Germany does not have a traditional, centuries-old national holiday, such as July 14 in France or July 4 in the United States.

But Germany is carefully attuned to dates, and how they might be used to reckon with the history of dictatorships, encourage the maintenance of memorial sites, and spark remembrance in ways that draw the public to past sins, and provide vital information and moral orientation.

Reckoning with and making restitution for the Nazi dictatorship of 1933­–1945, World War II, and the deaths and persecution of millions occupies Germany to this day—and probably will forever. The ongoing German work of remembrance around dates also should remind us of how frequently used phrases like “coming to terms with the past” (“Vergangenheitsbewaeltigung”) or “processing the past” constitute a rather helpless vocabulary, and provide only a generalizing veil for specific historical crimes.

In the immediate aftermath of World War II, the occupying Allies took the first steps to punish those most responsible for the Nazi regime, to reorganize the government, and to begin to compensate the Nazis’ victims. But they did much of this work at a distance. The newly installed powers within Germany, on the other hand, were more entangled in old patterns, and often remained ambivalent about the continuation of denazification and democratization. In any case, the population tended to deny and repress recent crimes and, above all, lament their own victims of the war.

But over many years, beginning in the late 1940s and into the early 21st century, Germany developed a “policy on the past” and established days of remembrance. The process took different paths in the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) and the German Democratic Republic (East Germany). But everywhere, its influences included court proceedings, historical research, art, and media, as well as political events like the trial of Adolph Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961­–2, the reunification of Germany in 1990, and debates around the Holocaust memorial in Berlin, which opened in 2005.

Over the decades, Germany would come to commemorate a number of dates—not as national holidays but in conjunction with a heterogenous group of organizations and individuals, including government. The shifting commemorations and days include the end of World War II in Europe on May 8, 1945, the anti-Jewish pogroms of November 9, 1938, and the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp on January 27, 1945.

Beginning in the late 1940s, first the Soviet-occupied zone and then the German Democratic Republic celebrated May 8 as the victory of the USSR and of anti-fascism. But the Western parts of the nation occupied by the U.S. and other Allies didn’t mark the date. In 1965, the Federal Republic of Germany’s government wanted to highlight the 20th anniversary for the first time as a kind of “end of the post-war period,” celebrating successes in reconstruction, consolidated democracy, and the prospect of reunification—but the Allies rejected the idea.

After years of routine events, in 1985, Federal President Richard von Weizsaecker made a speech interpreting May 8, 1945 no longer as a day of military defeat but as the “Day of Liberation.” He received some public criticism, but this statement marked a turning point for May 8. It reduced the attention on Germany’s own post-war grievances, and focused more attention on those whom the Nazi regime had killed and persecuted.

It has taken quite a long time to establish adequate forms and days of recollection for victims of the Nazi regime.

In 1946, the U.S. military took the first steps toward commemorating the Holocaust, remembering the destruction of the synagogue at Frankfurt’s Börneplatz on November 9, 1938. Similar commemorations followed elsewhere, with widespread media coverage throughout Germany (then divided into four zones of Allied occupation) on the 10th anniversary on November 9, 1948. But no centralized events took place.

In the Soviet Occupation Zone (later GDR, or East Germany) a “Day of Anti-Fascism” was set up on the second Sunday of September 1946.  But its strong emphasis on military and political victory soon pushed aside Jews as victims, focusing instead on the deaths of “political” anti-fascists. Meanwhile in the Federal Republic (West Germany), November 9, 1938, would gain greater importance.

Very soon, however, a different and competing line of remembrance was started as a “National Day of Mourning” for all German victims of war, following a tradition which began after World War I. This focus on the fallen soldiers and other war dead remained far removed from the fate of the victims of Nazi dictatorship, and the topics of German guilt and responsibility. Only the states of Hesse and Hamburg dedicated the national day of mourning as a “day of remembrance for the victims of National Socialism and the dead of both world wars.” During the 1950s, the victims of the Nazi dictatorship received more attention in commemoration, but the victim community remained tied to the German dead.

Since the early 1950s, Jewish communities in cities such as Frankfurt, Munich, and Berlin have driven initiatives to hold days of remembrance on November 9, along with victims’ organizations and opposition groups. Although the state did not sanction these commemorations, eventually more municipalities took part.

The number of memorial sites to Nazi victims also increased rapidly, especially after a wave of new attacks against synagogues in 1959 and 1960. In the decade leading up to the 40th anniversary of November 9, in 1978, the number of commemorative events increased tenfold. Historical research and publications began to offer in-depth accounts of the anti-Semitic November pogroms of 1938—and of the German population’s widespread acceptance of those attacks.

