J. and I have talked for years about these places, these sites of catastrophe, and now, finally, we will be seeing them together. I don’t think I could do this alone. And J. has been my companion from the earliest years of this quest, so it is entirely right that we’ll be meeting, in a few minutes, at the Berlin station this train is now pulling into. We have a guide on this journey too, in the form of an invaluable book by Martin Gilbert, which J. gave me five years ago – Holocaust Journey. I open the book, and see that J. has inscribed it in his elegant writing, ‘For Dan, In hope of a future journey together …’ It is also almost exactly twenty years since we met, since Platform was born, so these ten days are also a way of marking this milestone.
Stepping down onto the platform with my heavy rucksack – J. there immediately, taking off his black hat and bowing in exaggeratedly formal greeting. Wonderful to see him. Both of us a bit shot away from our overnight journeys so we find a café just out of the station, at the top of the Kurfürstendamm. J. also feeling a bit funny about Berlin – bad associations with a girl here in the late 1980s. Then, following Gilbert, we walk up the Landswehr canal, past the place where Rosa Luxemburg was murdered, then along a tree-lined street to see the Spanish Embassy, a rather pompous neoclassical edifice. Eagles over the door with Franco’s slogan ‘Una, grande, libre’ (‘One, great, free’). Surprised by that detail of Gilbert’s that Franco refused to deport any Spanish Jews. Round the corner, the former Danish Legation, built by Albert Speer. Shocked by its blandness, total lack of anything distinctive. In Rauchstrasse, two more Speer buildings, the former embassies of Yugoslavia and Norway. We reflect on the laziness of many historians who repeat the cliché that ‘all that remains of Speer today is a few lamp posts in Berlin’.
We walk eastwards along Tiergartenstrasse. How much this street has occupied my mind over the last years. Or rather, what was planned from a villa on this street, at Tiergartenstrasse 4 – ‘T4’, as the Nazi ‘euthanasia’ programme became known – which killed over 70,000 people in its first phase between September 1939 and August 1941, including children, the elderly and mentally and physically disabled patients. It feels like the Kensington of Berlin – a wooded park to the left, embassy buildings to the right. And the former Krupp villa. Imagining all the meetings of industrialists and Nazi leaders here. Now, we see it’s a Jesuit college. We continue, past the site of the former British passport control office, picturing thousands of Jewish Germans queuing up here in the 1930s as the situation became more and more desperate.
A couple of hundred yards further on and we’ve arrived at the site of the T4 villa. There is a small plaque here but nothing else to mark the place. We are confused by Gilbert’s account: he describes a piece of wasteland where it is still possible to see ‘the occasional brick or broken stone’ of the building that was once here. But there is nothing at all here now. Although the view from the villa over the park opposite would doubtless have been the same. As the bureaucrat killers looked up from their desks. Or left for their lunches.
Today, perhaps fifty yards behind where the T4 villa stood, thousands gather every week at one of the global shrines of classical music – the Berliner Philharmonie, home to the Berlin Philharmonic (overseen when we were there by the conductor Simon Rattle).
The ‘euthanasia’ killings were organised from this place – which was given the title the ‘Charitable Foundation for Institutional Care’. Hitler had appointed his own doctor, Professor Karl Brandt, and Reichsleiter Philipp Bouhler of the Chancellery to oversee the programme of supposed ‘mercy deaths’. But the details of the operations were organised by SS Oberführer Viktor Brack, based here at Tiergartenstrasse. The killings were carried out at six sites across Germany, all psychiatric hospitals – Grafeneck, Brandenburg, Bernburg, Hartheim, Sonnenstein and Hadamar, between January 1940 and August 1941. At these hospitals, small, improvised gas chambers, often disguised as ‘shower rooms’, were created. Carbon monoxide gas, supplied by BASF (then part of the IG Farben corporation), was used in the gas chambers, and afterwards some of the victims’ bodies were dissected for supposed ‘medical science’, gold teeth were extracted, and then the bodies were burned in crematoria. All techniques that were later used, on a far larger scale, in the extermination programme. Many of the key personnel in Aktion T4 such as Viktor Brack, Christian Wirth, Philipp Bouhler, August Becker and Albert Widmann, and others working on the security side, such as Franz Stangl (then a security police superintendent at Hartheim), were subsequently transferred to the Aktion Reinhard extermination programme in Poland, where they used the experience of mass murder they had first gained in Aktion T4.
As the news of the ‘euthanasia’ programme became more publicly known in 1940 and 1941, there was growing disquiet and even protest from relatives of disabled citizens, and also from some within the Lutheran and Catholic Churches. This protest culminated in Bishop Galen of Munster publicly criticising the ‘euthanasia’ programme in sermons in July and August 1941, and sending a direct appeal to Hitler to stop the Gestapo killings – the victims were ‘our compatriots, our brothers and sisters. Poor unproductive people if you wish, but does this mean that they have lost their right to live?’ Although reports of Galen’s sermons were not printed in the German press, leaflets were soon widely circulated in what the historian Richard Evans has described as ‘the strongest, most explicit and most widespread protest movement against any policy since the beginning of the Third Reich’.1 Shortly afterwards, on 24 August 1941, Hitler ordered the T4 programme to be suspended.fn1
Apart from the killing of almost 300,000 human beings, the most shocking aspect of the T4 operation was the collusion of many senior doctors in organising mass murder – doctors who all would have signed the Hippocratic Oath vowing to save lives, not to end them. As we walk down towards Potsdamer Platz, the new towers of commerce and skyscrapers looming ahead of us, J. and I remember the shattering impact of first encountering Lifton’s book on the doctors of Auschwitz. I tell J. about another remarkable work which examines the systematic corruption of the medical profession under Nazism – Cleansing the Fatherland by GÖtz Aly, Peter Chroust and Christian Pross. It’s now known that 38,000 doctors had joined the Nazi party by 1942 (more than half of all doctors in Germany at the time) and that 7 per cent of doctors were members of the SS (compared to 1 per cent of the general population). The authors describe the ‘collective amnesia’ of the German medical establishment in the post-war years, and their inability to face the reality of their profession’s direct complicity with the worst horrors of Nazism.
*
We walk on, the roar of traffic at Potsdamer Platz making it impossible to talk. This part doesn’t seem like Berlin at all, the bland modernity of this financial quarter, the shimmering glass-and-steel towers could be any city. Extraordinary to think that only twenty years ago this was a wasteland – the place where Wenders filmed the elderly Berliner sitting surrounded by dereliction, lost in his memories of his pre-war city, in Wings of Desire. We decide to head north, up Ebertstrasse, relieved to be away from the noise, with the winter trees of Tiergarten now on our left, waving to us in the afternoon light, and the sense of dusk not far away.