Topography of Terror Museum
The End of the Weimar RepublicThe Topography of Terror museum in Berlin is not your regular WWII museum. Rather than going into the details about WWII from a removed perspective like we learn about in history, it looked specifically at how the Nazis took over Germany politically before moving to militarily. I didn't really know a whole lot about the Weimar Republic until I went to this museum; at best, I was vaguely aware of its existence. The scariest part of the museum was definitely that I had always kind of thought that the whole 'Final Solution' thing was just the scapegoat the Nazi party picked to blame all of Germany's problems on. But the leaders of the Nazi party legitimately believed in it. That's terrifying.
Outside the safety of the air conditioning, there was a long stretch of a covered walkway beneath a long still-standing stretch of the Berlin Wall. This you can see in both the picture at the right and the picture beneath. We were tasked with finding one tidbit of information from this museum that we weren't aware of prior to coming. The picture to the right shows what I found that fits that description. It's a panel or two talking about Jewish Catchers during the Holocaust. These were Jews that, in exchange for their family's safety, revealed the hiding places of other Jews or 'undesirables' around them. What an awful decision that must have been to make; choosing between the lives of you and your family members or the lives of countless other families that you don't know? Ending on a cheery note today, it seems. |