Berlin Trip : House of Wannsee (Part 2)

One of the true German heroes, Richard Stern (1899-1967) who was a German businessman who is notable for his public resistance against the Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses in the 1930s. He issued the leaflet on the right-hand side of the above photo which referred to:

– 65 million Germans being asked to treat Jews as second-class citizens
– 12,000 fallen German front-line soldiers were Jewish
– Calling for solidarity to the Jewish community

He himself was a First World War veteran himself and in the image on the left, he was wearing his Iron Cross whilst a young Nazi stands by the entrance to his shop. The photo was taken on 1 April 1933 outside his bedding store in Cologne. Stern’s strength of character is immense, he stayed in Germany for as long as he could before he needed to emigrate to the United States in 1939, just before the outbreak of the Second World War. He then, as a German, joined the US army and in 1944 was awarded the Silver Star, the third highest military decoration that can be granted. It also transpired that in 1942, there had been a drive to collect metal for the war effort and Stern put in his Iron Cross.

The highly complex system used by the German Civil Service to work out if someone was a Jew.

This is a photo of Julius Wolff, a young Jewish man, and Christine Neemann, his non-Jewish fiancé who were both paraded around Norden in Germany on 22 July 1935 because of their relationship. Wolff was forced to wear a sign that says “I am a race defiler” (“Ich bin ein Rasseschänder”).

Back to the museum, this is the room where the meeting took place with a side-room visible on the right.

The side-room.

The documents from the meeting were meant to be destroyed and they all were with one exception.

The number of Jews in various parts of German territory. I understand that these were the numbers they wanted to reduce by their Final Solution plans. The exception I mentioned was that one set of documents was found almost by chance in 1947 by Robert Kempner, a U.S. prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials. Without that find, I’m not sure that this property would now be a museum as these were the documents that revealed information about the Final Solution.

This photo is from 19 April 1945 when the Nazi documents stored by the Foreign Office were seized by US troops.