Hi everyone,

This past weekend I went to Hamburg with my holocaust class.  It was a very interesting trip and very wet.  It rained the entire time and on the last day it hailed.

Hamburg seemed like a nice city very quiet, lots of ethnic food and walking streets.  However, it is also a very new city.  The allies almost destroyed the town during a bombing raid at the end of 1943 in order to try to disrupt the German workforce.  Because of this many of the buildings are the new grey concrete 1960s buildings.  Although they have started to make an effort and trying to build replica buildings of the ones destroyed it still lacks the feel of an old world european city.

We went to a bombed out church one of the few remaining buildings left.  It was a memorial to those who died and were persecuted during World War II.  That is very interesting.  Most people would assume that it would have been dedicated to those who 50,000 germans who died in the bombing raid.  But no.  The reason for this is because the Germans don’t want to be the victims.  IT is interesting if one looks at this from a national memory standpoint.  Although they committed horrible atrocities and lost, they did suffer many deaths yet they will never in any of their monuments be viewed as victims.  This can be seen as the allied influence on western germany that the war was in fact to blame on them and thus they should not take status as victims.  However, it could also mean that the german people do not want to remember themselves as victims

Another interesting spot was the Janusz Korczak school.  this school was used as a subcamp for the concentration camp of Neugamme and was located in the middle of a residential neighborhood in Hamburg.  It was here that 20 children and 4 adults used for medical experiments were killed because they knew too many secrets.  They were hung from the basement ceiling but because the ceiling was too low 2 SS guards had to bear hug the victim and pull them down in order to kill them.  This must have been a horrific death.  Today the school has been reconverted into a school and children still go there.  It has been renamed after Korczak, an orpahange director who was killed at Treblinka along with his kids.  At first I found it hard to imagine them actually allowing school kids to attend this place.  However, I realize that perhaps it is appropriate memorial to them to allow life to go on and people to function and ids to go to school.  The school kids have actually built and maintain a rose garden in the playground as a memorial.

Our last stop was the neugamme concentration camp.  Now this camp was mainly a work camp and used for political prisoners.  Here death was mainly caused by unsafe and unsanitary working conditions.  The main job was for prisoners to go into trenches in hip deep water and dig for clay.  This was not conducive for health reasons and was dangerous because if you lost your shoes in the water you were dead.  Also if the prisoners fell into the water or slipped the SS guards would hold them under the water until the drowned.  It rained the entire time we were touring the camp.  It was miserable and although it would have been better to visit such a camp during nice weather you have to deal with what you have.  I found it very upsetting that students started to whine and complain and asked multiple times to return inside.  I know that it wasnt great outside but we were far more fortunate than the prisoners and we were told to bring water proof jackets and boots. I felt that a lot of the students just needed to get over themselves!!!

This camp was very different from the others I have visited.  It had a completely different feel to it.  Not much is left only 2 original stone barracks, the SS barracks, the brick factory and the Walter weaponry factory.  Must everything else was torn down.  Even the original structure have been remodeled.  This was mainly due to the fact that the town built a prison on the site.  I am not sure why this occurred.  Perhaps they were trying to forget abut the past or they felt it would be a good site for a new prison (very ironic).  perhaps it was even a combination of both.  About 20 yrs ago it was reconverted to a memorial site after numerous protests started to occur.  However, a lot of it has changed and the atmosphere is different.  Also it is different from many other camps because of how integrated it was into hamburg.  Farmers would till their fields up to the prison gates and fences.  Young boys would walk around the camp while it was in use.  SS guards from the camp still live in Hamburg and the surrounding small towns!!!

So this week is super busy for me.  I am prepping for my Truman interview and writing four papers!!!  It will be a fun and busy week so this is my last blog post until after turkey!!!!