Best of Germany

Weinheim and Heidelberg’s medieval architecture and castles were perfect towns to wonder around and get lost in our own imagination. We love Munich’s park with its river where surfers practiced their tricks any day in a constant wave before hitting the ocean. Berlin was a trip back into time and history with excellent museums and walking around transported us into the dark times of the Nazis and the post-World War II division of the city. Learning about these difficult times was interesting, disturbing, and necessary. The establishment of the Nazi dictatorship was possible because broad segments of the German society rejected the Weimar Republic and the Treaty of Versailles and feared a descent into civil war-like conditions after the loss of World War I. They saw Hitler as the guarantor of internal security and order, thus overlooked the fact that Prussian Secret State Police Office (“Gestapa”), established in April 1933, represented an increasingly powerful special agency whose aim was to control German society. Subsequently, newspapers were censored and meetings forbidden. Anyone who might oppose the “national revolution” was to be intimidated or “neutralized.” Communists were the first target of the Nazi Party and followed by all other opponents which were threatened, maltreated, publicly humiliated, and arrested. “All men are not equal” was the principal the Nazi leadership used to justify the exclusion and persecution of those who disagreed with them. The willingness of most Germans to adapt meant that many not merely shared the aims of the Nazis but also actively supported them often at the price of denouncing others to the Gestapo. The Nazi regime murdered all those defined as “racially inferior,” such as Jews, “Gypsies,” “Slavic sub-humans,” homosexuals, vagabonds and beggars called “antisocial elements,” disabled and mentally ill, and members from Christian minorities such a Jehovah witnesses or politically dangerous to German rule. For the National Socialist Party, “the Jew” was “the number one enemy of the Volk, the race, and the state.” “Non-Aryans” were to be excluded from the community, expelled, and ultimately exterminated. 70,000 mentally disabled and ill persons from German asylums and residential facilities were murder. Nearly 60,000 homosexual men were convicted.