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Feb. 23 | Humble Beginnings: Notes from Germany

NOTE: When I was traveling in Germany in 1998 with my friend Maria Henzler, I was writing for a magazine on Rob Brezny's Real Astrology site, and did a series on civil rights in Germany and the early days of the Nazi regime. I went to Deutchland, in part, with a mission of figuring out how it all happened, and to see how Germans were dealing with it today. In essence, the question was this: We all know how it ended. How did it begin?

Here is an excerpt (with light edits) from an article called "Hell's Bells," published in Sept. 1998 in the Planet Waves series in the "Televisionary Oracle" newsletter. The setting is Erfurt, in the former East Germany, where we learned the Holocaust first began in the spring of 1933. (Erfurt was also the birthplace of the Protestant Reformation some centuries earlier.) Unfortunately, the photos are not available now.

EARLY AFTERNOON Sunday and we're going to meet Bernhard for a tour of some Nazi artifacts. Two o'clock comes and we walk a few blocks. First he takes us to what remains of the old Erfurt synagogue. We explore the gutted building, and I wonder what they said to one another here during those years. Then we ride a streetcar across the cityscape, and then another, toward a place called Ilvers Gehoffen, which is now part of Erfurt but a century ago was its own town. We get off the trolley and walk, stopping to peek into the apartment house where Bernhard was born. He said he hadn't been back here since the late 60s when he was investigating Nazi atrocities. The neighborhood has that neutron bomb feeling -- all buildings, no people.

We come to Feldstrasse, an ordinary-enough looking depressed urban street, with a row of small apartment houses. The neighborhood reminds me of somewhere in the desolate Bronx. In the middle of the block, on the front an apartment building, between two first-floor windows, is a memorial plaque, informing rare passers-by that on the other side of these buildings was a "protection arrest camp" where 100 anti-fascists were imprisoned, tortured and interrogated, and where in April 1933 four leaders of the "Erfurter Resistance Warriors" -- Heinze Sendhoff, Josef Ries, Waldemar Schapiro and Fritz Büchner, were imprisoned and, somewhere -- it's unclear where -- "killed like animals." It concludes somberly, "Their lives should be an example and obligation to all of us."

This occurred less than 12 weeks after Hitler first took office as Reichs Chancellor, without, by the way, having been elected*. We are aghast at the swiftness of this. There is a big garage door near the sign leading under the apartment houses and into the warehouse on the other side, which is now occupied by a metal company.

We walk around the block to the right, and behind the row of houses is a large and mostly-vacant city lot. There are a few dilapidated buildings and a lot of old bricks lying around with weeds growing. The metal company's building is behind a fence; there's also a brick building that looks like an old slaughterhouse you might see along the lower west side of Manhattan. This was it, this whole place. We are standing in what we believe was the very first concentration camp.

Normally we are used to seeing the terrible results of the Holocaust; these are the humble and all-but-forgotten beginnings. I doubt whether any other Americans have come here. The warehouses are surrounded by numerous apartment buildings. Bernhard explains that there was an exercise yard for the prisoners, which we are now standing in. And here, he said, as we walk, was a very popular cinema where the good citizens would watch movies right next door to where prisoners were being tortured. We ponder this one for a while. At a little café across the street from the ruins, the Marmara Imbis Turkish Bar and Café, people are drinking coffee on the street.

The psychology becomes very clear. Put the thing where everybody can see it and hear it. And naturally, nobody will complain. And if you lived in one of these apartments, on a hot summer night when the windows were open, you certainly might want another pillow to bury your head -- as Bernhard has informed us was the practice at the time this space was used as a torture prison. As we walk around surveying the scene, taking photographs, faces start to appear in those windows and eyes stare at us. I know that they know exactly why we are here, and the way they are gawking at us their anger is clear. We are acknowledging what they must somehow both deny and yet live with every day of their lives. Nothing changes here.

We walk to a street car and head back to the hotel. I don't know it at the time, but I am slipping into shock, and it will be some weeks before I come out of it.

--

*Hitler was initially appointed Reichs Chancellor by the aged and ineffectual then-German President Paul Hindenburg, and was elected head of state in 1934. He continued to hold the title Reichs Chancellor through his death in 1945. Here is a Wikipedia reference:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitler#Hitler.27s_appointment_as_Chancellor

Here is the article from which today's edition is excerpted: http://snipurl.com/mtne