A very different memorial, one concerned more with the perpetrators of Nazi terror than with the victims, was installed on the grounds of the SS and Gestapo headquarters in the former Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse. As we noted above, excavated ruins on the site and a small museum had been patched together there as a “Topography of Terror” on the eve of Berlin’s 750th anniversary celebrations in 1987. The installation was primitive and makeshift, and its custodians encountered resistance to their efforts to construct a permanent study center at the site. Federal and local officials insisted that there was not enough money for the project. Obviously, they were uncomfortable with an undertaking that illustrated the Nazi terror’s prominence in Berlin’s political landscape. Although the “Topography of Terror” backers wanted improved facilities, they did not want changes so obtrusive as to obscure the site’s quality as an “open wound” in the heart of the new Berlin. A design competition was launched in the early 1990s for renovations of the installations, but no substantial work was done. The place remained a powerful but confusing experience for most visitors, many of whom apparently expected to see more in the way of physical evidence of torture. The visitors’ book contained comments like “Cool, but a bit tame on the gory bits.” The fact that a preserved section of the Berlin Wall stood nearby was a further source of confusion; visitors could conclude that Hitler must have built the Wall. It is fitting, however, that relics of both the Nazi regime and the GDR stood cheek to jowl at this place: the point was not to conflate these two regimes, but to grasp Berlin’s centrality to both.
A better-known site of Nazi criminality is the Villa Wannsee, or “Haus am Wannsee,” though only one significant political event took place there, the so-called Wannsee Conference (January 20, 1942), at which various bureaucratic details of the Holocaust were discussed. Adolf Eichmann’s record of the conference was discovered in 1947, but it took another forty-five years to “give this place its history back,” as Mayor Diepgen put it in his remarks at the opening of a documentation center at the site on January 20, 1992. The Soviet and American military authorities who had commandeered the villa after the war made nothing of its history, nor did the German officials who used it as a children’s recreation center from 1952 to 1988. In the 1960s the West Berlin government even turned down an offer of $5 million from the World Jewish Congress to establish a documentation center in the house. The Berlin Senate said that it feared attracting neo-Nazis to the site, but it is more likely that it feared a backlash from right-wing voters. Finally, in the late 1980s, the West Berlin authorities came to understand that it was more damaging politically to ignore the villa’s history than to acknowledge it, and the work that culminated in the documentation center began. The exhibit that was installed in the house is a cross between a museum and a memorial, which, like all such hybrid constructs, presents a problem in itself. As Ian Buruma has commented: “You can remember the Holocaust through art, through ceremony, or through analysis and discourse, but you cannot do all this at the same time, or in the same place.”
The Villa Wannsee lies not far from the freight train station at Grunewald from which some 50,000 Berlin Jews were shipped to the concentration camps. The vast majority never returned. Like the infamous villa, this place received no acknowledgment of its historical role in the killing process for many years after the war. In 1973 a private group erected a plaque at the loading ramps, but the plaque was often defaced and twice stolen. Shortly before the
