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From a 1998 essay by Eric Francis...

In Germany it's hard to get anybody
to talk honestly about the Holocaust. One of my missions in coming here was to find out how it happened, how so many tens of millions of people were arrested, imprisoned, shot, tortured, gassed and cremated, just like that; how it went on and on for years, ending with a massive, morbid free-for-all in the final months when the SS knew it was over. I did not expect to interview some retired old Gestapo guys for the "inside story," but rather, I thought it might be possible to discover something in the culture that would help explain it. When I raised the subject, people would often look at me sheepishly and tell me how ashamed they are of their country's conduct, but fortunately that's the past. And yes, we learned all about it in school. But that's about it. Not a shred of the cynicism you'd expect to see. No anger. Just, you know, sorry about that, it was terrible, let's have lunch. But Bernhard, who says he's one of 40 Jews still living in Erfurt -- his mother was a Jewish concentration camp survivor -- has a little more to say.

 A writer, artist and political activist born here in Erfurt and raised entirely under the DDR [old East Germany], he began documenting Nazi crimes at the age of 18 in 1968, the same year Russian tanks rolled across nearby Prague and blew everyone's mind, and the year he sat in jail for six weeks under "protective custody" for playing music at an anti-Soviet demonstration one afternoon. His speaking voice rings deep and thick like those 11-ton bells up the hill wish they could. He starts right in with something that is quite unbelievable.

 The Holocaust, he says, began right here in Erfurt, where the first concentration camp, or konzentrationslager, was put into a dense city neighborhood quite early on. "Some people were killed there," he explains, but mostly they were interrogated and tortured; one of the favorite Nazi torture methods of the early days was hanging people from poles by their arms, which were tied behind their backs. "People said they heard cries and screaming. They needed one pillow more for the night because people were shouting down there. It was an old factory in the middle of these houses where this happened, and everyone that lived on the first floor could directly look into this concentration camp." The infamous Buchenwald, which he says is about 20 kilometers away, came a few years later.

 I have seen a lot of images from the Nazi regime, because as a student I taught at the Holocaust Education Center in John Dewey High School, in Brooklyn. But a concentration camp in a city neighborhood? I asked the journalistic Dumb Question of the night: Why didn't people do anything?

 "Because they thought it was right. Because everything that the law says is right. And people still think that way. This is proven, because how can a totally communist country [East Germany] become a totally capitalist country in one day? If the country were to become communist again, everybody would become communist. If it were to be fascist, everybody would be fascist."

 Yet Erfurt, in particular, has a reputation for dissent; if you're fishing for dissidents, look where there are a lot of reactionary arch-conservatives. A major city, I learn that it was where Martin Luther, the white one, attended seminary, and where he launched his tirade against the Roman Catholic Church, writing, in a 1517 letter, "These unhappy souls believe that if they buy a letter of pardon they are sure of their salvation; also that souls fly out of purgatory as soon as money is cast into the chest." Ooooch. One of Luther's position papers, on which he demanded public debates, inquired of Church authorities, "Why does not the Pope, if he has the power, out of Christian charity, empty purgatory of the suffering souls all at once?" Ouch.

 Now a Martin Luther doesn't come strolling along every day, but Erfurt maintained its reputation, its kind of freaky-and-free-despite-it-all vibe, and some say that's why Hitler -- in addition to his National Socialist (Nazi) party being strong in Thüringen, the "green heart of Germany," where we are -- chose Erfurt to begin the rounding up of political dissidents, anti-Fascists, priests, artsy-fartsies, what were called "work-shy" people, and anyone else who potentially threatened him. He was obviously insecure. It's clear that once Adolf and his boys had their foot-holds in place, kicked with steel-toed boots into the absolute destitution of the German economy, and the grave desperation of its people in the early 1930s, the idea of "public support" for Hitler became rather negated by public terror. In other words, say or insinuate anything against the Nazis and you're off to Buchenwald, blond hair and blue eyes notwithstanding. And many millions of people were arrested and murdered for far less; indeed for nothing. So dissent was not what you'd call a major factor in the early years, and effective organized resistance finally came much later.