It’s August 11th and our study seminar is almost over. Today we had a walking tour of Nuremberg where we got to explore the old town. On the way to the highest point where the castle sits, we admired the beauty of the many old (or old style) buildings, shops and churches. As the guided part of our tour began, we started to understand the complicated history of these places and the dichotomy that seems to exist in places in Germany. One beautiful church had antisemitic stone carvings on the facade, one structure depicted a demonically horned Moses delivering the 10 commandments and one church at the town square was erected over the ruins of the destroyed synagogue.
Next, we got to tour the memorial of the Nuremberg trials where we learned about both how the Nazis used this town during the war as well as how the Allied forces came to decide to hold the military tribunal here. It seems fitting that the place where such hateful discrimination laws for racial purity were created would be the place that Nazi leaders would have to answer for their crimes. On the surface this would seem to be cathartic; however, the details reveal that the reason for the location and the outcome from the trials are less satisfying. The choice of location is made solely out of fear of Soviet interference with the trials if they were to be held in Soviet-controlled East Germany (Berlin). Many of the party leaders were able to put on a defense that allowed them to get off with less than 5 years in prison, in some cases allowing them to go free with only time served since the end of the war. It seems that the focus of the trial was on war crimes against foreign countries and not on the actual victims of the Shoah as I had previously believed.
Each day, including this day, our group struggled with how places of such beauty can hide such awful pasts. It seems that the story of modern Germany is one of balancing how to grapple with this horrifying past and finding a way to move forward. I can’t help but feel that in moving forward there is the danger of forgetting, or worse, revising, the history of deeply rooted antisemitism that was such a fabric of life in Nazi Germany. When so many people were either perpetrators, party members, supporters or simply complacent, I wonder if there is really any way to prevent this short of keeping a Jewish voice in Germany. With most Jewish studies students here being non-Jews and the Jewish Museum in Berlin not being run by a Jewish organization, it appears that the lack of a large Jewish community here has resulted in others telling our story.
Mike Collura lives in Pittsburgh, PA.