiot” could see how important it was, Sargent B. Child told colleagues later.

But even then, the Nazi documents weren’t a sensation. They traveled to a warehouse near Kassel where the US military government collected and cataloged material found across Germany. As focus shifted to war crimes trials, the Allies saw the untold value of Huber’s paper. Right there was the documentary proof of membership in the NSDAP, along with other papers that could be used in war crimes trials.

In January 1946, 15 train loads of papers traveled to their final home — the Berlin Document Center. In his memoir, George Clare described the center that year.

I had expected to find a big barracks of a place but what I actually saw when I arrived at Wasserkäfersteig was a largish suburban villa, like so many in Zehlendorf. However, the high barbed-wire double-fence round the periphery of its extensive grounds, the floodlights and the armed, steel-helmeted sentries told me I had come to the right spot.

The Americans controlled the archive until 1994, and it’s now a part of the German Bundesarchiv.

And no one who was ever in the German Nazi Party could deny it and get away with it.

*Photo: Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-M1129-300 / Donath, Otto / CC-BY-SA [CC BY-SA 3.0 de (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/de/deed.en)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons

Destined to Witness

28 Thursday Feb 2013

Posted by Anika in Personalities

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Tags

book, Hamburg, journalist, massaquoi, nazi, postwar, witness

Some people live amazing lives.

On a visit to Berlin a few years back, I went to a book reading by a remarkable 80 plus-year-old who I’d never heard of until then. I haven’t forgotten him since.

Hans-Jürgen Massaquoi spoke softly into the microphone in a German tinted with his native Hamburg accent though he left Germany in 1947. HHans Jürgene was a journalist, former managing editor of Ebony Magazine, introducing his autobiography Destined to Witness.

He witnessed Nazi Germany and the postwar years like few others did. His mother Bertha raised him alone in a Hamburg neighborhood. His father, a Liberian student and grandson of the consul general of Liberia in Germany, rarely visited.

So there he was, a half-African German boy under one of the most racist regimes that ever was. He couldn’t hide from the Nazis; his skin would always betray him. Ironically, he didn’t have to hide. He went to school, lived happily with a loving mother, and later learned a trade. The network of people who knew him in his Hamburg neighborhood sheltered him somewhat from the worst of the regime. But the Nazis made it clear he was a second class citizen, and he endured racism from classmates, teachers and others. For him, being second class had a few advantages. He wasn’t persecuted like the Jews, Sinti and Roma. He was forbidden from joining the army, a blessing in disguise.

desinted coverReading his book, I came away with the feeling that his story wasn’t only about growing up mixed race under the Nazis. It was about a boy who desperately wanted to belong, and couldn’t. He wanted to join the Jungvolk, the Hitler Youth for younger children. He wanted to join the Wehrmacht. I didn’t get the impression he was ashamed of having felt this way, and he shouldn’t have been. It’s natural for a child to want to fit in, no matter what environment he grows up in.

He survived the war, the fire bombing of Hamburg, and entered the postwar years. For the first time, he saw men who looked like him, African-American soldiers. After a short stint in Liberia, he emigrated to the United States — a country with its own problems with race. But there, he found what he was looking for. He served in the army, went to college, launched a successful career as a journalist.

At the book reading, he seemed to enjoy every minute of the respect and wonder the German audience gave him. I shook his hand and asked him to sign my copy of his book. A brief encounter, but one I won’t forget.

Hans-Jürgen Massaquoi died on January 19, 2013. RIP.

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