Authors: Roger Moorhouse
a choice of new flats elsewhere, and chose one in the quiet neighbour-
hood of Friedenau, a couple of kilometres to the south.45
Yet, in many cases, it was at this point that the building plans collided
with cold realities. Though Speer promised to house all the 200,000
or so displaced Berliners, in reality he was hardly in a position to do
so, as the Berlin housing market was already seriously under-supplied
and he could not build new properties at anything near the necessary
speed. This situation, coupled with the Berlin housing stock already
lost to RAF raids, led to a genuine housing crisis in the German capital,
a crisis that would have profound ramifications.
As perhaps is natural in a crisis – and especially so in a dictatorship
– the solutions to problems are often found with society’s weakest
members. In Berlin in 1941 the answer to the housing crisis was sought
in a stepping up of the official persecution directed towards the city’s
Jews: if there was insufficient housing stock to accommodate those
relocated as well as those bombed out, then the Jews would be forced
to make way.
Berlin’s Jews – like those elsewhere in the German Reich – had already
been subjected to growing persecution. By the outbreak of war, they
were effectively isolated from everyday German life, banned from most
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berlin at war
public places and facing severe restrictions on their movement and
employment. But events would soon take an even more ominous turn.
In fact, the idea of forcibly evicting Berlin’s Jews dated back to
September 1938, a full year before the outbreak of the war. At that
time, Speer suggested that the capital’s Jewish community should be
moved into smaller properties, thereby freeing up larger ones for the
use of those Aryan Berliners displaced by the ongoing demolition
works.46 Speer’s idea was at least partially incorporated into the revised
rental law of April 1939, which decreed that Jewish tenants could be
legally evicted if it could be demonstrated that replacement housing
was available elsewhere. This decree opened the way for a series of
piecemeal evictions of Jews from those areas that Speer had earmarked
for his building projects. In 1940, one thousand Jews were removed
from the area to the south of the Tiergarten, which was required for
the construction of new Danish, Swiss and Spanish embassies.47 The
following summer, a further five thousand Jewish properties were
ordered to be cleared.
In time, the rules regarding Jewish housing were tightened still
further.48 In 1941 it was decreed that all vacant properties in Berlin
were to be registered with Speer’s office, which would then decide
on whether, and to whom, they could be re-let. With this move, all
remaining rights of Jewish tenants were suspended, and it became
possible for the authorities, in effect, to decide where to house Jews.49
This resulted in the establishment of so-called
Judenhäuser
– ‘Jew houses’
– often dilapidated blocks in insalubrious areas, where large numbers
of Jews would now be concentrated, subletting individual rooms and
sharing the meagre facilities. As if to make matters worse, homeless
Jews now also had to be taken in by existing Jewish households.
Life in the
Judenhäuser
was difficult. Overcrowding was endemic,
with families often living in a single room, sharing bathrooms and
kitchens and enduring the inevitable conflicts. Inge Deutschkron
described some of the everyday problems in her ‘Jew house’, on
Bamberger Strasse in Schöneberg:
Eleven people lived there, in 5½ rooms, according to the rules; one room
for every 2 Jews. In the flat, there was only one bathroom and one
kitchen. The mornings there were terrible. Everyone wanted to get to
work on time, as lateness could be taken as grounds for deportation.
brutality made stone
115
To do more than was required appeared to promise security, or relative
security at least. Anyone who dared to spend a long time on the toilet,
would be driven out with wild banging on the door or hysterical
screaming. An attempt to introduce any form of order was doomed
by the irregularity of the shifts. Factions were formed and became
irreconcilable. Those who returned home exhausted, from the hard
labour that had been allocated to them, and found the kitchen occupied,
would scream at the lucky ones who had got there first.50
Anna Samuel would have recognised such hardships at once. Her new
flat in a
Judenhaus
in Köpenick was dismal. ‘It’s difficult’, she wrote to a friend, ‘no running water in the room, only in the hallway, [where] there
is always a hubbub.’ Though the sixty-eight-year-old pensioner tried to
make the best of it, she seemed to be thwarted at every turn. ‘How will
I create order’, she worried, ‘out of this chaos, when . . . every kitchen
amenity is missing . . . Where will I wash something? There is an elec-
tric hot plate in the hallway – but it is always in use . . . To get to the
shower, I have to get up between 5 and 6. Then I go back to bed.’51
Many
Judenhäuser
were worse still. One of them consisted of a
block of properties bordering Katzlerstrasse and Grossgorschenstrasse,
close to the railway in Schöneberg. Though it had been earmarked
for demolition, as it lay in the path of the proposed North-South Axis,
it was instead designated as a ‘Jew House’ in 1940. It would become
home to 220 Jewish families.52
Though the raft of legislation had stopped short of a blanket evic-
tion of Jewish residents, Jews were now being corralled into what was
in effect, if not in name, a ghetto. By the autumn of 1941, over two
thousand Berlin Jews had already committed suicide. Perhaps they had
simply had enough of the petty persecution and harassment; perhaps
they had suspected that worse was to come. Those they left behind
would soon have their darkest fears confirmed. That October, the first
transports left the capital, carrying some four thousand Berlin Jews
bound for the ghetto at Lódz.53
It is sometimes suggested that any analysis of Albert Speer’s plans for
the rebuilding of Berlin should be restricted to the architectural sphere.
Just because the Nazi regime was evil, some have argued, it does not
necessarily mean that its architectural output must be damned in turn.
