Remnants of the Nazi Era in Germany Today
The Nazi era was undoubtably one of the worst periods history has ever recorded. Millions were killed and whole countries left in ruin. I’ve always had an interest in the Second Word War. So when I had a chance on The Village Program to take a special JourneyCOURSE to Munich, I found myself boarding a train to spend a week in Bavaria, where I’d be able to study the history of Nazism and the Holocaust by visiting museums and sites related to that horrible epoch of destruction.
I was surprised our first morning of class at how new Munich looked. In fact, due to how hard Munich was hit by allied bombs in the latter half of World War Two, much of the city had been leveled, taking with it many of the buildings that were central to the rise of Hitler. And as a class, we discussed how if the physical reconstruction of the city was dramatic post-1945 — obliterating in many cases even traces of the Nazi past — the emotional rebuilding process is still ongoing. Indeed, we explored how the city and its citizens are constantly reckoning with the fact that the creation of any historical marker related to the Nazis runs some risk of becoming a travel destination or shrine for neo-Nazis. Similar issues have arisen on the larger question of historic memory and memorialization, as Germans generally and citizens of Munich specifically have changed how they think and talk about the Nazi years over the decades since that awful period. This evolution was especially well explored in the documentation center on the history of Naziism and World War II where our class met in Munich, but almost everywhere we went in the city and around it we found subtle or direct discussions about the past were in evidence.
Despite the ravages of bombing and the intervening years, some sites still stand much as they did in the Nazi era. Hitler’s old home in Munich, “Dodgers Alley” and Feldernhalle, the Nazi Congress Building and Rally Grounds in Nuremberg, and the Dachau Concentration Camp are among the more powerful places we visited for class. These haunting places — where significant events unfolded during the time the Nazis were in power — are entry points today for a student of history who wants to learn about the larger environment and context that were home to the Hitler years.
The real lesson from walking the streets of Munich, Nuremberg and Dachau, however, is probably less about what sites you visit than it is about the German people and their challenging relationship to their own past. It’s easy to see that Germany has taken great pains to be sure that nothing in its landscape or cityscape can be construed as a memorial in any way to the Nazi past. While the party itself was a part of history and needs to be remembered and studied, you cannot walk around a street corner anywhere and find a memorial plaque to German soldiers who died fighting to defend their own city from attacking Russians or American. Germans want no more to do with the terrible and menacing history of what their ancestors did than we, as contemporary Americans, want to tell our own national or urban histories primarily or solely through the narratives of the Native American genocide or the appalling horrors of slavery.
If as a student going to Munich to learn about the rise of Naziism I personally was underwhelmed with the amount of sites left to learn about and see first hand, the city and others I visited did help me begin to understand just how hard it may always be for Germany to live with the awful era of tragedy and bloodshed that was the Third Reich. Looking at historic sites where nothing is marked at all today (and seeing that lack of any historic reference as a German might on any given day), I thought about how hard it is to make sense of a horrible past. Could Germans perhaps remember their soldiers who were forced to serve and were not themselves ardent Nazis at all? If so, how and where might this memorialization be achieved? Or perhaps they could identify and memorialize the civilians who might have voted for Hitler in 1933 only to turn against the Nazis later, before or during the war?
I thought about the debates and discussions that underly any memorialization, and then I thought again about the armed honor guard Hitler had posted on the Odeonplatz, to stand in a permanent vigil and as protection for the memorial to the dead from the Beer Hall Putsch. Would just such steps be needed today — in terms of surveillance and protection — to keep even a set of didactic plaques related to the Nazi past from being taken over as a covert shrine by neo-Nazis?
In Germany today, you’re arrested if you wear the swastika or offer the Hitler salute in public. Destroyed physically and emotionally by the events of World War Two and the horrors of the Nazi regime, Munich and most of Germany are almost ironic as places to dive into active learning, out in the streets and in search of historic markers. I learned about this terrible past on ground that was literally shaken by it less than 70 years ago, and mostly what I found were empty and vacant places, where nothing indicates at all that this horrible history, really, was hardly that long ago.
