The Topography of Terror — Writer & traveller

Jews, homosexuals, political dissidents: we know and/or are the kind of people the Nazis came for during their reign of terror, from the early 1930s until the end of World War Two in 1945.

The Topography of Terror uses photos, state documents, eyewitnesses accounts, newspaper clips and film footage to detail the history of repression under the Nazis. The exposition unfolds in a plain concrete building in Berlin, where once stood the Secret Service and Gestapo headquarters.

How did it happen? Why was opposition to the Nazis insufficient to prevent murder on such a massive, massive scale?

These are questions Topography of Terror seeks to address by focusing on the role of the Gestapo and SS.

It started with public humiliation of people who didn’t agree with the Nazis. Teachers, politicians, journalists were named and shamed. Political opponents were taken into ‘protective custody’. Jews were dismissed from the public service and their jobs given to those in favour; newspapers shut down, the media concentrated and controlled.

Intimidation led to arrests and interrogation.

Police raided gay bars and imprisoned the patrons, synagogues were desecrated, their furniture and sacred objects dragged out into the street and and set alight, Rabbis abused.

Much of this was watched by crowds of onlookers and reported in state-owned media.

Photos displayed at the Topography of Terror show large numbers of people gathered around the bonfires on city streets when the synagogues were ransacked; and neighbours leaning out of apartment windows, watching curiously as police herd scared and distressed families out of their homes and into waiting vehicles.

Surely you’d do or say something, wouldn’t you? And so would your friends and neighbours, your family and community. Wouldn’t they?

By placing personal stories and eyewitness accounts in amongst reports written by Gestapo and SS officers, Topography of Terror succeeds in personalising our response to Nazism.

Impossible not to imagine how Malcolm and myself would have been arrested, separated, abused, then killed or sent to the death camps. Same thing in the end.

I stood there asking myself, at what point would I have let go. If I had the choice - although few did - would I have recognised the inevitability of murder and surrendered to it early? Or would I have struggled to survive, believing there are enough good people to intervene.

The Nazis killed up to 6 million Jews and hundreds of thousands of dissidents, gypsies, partisans, so-called ‘asocials’ and people with disability in just over a decade. What’s less well-documented is the extent to which large numbers of people, corporates and institutions such as the Red Cross, the Bank of England and the Vatican helped and profited from Nazism.

Opinions vary, of course. But the exhibition includes this observation by historian Gotz Aly:

’How did National Socialism, which in retrospect was such an obviously deceitful, megalomaniacal and criminal undertaking, succeed in attaining such a high degree of acceptance in Germany?

‘Hitler, the Nazi party gauleiters, a majority of ministers, state secretaries and advisers acted as classic populists attuned to shifting moods.

‘They bought public approval or at least indifference anew, every day. By giving and taking away, they built a dictatorship of consent with consistent majority appeal.’

It’s not until later in the day that I learn about the Silent Heroes Memorial Centre, also in Berlin. It documents the efforts of those who resisted persecution in Nazi Germany.

We’d arranged a tour with Dr Finn Ballard, a historian who some years ago moved to Berlin from Ireland. It’s too hot to be on the street for too long during the day, so we agree to meet for dinner then a walking tour of Mitte, the political centre for so much of what we saw earlier in the day.

“How about Chinese at Peking Ente on Vossstrasse 1, right on top of Hitler’s bunker?”, asks Finn.

“Sounds like a great opening for a story... we’re in!”

Not surprisingly, Finn has a keen eye for the ironies, absurdities, hypocrisies and deliberately obscured experiences of Nazi Germany, as well as for its documented tragedies.

Who knew, that Buffalo Bill and Annie Oakley entertained the Kaiser in Berlin, at a theater not far from the restaurant Hitler bought for his half brother, whose son William Patrick Hitler ended touring the USA, expounding on the subject “my uncle Adolf”.

As we walk along the same street Malcolm and I had walked earlier in the day, on our way to the Holocaust Memorial. Finn stops and points to a silhouette we’d not noticed previously. It’s a metal outline of a man’s face, hanging above us on Vossstrasse.

It’s Johann Elser, Finn tells us. He single-handedly engineered an elaborate assassination attempt on Hitler in 1939, in Munich.

All up, there were an astonishing 120 attempts to assinate Hitler, most of which were thwarted by a random turn.

In Elser’s case, a change in the weather and a a small change in plans meant the bomb intended for Hitler exploded 10 minutes or so after Hitler left the building. The Gestapo and SS couldn’t believe Elser acted alone. He was kept alive and tortured for years before being murdered at Dachau.

Our tour takes us back to the Holocaust Memorial, an uneven assembly of tomb-like concrete plinths, a stone’s throw from the Brandenburg Gate. It was eloquent and sombre in full sun; now, in the evening light, it looks more than ever like a graveyard.

Finn takes us across the road, into the Tiergarten. There stands the Memorial to Homosexuals Persecuted Under Nazism.

It’s a hollow concrete cube, separate from but connected to the Holocaust Memorial because its material presence is similar to the memorial to persecuted Jews.

We peer inside and see a film playing silently, on a loop. It shows two men kissing, and alternately, two women kissing. This simple act takes place against a revolving background of images showing Nazi persecution of the men who were forced to wear the pink triangle.

It took a long time for the stories of homosexual survivors to be told. Testimonies weren’t published until the early 1980s, and it took another 20 years for Berlin’s homo monument to appear.

But the city got there, in the end. Not without controversy within LGBTI and some Jewish communities.

The monument works. It’s a silent counterpoint to terror. A quiet and hopefully perennial expression of the topography of love and desire.