Berlin

I went to Berlin about two months ago, to get a work permit to come to the Great White North. (Not the Great White North of my first choice - I wanted a job in Tromso, Norway, but they never got back to me.) It was an interesting place, haunted badly by the ghosts of 20th-century totalitarianism. Bits of Berlin Wall all over the place, plastered with graffiti; communist detritus; Checkpoint Charlie and the various sectors Berlin was divided up into after the war; the foundations of the Gestapo HQ (now torn down, and being rebuilt as a commemorative museum). And a fair few older buildings too - the Brandenburg Gate, the Reichstag, the Angel of Berlin - from a time when Germany was merely excessively militaristic, rather than being run by genocidal lunatics.

The Gestapo HQ, as I say, was being rebuilt, albeit not for its original purposes. But in the meantime, there's an exhibition among the dismantled foundations, with lots of photos and the occasional audio recording, tracking the history of the SS. I started at the wrong end and progressed back in time. There were a great many things that struck me; the most memorable was the section concerning notable prisoners held there, often later transported to a concentration camp somewhere. Each prisoner got photos and a short blurb in English and German, and often extracts from letters they wrote, and their stories were highly varied - a kind of martyr's gallery spanning the political spectrum. Quite a few communists, of course, several of whom wound up committing suicide due to torture; one priest was permitted to give a Christmas service to other prisoners, and was interrupted partway through by a loud thud - the guard informed him it was a communist jumping off the top of the stairwell. There were a fair few nationalist conservatives, who'd endorsed Hitler in peacetime, but didn't like the way the German military was reduced to committing atrocities in wartime - systematic ethnic cleansing of Jews and Slavs was going too far, so they rebelled. Some of these made interesting figures in their photos before the People's Court - looking scared but defiant, or just too old and cranky to care what was done to them. There was a Lutheran minister whose breaking-point was the euthanasia of the old and sick. There was Josef Mueller of the Catholic resistance, who ferried intelligence to the British via the Vatican. Admiral Canaris is well-known.

Adolf Reichwein stuck in my mind particularly. A friend saw in his face, during trial before the People's Court, the eventual triumph of humanity over the monstrosity they were facing; his last letter to his wife was affectionate and loving, and urged her to trust in God. You could see all of this in the court photo - he didn't have defiance written on his face, but serenity, facing death unafraid and trusting God. There's photos from the trial here and here; though sadly the exact photo I saw there doesn't seem to be on the internet.

There was information on the atrocities committed by the SS - revenge attacks on the civilian population, ordered sometimes by Hitler himself in response to partisan attacks on German soldiers. These were disturbingly well documented - a lot of Germans, for some reason, took cameras with them to the front lines. In one photo, a hanged Russian dangled before a crowd of German soldiers and civilian auxiliaries, several of whom were taking photos themselves. It made me think of the ubiquity of digital cameras today, and specifically of thugs filming themselves kicking the crap out someone while cheerfully announcing "this'll make great youtube material!"

There's an extract from a letter by an SS officer to his wife, casually stating that, because the war is all the Jews' fault, therefore the Jews bear the brunt of it, and as far as the German soldier advances, Russia becomes a Jew-free Zone. "Please do not tell Frau Schmidt", he adds. Of course, she and the kids want to know about his well-being; he says all the shootings are really doing his nerves no good (there were 96 again this morning). he'd be OK if it weren't for the shootings. The children want to know if he can get fresh fruit? An apple a day, and it's a hassle to get that.

Of all the many disturbing things there, though, the worst was the letter between SS operatives in the Netherlands tasked with deporting Jews. It was standard-issue beaurocratic quota management, except that the export quota was for human beings to go to the gas chambers. Our monthly Jew quota is XXX, we only deported YYY, we're missing 222 Jews, and such-and-such an office insists we make it up, right damn now, or it's our head on a plate. Where are we going to find 222 extra Jews on such short notice? The possible options are as follows...

Such was my trip to Berlin. A fascinating city, wild and varied architecturally, and with the fingerprints of 20th-century nightmares all over it.