Each Fall while working at a college (now a German University) in the Pankow District of what used to be East Berlin, I offered new students a short walking tour of the area which we inhabited.
Among the attractions was the Niederschoenhausen Palace, built by King in Prussia, Frederick 1, in 1701 (Leopold 1, king of just about everything at that time from “in” Germany and much “in” Central and Eastern Europe, insisted that Frederick I be King "in Prussia” rather than “of Prussia” as there were several other kings whose domains included parts of Prussia ). When the palace was inherited by Frederick’s grandson, Frederick II, also known as Frederick the Great, the new king never visited the palace, but gave it to his wife, who he disliked. The palace and surrounding area became the seat of the GDR after WWII until 1960; on the night of the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the palace’s guests included Raisa and Mikhail Gorbachev.
We also walked to the Soviet War Memorial in Schönholzer Heide, one of three Soviet military cemeteries in Berlin where more than 13,000 soldiers of the 80,000 Soviets killed in the last two months of WWII are buried. It is beautifully designed and is maintained exquisitely. My sense was that these 13,000 men, most of whom were between 17 and 30 years old, had no choice: they were going to be shot either in the front or the back.
Meanwhile, about a mile away, while bicycling in the middle of the woods one day, I had found a small German cemetery in the midst of overgrown weeds in which all the buried were also males who had died in the final months of WWII; their ages at death were either under 18 or over 50 years old. This was a cemetery for the Volkssturm, the People’s Army created by Hitler in late 1944 to prepare for the battle of Berlin. They were a rag-tag group wearing old uniforms or civilian clothes, armed with pistols, rifles and submachine guns, but with little training and very little ammunition. Their mightiest weapon against the overwhelming numbers of Soviet soldiers was the panzerfaust, a bazooka-like tank destroyer that could be (and was) fired from the shoulder by 14-year old boys. Thus, Hitler saw to it that just about everyone under his purview could be killed in carrying out his evil pursuits. This cemetery was on my tour.
The next to last stop was the square where we lived, Pastor Niemoeller Platz. I had lived there for more than a year before I became curious about who Niemoeller was, as all streets and squares had been renamed by the Communists to honor Karl Marx, Herman Hesse, Rosa Luxembourg and other socialist or communist heroes. So who was Pastor Niemoeller?.
Martin Niemoeller was a naval officer during WWI, and commanded a U-Boat that sank allied ships. On one occasion, he ordered his troops not to rescue the sailors on a ship his submarine had just sunk, leaving them to drown. Reflecting on that act later, he concluded that letting them drown had not been the right answer. He became a Lutheran minister and in the early thirties, became the minister of St. Ann’s Church in the Berlin suburb of Dahlem. Though he had been a strong nationalist and an early supporter of Hitler, he was opposed to the Nazi’s attitude toward religion and, in particular, its stance toward anti-semitism.
Increasingly, his sermons against the Third Reich reached Hitler’s desk. I pictured Hitler reading through Niemoeller’s sermons on Mondays and pounding his fist, “Who will get this man?”. in 1937, he was arrested and confined to Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp near Berlin, and was subsequently moved to Dachau until the end of the war.
He returned to his church. At some point in those post war years, he recited a kind of poem which he returned to many times during his preaching career, a poem which became well known in the West:
They came for the Communists; I was not a Communist so I did nothing.
They came for the Trade Unionists; I was not a trade unionist, so I did nothing.
They came for the socialists; I was not a socialist, so I did nothing
They came for the jews; I was not a jew, so I did Little.
They came for me, but there was no one left to help me.
Niemoeller has been immortalized by this poem, though his precise wording and sequence has never been agreed upon. The above sequence of lines corresponds to the order in which the Nazis attacked the various classes of people and, according to German scholars, is the likely sequence the first time Niemoeller recited this poem.
After Pastor Niemoeller Platz, we all had an ice cream.
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