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berlin at war
Nazi architecture, some say, should be assessed solely on its architec-
tural merits and demerits: its proportions, its materials, its capitals and
its pedestals. Ancient Rome was built on slave labour, yet no one would
suggest that the Colosseum should be bracketed in the same heinous
category as Hitler’s projected ‘Great Hall’.
This is a specious argument. Speer’s plans for Berlin are indeed
fascinating. Architecturally, they are if nothing else a potent display
of the astonishing extremes that can be reached by megalomaniacal
designers. Yet, those plans cannot simply be viewed from this perspec-
tive alone: in examining them, one is morally bound to consider not
only the designs themselves, but also the brutal methods by which
they were to be realised.
The Germania project perfectly reflected the dark, misanthropic
heart of Nazism, and in realising that project Speer’s office was not
a passive, innocent bystander. Rather, it emerges as a prime mover: a
motor of policy, not only in its own narrow ‘artistic’ sphere, but also
in areas as diverse – and nefarious – as the concentration camps and
the preparations for the Holocaust. Speer’s influence, therefore, was
clearly not confined to the artistic and the aesthetic. Speer was not,
as he later protested, merely an architect.
Hitler intended his new Berlin to stand as a monument to his rule.
Appropriately enough, none of his grand designs ever saw the light of
day. Today, only the
Schwerbelastungskörper
– the mushroom – still stands.
High on an embankment in the south of the city, it is now stained and
weather-worn and weeds crowd around its base. It served its purpose.
Its gauges recorded that the earth below it
did
shift, sinking between 11
and 18 centimetres across the six measuring points – a little beyond the
criteria deemed acceptable by Speer – but whether this might have curbed
the architect’s enthusiasm, or reined in his designs, is anyone’s guess.
The mushroom was supposed to have been pulled down after the
measurements had been completed, yet the worsening situation of
the war intervened and its demolition was repeatedly postponed and
then finally abandoned. To generations of post-war Berliners, it was
a conundrum, an eyesore that should not be permitted to remain, but
which could not feasibly be demolished. It stands now as architectural
curiosity, a silent witness to one man’s megalomania.
6
Unwelcome Strangers
They would arrive at any time of day or night. Their train would
inch down the siding in a cacophony of hissing and the screeching
of brakes. Many of them had travelled in relative comfort, in third-
class passenger carriages, with simple wooden seats and luggage
racks. Others had been packed unceremoniously into goods trucks,
without seats, toilets or any creature comforts at all. All of them
would be hungry and exhausted upon arrival. Their journey, what-
ever its starting point, would have been long and arduous, with much
time spent idling in sidings, while military transports and civilian
traffic were given priority. Very few of the new arrivals had any
inkling of what awaited them. Many had no idea of precisely where
they had been taken, even of which country they now found them-
selves in.
Emerging from the train onto a small platform, the arrivals were
confronted by ranks of soldiers, police and rail personnel. There, under
barked instructions, they collected themselves and formed into a column
to march through a gate and off down a track, leading into a birch
wood. After about 100 yards, they would have glimpsed barbed-wire
fences and, in a clearing beyond, a cluster of sturdy wooden barrack
blocks. Frenchman Albert Flammant arrived there in the summer of
1944:
It was a terrible sight. The high gate was made with wooden beams
interlaced with barbed wire. To the left and right of the gate, there were
watchtowers made with rough-cut branches; above a single searchlight.
Two parallel barbed wire fences, separated by about 2 metres, marked
off a closed area, where there were numerous barracks.1
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berlin at war
There, deep in a wood known to its inhabitants as ‘the Forest
of Tears’, was his destination: the
Durchgangslager
, or ‘Transit camp’, of Wilhelmshagen.
The new arrivals were labourers. They would come to be known
as
Zwangsarbeiter
, ‘forced labourers’ or even ‘slave labourers’, though
they were officially known as
Ausländische Arbeitskräfte
, or
Fremdarbeiter
–
‘foreign workers’. Millions of them were brought in to feed the Nazi
military-industrial complex and replace those German workers who
had been drafted for military service. It is estimated that over six
million2 foreign workers laboured within Germany during the war.
They served in every capacity imaginable, from helping to gather the
harvest in rural communities, to working as servants in private homes
and labouring within the flagships of German industry.
It was not the first foreign worker programme in Nazi Germany.
A voluntary labour scheme had been rolled out across occupied Europe
in 1940, seeking to attract workers by promising adequate food, good
conditions and regular leave for visits home. However, the wartime
needs of German industry quickly outstripped the available volun-
teers. Soon, more coercive measures were being employed.
By the time Wilhelmshagen opened for business, in the autumn of
1942, workers were being ‘recruited’ across occupied Europe by means
of raids on church congregations, mass arrests, forced conscription
and intimidation. Those who arrived at the camp came from all corners
of the continent, from rural France to the western republics of the
Soviet Union. In total, it is estimated that as many as 150,000 labourers
made their way down the ramp and through the barbed-wire gates
of Wilhelmshagen.
Their new home was certainly in a picturesque area. Located at the
south-easternmost limit of Berlin’s suburbs, Wilhelmshagen was a quiet
settlement of villas and detached houses, surrounded by beech woods.
There were also lakes: the Müggelsee to the west, the Dämeritzsee to
the south, and the River Spree linking the two before meandering off
into the city centre. The logic of placing a transit camp there was
simple: not only did the semi-rural location allow a great deal of space,
it also assured a degree of privacy. Moreover, the camp was located
off a main rail line, with its own siding, on the eastern approaches to