One of Berlin's largest synagogues was located in Levetzowstraße in the district of Moabit. In 1941, the National Socialists set up a collection camp for Berlin Jews from where they were deported to the east. Since 1988, a memorial on the synagogue's former location commemorates the deported Jews of Berlin.
History
The liberal synagogue in Levetzowstraße, inaugurated in 1914, could seat over 2,000 people. In the course of the »Kristallnacht« in November 1938, the National Socialists destroyed part of its interior, yet the building remained intact. When the National Socialists began mass deportations of Jews from the German Reich in the autumn of 1941, the Gestapo forced the Jewish community to set up a collection camp in the synagogue. The Gestapo arrested Jewish families in their apartments in neighbouring districts, mostly in the middle of the night, and brought them to the Levetzow synagogue. The Jews usually spent a few days in the well-guarded collection camp before they were deported to ghettos and concentration camps in the occupied eastern territories. The Jewish community was responsible for all provisions. Prior to their »evacuation«, the Gestapo forced the Jews to fill out forms concerning their assets, which were then seized by the German state. Any valuables they had brought along were confiscated by the Gestapo. When a transport list had been completed, police and SS units chased the Jews to the train station, beating and whipping them along the way. Upon arrival, the Jews had to board special trains of the German state railway. The trains departed from the Grunewald train station probably until spring 1942; due to the close proximity of the Moabit freight depot, the trains then began departing from there as well as from the Anhalter train station.
Victims
Over 50,000 Berlin Jews who were deported did not live to see the end of the war. Many of the transports were headed for the ghettos of Theresienstadt, Minsk, Riga, Kaunas (Russian: Kovno) and Łódź. From July 1942 on, many of the transports went directly from Berlin to Auschwitz-Birkenau and other death camps.
The entry to power of the National Socialists in 1933 heralded the state persecution of opponents of the regime, Jews, Roma – who were classed as »gypsies« -, the sick and many other groups. For the first time, anti-semitism became part of the government policy of a modern state and the persecution of all groups was progressively heightened. The process was characterised by the interplay between state regulation, violence from supporters of the regime and rabble-rousing propaganda from the press. The acts of terror against the Jews in November 1938 (»The Night of the Broken Glass«), culminating in around one hundred deaths, marked the prelude to the complete exclusion and murder of the Jewish minority.
With the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939, large parts of Europe fell under German control. In Eastern Europe in particular a multi-tiered system of camps and extermination sites was established, in which the SS murdered up to six million Jews, among them around 165,000 German Jews. It is estimated that around seven million Germans lost their lives in the war, including almost 3.5 million civilians. Around 28 million residents of the occupied Soviet Union (both soldiers and civilians) and three million non-Jewish Poles met a violent death. These groups are still barely commemorated in Germany.
Germany came under Allied occupation in 1945 and 1949 saw the foundation of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), who had very different cultures of remembrance. The GDR profiled itself as an »antifascist« state. The former concentration camps at Buchenwald, Ravensbrück and Sachsenhausen became »National Memorials« and primarily documented the communist resistance during the war.
In the Federal Republic, the dominant memory was initially of the victims of Allied bombing raids and those who had fled or been expelled from their homes in the former territory of the Third Reich. It was left to specific groups to remember Nazi persecution, the Holocaust or the resistance. With the exception of the war crimes trials, there was no public discussion of perpetrators or involvement in crimes. However, the situation was to change in the mid-1960s, when the statute of limitations for murder was lifted following a lengthy debate. Also during this period, memorial sites were established at former concentration camps (1965: Dachau and Neuengamme; 1966: Bergen-Belsen) and the German Resistance Memorial Centre was opened in 1968 in West Berlin. However, it was not until the 1980s that a diverse and often small-scale landscape of memory developed as the result of local initiatives.
Following German unification in 1990, a national memorial site concept was developed and there was a major review of German sites of memory. The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin was inaugurated in 2005. The Topography of Terror, a comprehensive documentation of National Socialist crimes and perpetrators, has opened with a new centre in May 2010; the documentation centre »Flight, Expulsion, Reconciliation« followed suit in 2021. In the meantime, central memorials in Berlin have been erected to commemorate further groups of Nazi victims as well: the murdered Sinti and Roma, the patients murdered in the context of the Nazi’s »Euthanasia« killings and the persecuted homosexuals.
The German victims of National Socialist terror in the former Eastern territories of the Third Reich were forgotten by both German states after the end of the war. For decades, memory of these victims was only preserved by West German associations for Germans born in these territories and it mainly excluded the period from 1933 to 1945.
Remembrance
The remains of the synagogue, which was destroyed during an air raid in 1944, were torn down in the mid-1950s. The memorial to the deportations was set up in 1988 on the location of the former synagogue on the initiative of the Berlin Senate. Two architects, Jürgen Wenzel and Theseus Bappert as well as sculptor Peter Herbrich, erected a stylised deportation ramp with a freight car and a steel wall on which the departure dates of all the transports are inscribed. On the ramps and inside the freight car are marble figures depicting groups of humans tied together. Additionally, metal plaques on the ground on the site of the former synagogue entrance show reliefs of the synagogues which once used to stand in Berlin.