By the late 1970s, this day of remembrance had been firmly anchored at the national level. The federal president and other representatives of national government and parliament were observing the day, which students also study in school. This movement in turn inspired more local research, media projects, and discussions in small towns and rural areas. The American television series Holocaust, about a fictional Jewish family, also spread interest in the subject after several parts appeared on German television in 1979. The term “holocaust” became part of the German language, thanks to the show.

Today, November 9 has developed into one of the most important days of remembrance, recalling the date when Nazi organizations destroyed synagogues, attacked, killed, or expelled Jews, and deported many to concentration camps. Germans for too long downplayed this series of events as “Reichskristallnacht,” the night of broken glass, which doesn’t acknowledge the full extent of its horrors. The day of commemoration transformed November 9 into a symbol of the horrible path to the “final solution” of annihilation of German and European Jews. Germans, over time, began to understand crime, guilt, and responsibility in their historical and moral dimensions.

Other days of commemoration also advanced this process. The Society for Christian-Jewish Cooperation chose a “Week of Brotherhood” in March 1952 to focus solely on commemorating the persecution of the Jews. This week was initially devoted to seeking religiously motivated mutual understanding with the small number of surviving German Jewish citizens. But it expanded over time and contributed significantly to the clarification of historical facts and responsibilities of the Holocaust. More recently, however, the week has lost importance, in part because of the secularization of society.

A different theme concerns July 20, 1944—political resistance against the Nazi regime, remembered through Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg’s failed assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler. As early as October 1951, the Federal Republic of Germany’s government marked this day—both to honor resistance and to counter accusations of treason by old Nazi supporters and former military personnel. Annual commemorative speeches on July 20 by high state officials, and more recent events that include some military rituals, have achieved considerable media coverage. The commemorations are effective because of the drama of the attempted assassination, and the personal story of the executed assassin, Count Stauffenberg, and his co-conspirators. But they have also come under fire for focusing on military elites rather than the resistance of trade unions, left-wing parties, and everyday people.

Today, the official commemoration day of German state organs, explicitly dedicated to all victims of the National Socialist system of oppression, and especially to the murdered and expelled Jews of Europe, is January 27. That is the day in 1945 when Soviet troops liberated the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and extermination camp. President Roman Herzog first dedicated this day in 1996, and since 2005, it also has been International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Each year, the German Bundestag in Berlin holds commemoration events with contemporary witnesses, international experts, and political representatives, including from Israel and neighboring European countries. The state parliaments and governments of Germany, and many local authorities, also follow this practice—implying a political self-commitment of state institutions to permanently respect this occasion and its mandate.

Although November 9 retains its importance, January 27 has become a more powerful commemoration because it was established after German reunification in 1990, and it integrates the very different patterns of memory in West and East Germany.

Today, rising xenophobia, racism, and right-wing extremism are placing new pressures on Germany—and on the contribution remembrance, and days of commemoration, make to society.  Germany’s culture of remembrance may well deliver some relevant lessons and moral enlightenment necessary to secure freedom, democracy, and peace.

Since some right-wing activists quite openly proclaim allegiance to Hitler and Nazi ideology, it is much more necessary to use historical facts and moral arguments in everyday political dispute to counter their horrible beliefs and propaganda. The German pledge “Never again” will be needed on streets, in speeches, and in all kind of media for the foreseeable future.

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On September 8, 1943, Hans Heinrich Festersen was hanged at Berlin’s Plötzensee prison. Festersen, 35, had been arrested almost a year earlier, on October 12, 1942, for violating Paragraph 175, the German law prohibiting sex between men. He received his death sentence on July 13, 1943.

Though the Nazis had broadened the law and increased its severity, gay men were not usually killed for violating Paragraph 175. So, why was Hans Festersen killed, and how did his letters from prison to his sister Ruth Marie end up in a museum exhibit in Berlin today?

From January 1940 until August 1941, German “health courts” deemed 70,000 disabled persons to be “unworthy of life.” They were murdered in gas chambers as part of the Aktion T4 program. After the program officially ended and until the end of the war, 230,000 more people with disabilities, including infants, were killed by gas and other means, including starvation, medication overdose, and neglect.

Letter from Hans Heinrich Festersen to his sister, written at Plötzensee prison, December 14, 1942. Photo courtesy of the Schwules Museum.

Festersen, the son of noted ceramicist Friedrich Festersen, was physically disabled due to cerebral palsy. He used walking aids to get around. The police arrested him along with three other gay disabled men who had been living with Festersen at a Protestant institution for the unemployed and homeless.

Crucial to the case against the four men was the 1933 “Law Against Dangerous Habitual Criminals,” which allowed indefinite imprisonment and castration of sex offenders. But according to the memorial site at Plötzensee, by 1943 “wartime criminal laws allowed for death sentences for almost any criminal offense.”

The four gay disabled men’s trial records, as historian Andreas Pretzel reports, are filled with biases against, and misrepresentations of, both disability and being gay. The court’s judgment described Festersen and his co-defendants as being “mentally weak” and “not fully sane.” Their sexuality was deemed “unnatural fornication.” Pretzel concludes that their “death sentences were aimed at the destruction of life allegedly unworthy of life.” The phrase “life unworthy of life” was the term the Nazis used when deciding which of the disabled would be killed.

Ultimately, does it matter if Hans Heinrich Festersen was killed because he was gay or because he was disabled or because he was caught up in what the Plötzensee memorial site calls “a reign of judicial terror”?

I know firsthand the challenges of interpreting a life at the intersection of identities—I am both gay and disabled. I’ve written three books with my intersectionality as a focus. I’m also Jewish. Now, living in Berlin, I’ve too often been asked which of my identities is the “most difficult.”

I’m deeply interested in Hans Festersen’s story, which is at the center of “Queering the Crip, Cripping the Queer,” the exhibit I curated on queer/disability history, activism, and culture, at the Schwules Museum in Berlin through January 30, 2023.

Disability arts and culture scholar Carrie Sandahl coined the phrase on which the exhibit’s title is based in a 2003 essay. “[S]exual minorities and people with disabilities,” she writes, “share a history of injustice: both have been pathologized by medicine; demonized by religion; discriminated against in housing, employment, and education; stereotyped in representation; victimized by hate groups; and isolated socially, often in their families of origin.”

Queer history and disability history, though similar, were not quite parallel. However, with the advent of eugenics, from the late 19th century into the 20th, these histories more often ran together, culminating most dangerously during the Nazi regime in Germany.

Hans Heinrich Festersen and his sister, Ruth Marie. Photo courtesy of the Schwules Museum.

It’s relatively easy to find information on the fates of Jewish people with disabilities under the Nazi Reich. But researching the history of those killed who were both queer and disabled is far more difficult. When I asked Petra Fuchs, an expert on Aktion T4 who worked on the T4 Memorial and Information Center for the Victims of the Nazi “Euthanasia” Program in Berlin, if she knew of any, she asked if I had found anyone.

So it was quite a surprise when Birgit Bosold, my co-curator and member of the board of directors at the Schwules Museum, shared with me a 2008 local newspaper article about a commemoration of the murders of Hans Festersen and the men arrested with him. The article alluded to the men being disabled, though it mainly focused on their sexuality and their life at the Protestant institution.

It was even more surprising when, a few weeks later, Birgit informed me that five letters Festersen wrote to his sister from Plötzensee were in the museum archive. In these intimate letters, Festersen talks about his future, wanting to end his “wandering around in institutions” by marrying a “slightly disabled classmate,” whom he calls “Miss Hanna.” In his last letter in the archive, dated May 22, 1943, he wonders if he’ll be sent for sterilization. His letters included rhymed poems for his young nephew, Peter, who, decades later, donated the letters to the museum.

Clearly, amid the most difficult circumstances, Festersen kept his humanity. And when we remember the history—the lives—of those who were both queer and disabled, we humanize those who are too often looked upon as doubly “other,” or whose intersectionality is not recognized or understood.

Many (most?) of us live at the intersection of more than one identity. Exploring the connections between our multiple identities provides a deeper understanding of how our intersectional lives are lived, as well as perceived.

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The joke is on Shatner, or rather on an old tweet from the actor, who is best known for playing Captain James Tiberius Kirk in the original series. Considering that Star Trek has never not been political, responses to the meme have predictably flooded social media. (The best being “1966”—the year Star Trek debuted.)

Today, there is more Star Trek on air than ever before, courtesy of streaming service Paramount+. Amid this renaissance, the franchise, at its best, continues to serve as an arena for political thought, mining the events of the past and present to imagine what the future could look like. I’ve been especially interested to watch how several plotlines have lately been converging around eugenics, suggesting how heavily the subject will weigh over the future of modern Trek.

The debunked theory of eugenics gained widespread attention and influence in the first half of the 20th century until Nazi Germany’s passion for it made it politically nonviable. Nevertheless, today it still influences policy and thought around the world—including here in the U.S., where the dangerous legacy of the American eugenics movement remains embedded in the national discourse. But eugenic themes were long pushed off the screen and out of the public eye following a silent-era film debacle.

Back in the early 1900s, the eugenics movement was ubiquitous in American popular culture. State fairs hosted “better baby contests” that rewarded the healthiest and strongest (white) offspring. Op-eds pushed for doctor-approved marriage licenses in the name of “public health.” And traveling lecture tours warned of the dangers of children inheriting the supposed “weaknesses” of their parents, under the rationale that “inferior types” were a biological threat to the future.

All of this was reflected in movie plotlines of the day. But while dramas like Heredity (1912) and The Inherited Sin (1915) promoted eugenics ideals, progressive comedies like Wood B. Wedd and the Microbes (1914) and The Eugenic Boy (1914) pushed back, critiquing and debunking the movement. “Eugenics was an intrinsic part of early movie culture,” literary scholar Karen A. Keely argues in “Scientific Selection on the Silver Screen,” noting that film studios and directors in the silent era often “used their medium to argue the merits and deficits of eugenic theories and policies.”

Then came the 1916 silent film The Black Stork.

It was a plot ripped, literally, from the headlines, starring Chicago surgeon Harry J. Haiselden as himself. Historian Martin Pernick’s excellent 1996 book The Black Stork, which resurfaced the eponymous film and Haiselden from obscurity, recounts the story. In 1915, Pernick writes, Haiselden advised the mother of a baby born with deformities to forego necessary surgery and let the newborn die, lest it grow up with lifelong health conditions. After the so-called Bollinger Baby’s death, Haiselden called a press conference to announce what he had done—and would do again—for the genetic “well-being” of the nation. To Haiselden, the choice not to operate on the baby was part of the “Greater Surgery”—“the surgery that cuts away the vileness and decay and leaves only the sweet and clean and wholesome in this life of ours.”

National media covered Haiselden like a celebrity: “SURGEON LETS BABY, BORN TO IDIOCY, DIE” read a New York Times headline after Haiselden refused to perform another live-saving operation on a different newborn, with a subtitle noting the decision came “FROM ALTRUISTIC MOTIVE.”

Haiselden was a sensation, but after he appeared in The Black Stork, a fictional film version of the Bollinger case, he lost control of his message. Promotional material for the film billed it as a “eugenic love story” and “eugenic photoplay,” intended to elicit good feeling for the mother’s choice not to save her child after seeing the future he would grow up to have. But audience members empathized with the baby. Unlike the pro-eugenics op-eds or lecture tours that spoon-fed policy messages to audiences, movies and fiction gave the public more freedom of interpretation. And seeing the dead boy’s alternative life in The Black Stork unsettled them.

Those who did sympathize with the eugenics movement, meanwhile, also objected to The Black Stork: They did not want to see graphic depictions of physical deformities on the screen. All of this, Pernick argues, led to a backlash that ultimately led regional and national censorship bodies to ban or regulate eugenic themes, whether the subject was shown in a positive or negative light.

Pushing eugenics practices off the popular screen wasn’t exactly a win for the anti-eugenics camp. In the years following The Black Stork, eugenic films could still be screened for health professionals—and these works, hidden from public view, continued influencing policy that would become responsible for some of the most vile compulsory and coercive sterilization laws in the U.S. targeting Indigenous, Black, brown, poor, disabled, unmarried, mentally ill, and incarcerated people, among others. This “firmer distinction between education, medical, and social films and entertainment films” that obscured eugenic sterilization campaigns from the public came just as the “professional powers to intervene in the bodies and lives of the ‘unfit’ continued to expand,” as scholar Angela M. Smith pinpoints in Hideous Progeny: Disability, Eugenics, and Classic Horror Cinema.

In 1927—the same year censors approved a heavily-edited version of The Black Stork for rerelease under the title Are You Fit to Marry?—the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Virginia’s state-enforced sterilization law, ruling 8-1 in Buck v. Bell that 18-year-old Carrie Buck could be legally sterilized for being “feeble minded,” a decision that influenced Adolf Hitler when he designed the eugenics system for Nazi Germany. (“There is today one state in which at least weak beginnings toward a better conception are noticeable. Of course, it is not our model German Republic, but the American Union,” he wrote in Mein Kampf.)

After World War II, when the full extent of the horrors of Hitler’s Third Reich were revealed to the world, the eugenics movement lost momentum. But its influence continued on—the U.S. sanctioned mass institutionalization and forced sterilization policies into the 1970s. (Oregon’s last state-sanctioned forced sterilization occurred in 1981.) Today, the advancement of the “great replacement” theory—the racist ideology that there’s a conspiracy to “replace” white Americans—is yet another callback to a eugenics-based belief set, and is reflected in everything from the fight over abortion rights to the Buffalo mass shooting in May.

That’s why it’s important that shows like Star Trek—which has touched on the dangers of eugenics since the introduction of its greatest antagonist, the genetically engineered Übermensch Khan Noonien Singh, back in 1967—continue to put a spotlight on the subject.

As researchers who studied genetic engineering in film and television from 1912 through 2020 recently concluded in the Journal of Literature and Science, the visibility of this theme in film and television matters “not because it determines the attitudes of the public” but because it “furnishes the public debate.”

Too often, the science—or in this case, racist, classist, ableist, long-debunked pseudoscience—that shapes policy has been argued behind closed doors. Looking back on The Black Stork and its impact, is a reminder of why it matters that we don’t shy away from confronting it on screen.

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In June 1941, when German troops overran the country, Vilna was home to 55,000 Jewish residents and 12,000–15,000 refugees from German-occupied Poland. Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, the spiritual and academic center of Holocaust remembrance, described Vilna before the Nazis arrived as “the spiritual centre of Eastern European Jewry, the centre of enlightenment and Jewish political life, of Jewish creativity and the experience of daily Jewish life, a community bursting with cultural and religious life, movements and parties, educational institutions, libraries and theatres; a community of rabbis and gifted Talmudic scholars, intellectuals, poets, authors, artists, craftspeople and educators.”

The Nazis, with the help of some Lithuanians, destroyed all that. In September 1941, they imprisoned the Jews of Vilna in two separate ghettoes.

The smaller, filled with Jews deemed incapable of work, was liquidated after six weeks, with 10,000 of its residents massacred at Ponary, a forest just outside the city. The 30,000 Jews imprisoned in the larger ghetto were kept alive, barely, and sent off to work in nearby labor camps until September 1943, when the second ghetto was closed. Some 8,000 ghetto residents too ill to work any longer were sent to be shot at Ponary or to the Sobibor death camp to be gassed; a few thousand of the stronger men and boys were transported to suffer and be worked to death in Estonian labor and concentration camps; the strongest of the women and girls were sent to labor camps in Latvia.

What happened in Vilna was just a microcosm of atrocities committed throughout Lithuania. By the war’s end, 90 percent of the country’s pre-war Jewish population of a quarter million had been murdered. While it was the Germans who pulled the triggers, they were aided and abetted at every step by local Lithuanians, who sought out the Jews or gave names and addresses to the Germans, who invaded their homes, stole their property, and marched the Jews to the killing fields where they would be shot, and who stayed behind to bury them in mass graves.

In traveling to Lithuania, I had hoped to find that, as in Rome, the past remained present in some way; that I would be able to experience it in its absence, soak in what had once been there and now survived in the ruins and the memorials. But the Vilna and Lithuania that I wanted to visit was no more. It had been cleared of its Jewish population. There were no Jews left in Butrimonys, the small village where my maternal grandmother’s family had come from, and only a few thousand in all of Lithuania.

Vilna had been replaced by Vilnius, which, now, in the third decade of the 21st century, had branded itself as one of the most attractive, tourist-friendly cities in Europe, with wondrous shopping opportunities, magnificent parks, a picturesque old city, world-class hotels and restaurants, and a thriving night life.

On my arrival and for the next several days, I wandered and was escorted through Vilnius and its outskirts in search of Vilna and some vestige of the Jews who had once lived there. I walked the broad pedestrian-friendly streets of the Vilnius Old Town, where I was staying, past small shops overstuffed with antiques, designer clothing, handicrafts, linens, books, and amber jewelry. Outside the Old Town, I visited the beautifully designed and overflowing malls and markets and fashion houses. And all the time, I thought about how this city had once been a center of Jewish life and learning, all of it now vanished—105 synagogues and prayer houses, six daily newspapers, and dozens of active, thriving theaters, libraries, museums, hospitals, schools, universities, institutes, and publishing houses.

On my final day in Vilnius, I visited Ponary just outside the city, where, according to historian Timothy Snyder, 72,000 Jews had been shot, buried, and then, at the end of the war as the Soviets approached, had their corpses dug up by the Nazis and their local helpers and burned so that no trace of the atrocities committed there would remain. The scene I took in in 2019 was bucolic, with tamed forests, well-marked paths, and memorials along the way. One had to struggle with one’s imagination to link together the memorials to the dead with the still green, verdant parkland.

Having spent five years trying to distance myself from the horrors of the Holocaust in eastern Europe so that I could write my book and lead my life, I was now standing where the atrocities I had read and written about occurred. I had expected that the keynote of my visit to Vilna and Butrimonys, and Lithuania, then Latvia, would be an inescapable mourning. But I quickly learned how difficult, if not impossible, it is to mourn an absence.

I found myself grieving not only for those who had died in the past, but for the Jewish activists and educators who had done all they humanly could to resurrect the community that had been destroyed. At war’s end, a few thousand Lithuanian Jews who had escaped and survived the Holocaust—in the Soviet Union or in hiding, or who had fought as partisans in the forests—returned to Vilna. But their attempts to rebuild a Jewish community were thwarted by the Soviets, who feared any expression of ethnic pride or nationalism, other than reverence for the Soviet state and the Communist Party.

The Germans had murdered the Jewish people. The Soviets, through the 1950s and for the two decades that followed, engaged in another form of genocide, removing any remnant of the built community. Schools and shuls and libraries and theaters were destroyed or repurposed; the gravestones in the Jewish cemetery were removed, pounded into fragments, then used as building materials in the new brutalized, Sovietized streets and buildings.

By the early 1970s, increased Jewish immigration from Russia and Ukraine led to the expansion of the Jewish population to almost 20,000. But these migrants found it impossible to put down roots in the city and the country where so many of the previous generations of Jews had been murdered. When the establishment of an independent Lithuanian republic in 1991 enabled the Jews to abandon the Soviet bloc, they did so. Most migrated to the United States or to Israel, where they could be part of thriving, living Jewish communities.

For those who remained in what was now an independent Lithuania, there remained a glimmer of hope that the Jewish community, after five decades of occupation by the Germans and the Soviets, had a chance to finally be reborn. But it was not to be. Non-Jewish Lithuanians were more concerned with memorializing the suffering of their people under Soviet tyranny than they were in recognizing the destruction of the Jewish community by the Germans and atoning for the participation of some Lithuanians in the genocide.

There are today roughly 3,000 Jews still in Vilnius—many of them recent arrivals with no ancestral ties to the city. Those I met and talked with on my trip still held tight to their mission to revive a living Jewish community with cultural institutions, yeshivas, day schools, shuls, but I got the sense that they knew their cause was lost.

If a thriving Jewish community was out of reach in the present, there was among the Jewish activists I met, the hope that physical markers and memorials to the past might preserve the memory of the atrocities that had been committed in the vanished prewar city, that Vilnius’s and Lithuania’s school children might be educated about this stain in their national history, and reminded that their capital city had once been the capital city of Jewish thought and culture.

The Jewish activists are proud of the progress they’ve made since 1991—and the declaration of Lithuanian independence—in integrating the history of the Shoah in Vilna into the history of Vilnius and Lithuania, proud of the memorials that have been erected in the city and at the killing fields of Ponary, proud of and seizing on every opportunity to educate rising generations about the city’s Jewish past. Still, it is an uphill battle that they and other Jewish residents in eastern Europe are fighting. The inhabitants of today’s Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, do not want to be reminded of the sins of their fathers and mothers, or of the atrocities they witnessed or participated in. They would rather not revisit the past or, to be more accurate, they would rather revisit a sanitized past where Lithuanians were the victims of violence, not the perpetrators.

As a historian, I try to bring the past back to life because it is a vital part of our present. We live in a continuum of time—the past is with us, embedded in our present, and we must recognize it as such. But that past is difficult to locate and resurrect. It is a foreign country that we can visit, but never inhabit, never speak the language, eat the foods, worship and live and love as the departed once did. No amount of effort on our part, as historians, can bring it back to life. All we can do is struggle to re-present that past in words and images.

This is what I tried to do in writing The Last Million: Europe’s Displaced Persons from World War to Cold War. I wanted to recapture this forgotten chapter in the history of World War II, the Cold War, and the Holocaust. I wanted to instruct present generations to the reality that the suffering of the victims of war did not end with the cessation of hostilities. I wanted to show how 1 million refugees, 250,000 of them Jewish Holocaust survivors, were, after the German surrender, trapped in displaced persons camps in Germany for three to five years because their homes and homelands had been destroyed and no nation on earth would accept them for resettlement.

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The house from the old photograph. The house my mother once called home.

For a moment, the curtain seems to flutter and everything else stands still. I am not overcome with emotion or moved to tears; I simply feel this jolt, and a little voice inside shouting, “Give me back our stuff.”

The real “stuff,” of course, cannot be preserved under glass. Along with a few gold coins hidden in a jar of cold cream and a box of photographs, the beating heart of the family escaped with my mother in 1939, on Kindertransport #8.

While more than 1 million Jewish children were murdered in the Holocaust, my mother, Anita Heufeld, was one of 10,000 rescued by the Central British Fund for German Jewry (now World Jewish Relief). Just short of her 14th birthday, she became an unaccompanied minor, fleeing for safe haven in England. Her parents and most of her extended family remained behind and were killed. She never went back.

My trip to Fischach was instigated when the Jewish Museum of Augsburg launched an exhibition on what had happened to the Kindertransport children from the region after they escaped. The curators wanted to include my mother’s story, and I surprised myself by deciding to travel to the opening of the exhibition, accompanied by my husband and my nephew. I wanted to honor my bracingly intelligent mom, fondly called Ni, who had emerged from her disrupted childhood remarkably intact, running her dress-making business and our family with aplomb. I was also goaded by the resurgence of white supremacy in the U.S. and Europe, and by a president who gleefully incited hatred in a way that my immigrant parents would have recognized with horror, betraying the American ideals they had taught us to value.

While my mother did not hide the past, she also did not dwell on it. But in the mid-1980s, when she was about 60, Ni agreed to an oral history and told us about the close-knit family she had left behind. We learned that Aunt Mina loved growing strawberries; that my mother’s parents were very happy together, their twin beds were pushed together, “no space between”; that my grandmother Erna wrote skits and my grandfather Samuel grew red carnations. Samuel was the respected secular head of the Jewish community, who “was just as anxious that other people should be safe as that we should be safe,” Ni said. When her children grew up to became social justice activists, my mother claimed us as the inheritors of the values her father had embodied.

When the Nazis came to power in 1933, Fischach had 853 inhabitants. That included 127 Jews. Today there are none. Yet in our absence, a curious phenomenon has emerged: Small committees, comprised largely of non-Jewish older women, have made themselves guardians of Jewish history and cultural memory in towns around southern Germany. In Fischach, the local history committee of the Historical Synagogue Locations Network is headed by retired schoolteacher Anne-Marie Fendt and a deputy to the mayor, Marianne Koos. “It was my mother who told me what she remembered about the Jewish families,” Anne-Marie recalled. “I think of her as an empathetic woman … She always called your grandparents’ home the ‘Heufeld Haus,’ When I started school, I passed the house every day.”

Marianne, who moved to Fischach as a young adult, grew up as part of a new generation that held their parents accountable for being “the perpetrator generation.” Her interest in history drew her to the committee. “When you hear the stories of the families who lived here, and you know the houses where they laughed and loved, had children, and thought they would live their whole lives there because they were Germans, like everyone else in Fischach—I think that changed my way of thinking a bit, it became more personal. It was no longer just German history; it also became my history.”

As the Fischach women showed us around the village, my mother’s memories took physical shape: the former Jewish school next to the building that had once housed the synagogue; the corner bakery where the Jewish families had taken their Sabbath challah to be baked, and where each child could recognize the family loaf by how it was braided. And the awareness, too, revealed in the census maps that Anne-Marie had constructed, that this community had not been ghettoized, that the Jews had lived side by side with their non-Jewish neighbors.

The incremental rise of Nazism put an end to that existence. In May of 1932, the Nazis came to Fischach, plastered the town with anti-Jewish propaganda, and beat up a young man for tearing a poster off the synagogue wall. In 1933, the Jews were tossed off the city council and the volunteer fire department.

Even if townspeople had better angels, most fell in line. Jews were ousted from the town chorus and the garden club. Children were banned from the soccer team, and then from attending school. After Kristallnacht in November 1938, when the Nazis incited open warfare on the Jewish population, destroying synagogues and businesses, the Jews of Fischach—stripped of most livelihoods and restricted from travel—could neither feed their families nor flee. And then, all the Jewish men between the ages of 18 and 60 were arrested and hauled off to KZ Dachau, the first Nazi concentration camp. Among them were my mother’s father and her brother, Walter.

Through the intercession of the town mayor and my grandfather’s tenacity, or perhaps simply by happenstance, the men were released by December. But from that moment on, my mother’s mother made it her mission to get the children out. Walter left first, when relatives in Great Britain arranged for his emigration. When a neighbor told my grandmother about the planned Kindertransport, she wrote a letter requesting spaces for my mother and her cousin Rudi.

Of all the details in Ni’s story, I always linger on her departure. Her tough and smart mother prepared her for the trip: hiding pieces of jewelry in her belongings so she would have something to sell if she was hungry; trying to fill her with all the information a growing girl might need; making meringues with whipped cream for her last dinner at home—the dessert my mother would love for the rest of her life.

But in the end, it was her beloved father who saw her onto the train full of fleeing Jewish girls.

My mother didn’t come to the train station with us, she stayed outside the house and waved goodbye. I had a little navy coat and a hat with red ribbons down the back, and a navy-blue dress I had made myself, with red buttons. And on the platform in Munich my father checked me in with the leader of the transport. And he put his hands on my head gently, blessing me, and he cried, and he kissed me goodbye, and he put me on the train. And that was the last time I ever saw him. And there was a train full of children. And there was a platform full of parents, all weeping.

The End of the Road

As one of the final stops on my Fischach journey, the Fischach committee women led me up a little gravel road to the old Jewish cemetery, resting behind a locked iron gate on a tree-shaded hill above the village. The committee played a key role in restoring the cemetery and lovingly oversees its maintenance.

My great-grandfather Max Heufeld, who died in 1936, is buried here, but my great-grandmother Amalie isn’t resting beside him in the space reserved for her. Instead, at age 79, she was among the village’s last 10 Jewish elders who were rounded up in August 1942 and carted off to their deaths at the Theresienstadt concentration camp.

Kim at the cemetery where her great-grandfather Max Heufeld, who died in 1936, was buried. Courtesy of Kim Fellner.

