HVK Archives: Cologne faces reality of Nazi past
Cologne faces reality of Nazi past - The Times of India
Alan Cowell
()
18 August 1997
Title: Cologne faces reality of Nazi past
Author: Alan Cowell
Publication: The Times of India
Date: August 18, 1997
Cities, like spies, have their legends, and the one most favoured here is
the one offered by Konrad Adenauer, Cologne's prewar mayor and the first
postwar chancellor of West Germany.
Of all Germany's major cities, Mr Adenauer said In 1946, none had been so
battered by the Allies and, "none had deserved it less." indeed, he
complained, "nowhere was Nazism resisted so openly until 1933" - the year
Hitler came to power - "and nowhere was there so much spiritual resistance
after 1933."
Since June, however, a new permanent exhibit sponsored by the city
authorities in the former Gestapo headquarters here has subjected Cologne's
history In the Nazi em to unaccustomed scrutiny.
And the outcome, for some, has been the conclusion that Mr Adenauer's
version was one-sided, to say the least.
"He built the legend that the Rhine-land is liberal, Catholic and resistant
to every dictatorship," said Barbara Kirschbaum, a secretary at the
exhibit. "This proves that the legend is not true."
For others who have seen the exhibit, from a look at former Gestapo cells
in the basement to a documented history of the city's persecution of Jews,
Gypsies and slave labourers, the lessons relate as much to postwar
Germany's tangled relationship with Its history as to the past Itself.
"My mother never spoke to me about this time," said Christine Monheim, who
was born In 1941 and grew up with her mother in Cologne after her father
was killed on the front lines.
"People were ashamed,,, she said. "My grandfather, uncles and aunts all
lived in this time. And I have to assume they were all sup. porters of
Hitler. So, when the war ended, their support turned to hopelessness, and
they didn't want to tell us."
The soul-searching seemed all the more poignant in this city Germany's
fourth largest, with a population of around I million that has taken as its
emblems the huge trade-fair buildings on the east bank of the Rhine and the
extravagant annual carnival that underpins Cologne's self-image as a place
with a liking for irreverence.
But in the exhibit here, along walls that have been stripped bare of all
postwar decoration down to their prewar plaster and paint, a cone" view
emerges.
The vast halls of the trade fair, it seems, were used by the Nazis to house
prisoners of war and slave labourers. In the 1937 carnival parade, one
horse-drawn float was filled with Germans made up as bearded caricatures of
Jews. A hand-painted banner proclaimed them to be "the last to leave" the
city at a time when Jews faced increasing persecution.
"To this day, Cologne thinks of itself as the liberal heart of the
Rhineland," said Blanka Balfer, a 33-year-old nurse who was visiting the
exhibit for the first time. "Well, that's not true."
Indeed, said Ms Kirschbaum, the secretary, "the history of this building
was suppressed for a long time" while other cities more closely associated
with Nazism, notably Munich and Berlin, had little choice but to
acknowledge their history.
The widely accepted argument among most people in Cologne was that this
city had been far less receptive to Nazism than most others.
Electoral results from 1928 on show that Cologne lagged behind ,the
national average In its support for Hitler. in the March 1933 vote - the
last before Hitler took power - the Nazis won 43.9 per cent of the national
vote, but scored only 31.1 per cent of the ballot in Cologne.
Even so, photographs at the exhibit display just how rapturously Hitler was
received here during a visiting 1936, when Cologne was described in one
contemporary account as resembling "a sea of flags."
In 15 rooms, the exhibit of photographs, newspaper clippings, documents and
such artifacts as the prewar radios that carried Nazi propaganda traces the
city's history from the founding of a Nazi Party branch here In 1921 to the
end of World War II, when Cologne lay in ruins.
The exhibit records the systematic deportation of Cologne's Gypsies and
Jews, and the deaths of thousands in concentration camps.
Equally, though, the exhibit records the tenor inflicted on civilians in
the city by the vast Allied air bombardment, while the resistance to the
Nazis is also chronicled.
(New York Times Service)
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