A unique museum honouring Germans who helped persecuted Jews stay alive under the Nazi tyranny has opened in Berlin. The Silent Heroes Memorial Centre is the first of its kind dedicated to individuals who helped to hide, feed and care for people who otherwise would have gone to the gas chambers.
Tucked away in a tenement block on Rosenthaler Strasse, it lies in the heart of Berlin's pre-war Jewish quarter, not far from the site of the former paintbrush factory where an anti-Nazi activist helped deaf and blind Jews shelter from the Gestapo round-ups.
Germany had a pre-war population of 550,000 Jews; by 1945 fewer than 15,000 were left. Many of those were saved thanks to the courage of Christians who put their own lives on the line. The names of just 3,000 'silent heroes' are officially known, but historians believe that many more cases remain unrecorded. According to some estimates 20,000 people across the country are thought to have offered their Jewish fellow citizens some form of support and refuge.
'Compared to the number of people who allowed Nazi atrocities to happen or even took part in them, the people who shielded Jews were a tiny minority,' said Berlin's mayor Klaus Wowereit. 'But it is this minority that gives us direction. By commemorating these courageous people, we are ensuring that attacks on human dignity will not be tolerated.'
On display are photographs, letters and other documents recording 250 Germans who risked their lives giving Jews food, shelter or a place to work from 1938 to 1945. These Jews were known to themselves and the authorities as 'U-boats'; like submarines, they were not to be seen.
One poignant artefact is a key that belonged to Jewish seamstress Alice Loewenthal. It opened the door to a flat where she lived with her husband and four daughters. The family were taken by the Gestapo, but by a quirk of fate Loewenthal escaped and was given false papers by a friend in the police. Next to the key lies a doll and a small photograph album, all that remained of her family life; her daughters and husband were murdered at Auschwitz.
Another display chronicles the fate of Ilse Lewin, who was born in 1911 and grew up in Berlin. She had the chance to emigrate to England, but she did not want to leave her mother, Gretha. From September 1940 on, Lewin had to work at a Siemens factory as a forced labourer. After her mother was seized at the end of 1942, Lewin decided to evade her own impending deportation. Her friend Greta Schellwort warned her of the huge round-up planned for 27 February, 1943, in which all the Jews in Berlin, especially those working in armaments factories, were to be arrested and deported.
At first she was taken in by acquaintances, but after that she found no permanent shelter until mid-1944. She lived on food that Schellwort slipped to her. She was able to earn some money as a cleaner in a tailor's shop until the man took advantage of her situation to harass her sexually. Lewin's friend, Vera Freyer, provided her with forged papers and she obtained a postal identity card in Freyer's name. In the summer of 1944 another non-Jewish friend, Ilse Glondajewski, helped her to find a hiding place in the Berlin district of Prenzlauer Berg, where she hid until the end of the war.
'There are many memorial sites dedicated to those targeted by the Nazis, but there has never been one which is solely dedicated to these heroes,' said Johannes Tuchel, director of an umbrella organisation for memorials of resistance to the Nazis which put the collection together. He now plans to work with eastern European archivists and colleagues at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Israel, to extend the project.
The museum's opening comes just days before ceremonies marking the Kristallnacht pogrom of 9 November, 1938, when the Nazis gave a foretaste of the Holocaust to come by ransacking Jewish homes, businesses and places of worship. Hundreds died and thousands were thrown into concentration camps. The first step on the road to mass extermination had been taken.