A little further down from the Foreign Ministry, past where Freisler worked at the Ministry of Justice (opposite Goebbels’ Ministry of Propaganda), also on the right-hand side of the street was Albert Speer’s vast Reich Chancellery and the Führer Chancellery, Hitler’s headquarters (where Kritzinger and Klopfer had their offices).
We learn from a sign here that the Chancellery stretched 400 metres down Vossstrasse, so we pace this distance and are astonished at the scale of the original building. It stretches most of the way from Wilhelmstrasse to Ebertstrasse (where we walked yesterday). The sheer size of the Chancellery is the apogee of megalomania. And we’re again aware that it’s only by walking on the ground that you can really understand history. Gilbert’s map and assertion that the site of the courtyard where Hitler’s body was burned is now a children’s playground must surely be wrong. If the Chancellery was 400 metres long then the courtyard behind it couldn’t possibly be where the playground is today.
Instead we end up just before dusk in a banal car park at the back of Vossstrasse talking about the insanity of those final days in the bunker, Speer’s farewell visit with the Russians less than a mile away, the macabre description of the final concert of the Berlin Philarmonic with surviving Hitler Youth as ushers distributing cyanide capsules to the audience. It’s very strange to think of the bunker complex still there, a hundred feet or so beneath us. The Russians blew some of it up but presumably there are still some remains here. Of course we can respect the desire of the authorities not to create anything that could be used as a neo-Nazi place of pilgrimage, but for anybody intrigued by history there is something frustrating about what remains hidden, just out of view. And the power of place. The knowledge that these things happened here below our feet.
But away from one of the most written-about sites of modern history, I catch sight of another building – on the south side of Vossstrasse – one that is completely derelict now. There are no signs here but it’s certainly a building that predated the war. Could this be the former Directorate General of the German Railways? We’re confused again by Gilbert – he refers to ‘the building that stood on this site’, but surely this must be the original building? This also is a site of mass murder, the place where the deportation of millions of human beings was organised, but because this was a place of planners, of train timetablers, you will not find it on any historical tour of Berlin. Nobody glances at the former German Railways HQ here, while a few hundred yards further on down Wilhelmstrasse, past the vast surviving Air Ministry (ironically, one of the few central Berlin buildings to survive mass bombing), many people walk through the ruins of the ex-Gestapo headquarters at Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse 8 – where Müller once worked obsessively, ‘hardly ever [coming] out of his office’ – now a museum, The Topography of Terror. And just around the corner, Heydrich’s Berlin base at the Reich Main Security Office at Wilhelmstrasse 101 – where Lange and Schöngarth would report, when returning from Riga and Krakow. A little further back, at Leipziger Strasse, was Goering’s Four Year Plan headquarters, where Neumann worked.
It’s getting much colder now; J. is tired, he says he’ll meet me back at the hotel later. I decide to go to the Jewish Museum, designed by Daniel Libeskind, which is open for another hour. The museum is astonishing. Not so much the content but the experience that the building itself carries. It’s so powerful in its own right I feel it should not have been filled with information. We have too much information in the world but too few places that can move us. The windows throughout are violent slashes, razor wounds pointing towards all the areas of Berlin where deported Jewish families came from. Underneath, sloping down and then up, the three disorientating Axes of Continuity, of Exile, of Holocaust. This last one leading up to the Tower of the Holocaust. An attendant opens the heavy door and I’m suddenly in what seems to be a vast darkened space. Extremely cold and impossible to make out where the walls start or end. And nobody else here. Surrounded by this nothingness, my eyes look upwards, the instinctive habit of the frightened child, and eventually I make out the smallest source of light – a thin cone coming from high up. But this only intensifies the sense of isolation. Outside is Berlin, a night in late December 2003, but here it seems beyond time and space. I sink down to the floor, my back against the coldness of the stone, my eyes finally able to see a little further. I stay here transfixed for I don’t know how long.
From time to time the door is opened and light spills into the dark, momentarily giving edges to the space. But the few who come in leave again almost immediately. How to deal with emptiness? An erasure of such proportions.
*
Still shaken, I go back into the museum. I read that when the Nazis came to power there were 560,000 Jews in Germany. Of these, 276,000 emigrated before the war, 200,000 were deported and murdered, 4,000 committed suicide and just over 25,000 survived (9,000 in concentration camps, 15,000 through mixed marriages and 1,500 by going underground). But I’m perplexed by these figures, as they don’t add up to 560,000 – the only explanation I can think of is that the total number includes Jews who subsequently died ‘natural’ deaths as well. Another information panel says that today there are around 100,000 Jews living in Germany, 20,000 of whom are the children of survivors and former German citizens, and 80,000 being more recent immigrants from Russia, a figure that’s apparently increasing by around 10,000 each year. There’s also a map showing the geographical breakdown of the Holocaust, with the number of Jews killed from each country, by these figures totalling 5,578,329:
Poland – 3,000,000
USSR – 1,100,000
Hungary – 569,000
Czechoslovakia – 149,150
Lithuania – 143,000
Germany – 141,500
Netherlands – 100,000
France – 77,320
Latvia – 76,500
Greece – 67,000
Yugoslavia – 63,300
Austria – 50,000
Belguim – 28,900
Italy – 7,680
Estonia – 2,000
Luxembourg – 1,950
Norway – 762
Albania – 200
Denmark – 60
Finland – 7
Bulgaria – 0
There is, of course, something inherently problematic about such a stark presentation of such decontextualised data, as listing this way alters our reception of this information almost imperceptively – Germany’s role is diminished and the countries it occupied appear to bear greater responsibility for the killings. It is also surprising to see Romania and Britain (specifically the Channel Islands) omitted from this list. And I also don’t understand the figure shown here for numbers of German Jews killed – 141,500 – when the panel of information I’ve just read has described 200,000 being deported and murdered.
I go to collect my coat and bag from the cloakroom. On a wall in the entrance I’m disturbed to see this list of some of the museum’s sponsors – I can’t help but feel that it’s a kind of money-laundering-through-sponsorship exercise, as though such transactions could wash away the criminal responsibility of these corporations, all so closely allied to fascism in the past: