BASF
DaimlerChrysler
Dresdner Bank
Deutsche Bank
Deutsche Bahn
Siemens
BASF – one of the four main subsidiary corporations of IG Farben, the builders of Auschwitz III (Buna-Monowitz); DaimlerChrysler – as Daimler-Benz, users of mass slave labour; Dresdner Bank – the bank that led the Aryanisation of assets process; Deutsche Bank – whose loans built Auschwitz and who were bankers to the SS and IG Farben; Deutsche Bahn – who, together with the Directorate General headquarters we saw earlier today, organised the trains to Treblinka, Belzec and Auschwitz; Siemens, also users of wartime slave labour on an industrial scale.
6. The Grey Zone and Grunewald
30 December 2003, Berlin
Our last day in Berlin. We leave our hotel in Kastanienalle and head to the station at Lichtenberg, from where we’re going to catch our train tonight. After we’ve sorted out our tickets we find a left-luggage place and leave our heavy packs here. We then head for Kurfürstenstrasse, and get off the bus halfway down the wide street. We’re looking for 115–16, but again we’re struck by the selectivity of history’s gaze. In a city which probably now has more monuments, museums and documentation about the Holocaust than any other in the world, there seems little memorialisation here. Eventually, a hundred yards or so from the Hotel Sylter Hof, we do find a small marker of the importance of this site – a bus shelter for the No. 20 line, with information panels and large photographs of Adolf Eichmann. For this was close to the site of the former Office for Jewish Affairs, where Eichmann worked for years, with his relatively small team, patiently building the most detailed picture of the Jewish community in Germany and beyond. Developing the bizarre scheme for mass Jewish emigration to Madagascar. And later, from here, co-ordinating the logistics of the Holocaust, the round-ups of Jews, the deportations, the trains.
Although the actual building was demolished in 1961 (the same year as Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem), and although the street is now full of blocks of flats built in the 1970s and 80s, there are one or two mature trees on the opposite side of the road that may have been here sixty years ago as saplings. And as we think about Eichmann here, pausing at his desk, looking out of his window across Kurfürstenstrasse as the leaves on the trees reflected the changing seasons, Primo Levi’s words, in the Afterword to If This Is a Man, come back to me – he’s describing what he later would call ‘the grey zone’ – a place disturbingly beyond our normative conception of ‘good’ or ‘evil’, a zone epitomised by the middle managers of genocide:
We must remember that these faithful followers, among them the diligent executors of inhuman orders, were not born torturers, were not (with a few exceptions) monsters: they were ordinary men. Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions, like Eichmann, like Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz, like Stangl, commandant of Treblinka, like the French military of twenty years later, slaughterers in Algeria; like the Khmer Rouge of the late seventies, slaughterers in Cambodia.
In one of the last pieces he ever wrote, at the very end of The Drowned and the Saved, Levi went even further, explicitly connecting perpetrators in the SS with ourselves:
The term torturers alludes to our ex-guardians, the SS, and is in my opinion inappropriate: it brings to mind twisted individuals, ill-born, sadists, afflicted by an original flaw. Instead, they were made of our same cloth, they were average human beings, averagely intelligent, averagely wicked: save for exceptions, they were not monsters, they had our faces.
This view was strikingly shared by Hannah Arendt, who, having witnessed Eichmann’s testimony during his trial, and having spent much of her life investigating the psychology of totalitarianism, wrote this in Eichmann in Jerusalem:
The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgement, this normality was much more terrifying than all of the atrocities put together.
J. and I catch another bus, hoping to connect with a station that will take us to Wannsee. As ever, we’re fighting against the clock. And, as so often, trying to save time, you end up losing more. Our bus swings round into some crazed one-way system, taking us far away from where we want to go. We get off at the first opportunity, but we’re now in the middle of a nightmarish concrete jungle, part offices, part building site, and a dual carriageway going through the middle of it. We look at the map again but it’s hard to tell exactly where we are. We try to get onto another road, but our way is blocked by more construction works. We backtrack to the bus stop and head in the other direction, now infuriated by the chaos surrounding us. An enormous stadium appears around a bend – the Olympic one from the infamous 1936 games? Finally we reach a U-Bahn station, but there’s a sign saying that because of engineering works there are no trains between Christmas and New Year. I flag down a taxi and we ask to go to the closest (functioning) station. Dusk is not far away and I’d wanted to get to Wannsee in the light.
We drive for ten minutes; there’s now woodland on our right, a sense of the edge of the city, the houses are detached with gardens. The taxi pulls up outside a curious station building, rather grand with a parade of shops outside. It reminds me of the station at Kew Gardens. The same sense of being on the very edge of a vast city, but away from the hurly-burly. Flower shops. Estate agents. Delicatessens. The next train to Wannsee is not for twenty minutes so we wander along the platform, and it’s only then I see the sign: ‘Grunewald’.
A bizarre coincidence – by getting lost in Berlin, we’ve ended up at the station where the deportations of Berlin’s Jews started from. Over 50,000 people between 1941 and 1945. Many had lost their homes through Speer’s massive rebuilding programme, though, as always, he denied knowledge of that. I wonder how many would have come from the bustling streets where we were yesterday morning around Oranienburger Strasse? And how would they have been transported here? For my friend Peter’s grandparents, it would have been a much shorter journey, just a few stops from the even wealthier suburb of Wannsee. The woodedness of the area also has a curious link to Speer – apparently it was his initiative that led to the reforesting of Grunewald in the late 1930s.
We find a memorial here, as powerful in its simplicity as anything I’ve seen. The platform and railway track that was used for the deportations is now disused, but etched into each sleeper is the precise detail of every train that left here: the date, the number of people it carried, the destination. We learn about the first train:
18.10.41, 1,251 Jews, Berlin to Lodz
and then we walk all the way along the sleepers until we get to the marker for the final deportation train.
27.3.45, 18 Jews, Berlin to Theresienstadt
With the war lost, with massive shortages of transport, these trains were still leaving almost daily. We’ve never been more struck by the obsessive and insane nature of this extermination. After our frenetic criss-crossings of the city these last days and all that we have learnt, somehow this knowledge stuns us at a different level. All we can do is walk along, very slowly, and try to take in the meaning of every single piece of rusting track, and all the lives extinguished.