. There were not many jobs available to the Jews, but finance was something they could do.
After the Reconquista (reconquering/re-Christianisation of Spain), led by Isabelle of Castille and Ferdinand of Aragon one of the first missions that was launched was the Spanish Inquisition that began with the Alhambra Decree, the expulsion of Jews, that was when many Jewish people moved to the Baltic regions – where the leadership of Vilnius welcomed them.
By the time of Elizabethian England, Jewish stereotypes were set in stone. These people were best example I can think of is William Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice and Shylock is the embodiment of the treatment of the Jews.
Not much had changed by the time the 20th century arrived in fact the stories just got bigger and the hatred got stronger. Conspiracy theories about the Rockerfeller family and the Rothschild family, large Jewish banking families, controlling the whole of Europe made them easy scapegoats when things got bad.
It was into this cultural milieu that Hitler rose to power. The Jews (ironic again since he was considered half a Jew) were his target and conspiracy theory to explain to the German people why their life had gone bad in the Great Depression and how he would improve their lives by targeting them. Did it work? Clearly. Then came Goebbels systematic propaganda campaign of dehumanisation and the horrors of concentration camps. Berlin was the backdrop to where many of the decisions of the Holocaust were made.
The Sylter Hof Hotel in Berlin sits on the site of the former Department of Jewish Affairs, the departments initial role was to expel Jews from Berlin and move them to camps, its later role was to organise the extermination of Jews.
A bit further out in the idyllic suburb of Wansee, against a beautiful backdrop of nature the Nazi SS Conference met in 1942 to discuss solutions to the Jewish Question, the decision of which led to the Holocaust.
Let’s be clear though, there were truly good people and Christians among them who risked everything to save the Jews. Among them was the much-maligned Pope Pius XII, his legacy perhaps the most controversial focused not on the fact that he saved lives, but that he did not save enough.
Long after the war in 2003 a memorial was planned to all the Murdered Jews of Europe. The location was extremely apt, it was a stones throw to Hitler’s former bunker, in the area of Hitler’s former administrative building, along the road that all German parliamentarians have to drive to to get to work and surrounded by foreign embassies. It is a marker of history, a lesson from the past and a reminder to the present. The monument is made up of 2711 rectangular concrete blocks each with a different bent and height, shaped almost like a graveyard. The architect who designed it did not leave any interpretation and left the interpretation to those who visited.
In that vein, I too will not leave my interpretation, but merely leave some pictures within the site and let you decide.
Antiseminitsm is something that we critisize today, but sometimes its easy to forget that prejudice exists all round – there are one group of people in Europe who are still the subject of much prejudice today and who similarly suffered massively during the Holocaust – the Roma Porajmos.
Those who do not learn from history and doomed to repeat it.
ON THE MAP