Fifty-six younger people from the village, including my grandparents, had been deported earlier that year, sent to Piaski, a prison town near Lublin, Poland. As best we know, they were all taken out to Piaski’s Jewish cemetery and shot—except for my grandfather, who was sent to nearby Trawniki as part of a work detail. By winter, he too would be dead, shot in another mass murder, dumped in another unmarked grave.

Decades later, my mother’s brother would return to Fischach and, on Amalie’s side of the gravestone, carve the names of those in the family who had been killed: Amalie. Samuel and Erna. Samuel’s two brothers and their wives. His sister Mina, only 36 when she was deported, well-remembered as the proprietor of the family kiosk, from whom many villagers had purchased their spirits, cigars, chocolate, tea and coffee. And my mother’s little cousin Rolf, deported from Munich to Theresienstadt along with his parents in June 1942 and killed at Auschwitz. My mother, her brother, and their cousin Rudi, who escaped on another Kindertransport for boys, were the only immediate family to survive.

Truths and Reconciliations

My mother recalled going to the movies in England in 1945 and seeing the ghastly first newsreel footage of the concentration camps, with their mass graves and skeletal survivors. She never looked at the footage again. “I never let myself specifically think about the people I knew going through that,” Ni told us. “I always include them in with all the other people. What happened to my parents is never far removed from my consciousness. But I have never allowed myself to individualize them in the event. That would have been intolerable.”

No wonder that I too insulated myself by seeing the murder of my family as part of a grim collective. But as I returned to the place of their existence, I was able to fully reclaim them as my own, and to confront the difficult knowledge of my grandparents’ final months on earth. Standing in that graveyard, I recognized for the first time that my family had constituted the largest grouping of victims from that village, and that they had mostly been in their prime, living full and nuanced lives, and so much younger than I had imagined them.

Sifting through that past with Anne-Marie and Marianne, we acknowledged that our current moment has discomfiting echoes of the history that had brought us together. As in Nazi Germany, the bluster about national greatness, comingled with a narrative of racial supremacy, is like a magician’s sleight of hand; what we are ostensibly seeing and hearing about current emergencies distract us from the concurrent erosion of civil rights and democracy. We are always warned not to make these comparisons, that doing so always undervalues the unique evil of the Holocaust and Hitler, while overstating the evil of the event or person to which they are compared. But real parallels reside in the sneaky accretion of particulars—from propaganda and dehumanization to inciting people with fear and hatred, to bullying and punitive legal action, to the stripping of rights and freedom, to acts of brutality and murder. We can only hope that we have more success than those thinkers and journalists who opposed the onset of Nazism if we want to save our democratic values, our neighbors, the people we love, and ourselves.

But Marianne and Anne-Marie, thoughtful and willing to engage, gave me hope. They reminded me that history does not always evolve as the tormentors of the moment might wish—and that the children of the perpetrator generation and the children of the victims can find themselves on the same side of the struggle a generation or two later.

“I learned a lot, and like you, had a lot to think about,” Marianne wrote me after our visit. “What would I have done if I had lived at those times? I know for sure that I never would have been one of those Nazis! But what about being a coward? Saying nothing, doing nothing…. Maybe our generation isn’t responsible for the past, but we are responsible for the future.”

Like them, I know which side I’m on. And taking a stand is not someone else’s responsibility; it’s our own.

The post Coming Home to the Holocaust appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

But for Hitler, this air of imminent national revolution had come too soon—because no one yet realized that he should be Germany’s natural leader.

This was his own fault. For years, he had steadfastly refused to be photographed and had not given anything about himself away in his speeches. Instead, he had relied solely on the power of his voice to create a following for himself. And while his carefully choreographed speeches had been sufficient to turn him into the enfant terrible of Bavarian politics, Hitler concluded that his chances of becoming the face, or at least a face, of the national revolution were close to nil if people did not even know what he looked like.

So he went to the opposite extreme—producing picture postcards of himself and distributing them widely.

Hitler’s radical recasting of his public image in 1923 went further than that—and said a great deal about the kind of leader he was aspiring to become. A garden-variety demagogue might have simply created an outsized image for himself, an inadvertent sort of cartoon. Hitler did something more sophisticated. He made the case for a new kind of leader, and created a semi-fictional alternative version of himself that would fit his own job description.

To sell the idea that he was Germany’s savior-in-waiting, and to boost his profile outside of Bavaria, he wrote a very short autobiography to be published together with a selection of his speeches. In the autobiography, he told the story of how his experiences as a young man provided him with revelations about the nature of politics that would allow him to save Germany from misery and make it safe for all times.

But publishing such a self-aggrandizing portrait would have repelled Germany’s traditional conservatives, so Hitler searched for a writer with impeccable conservative credentials willing to pretend to have written the book. Doing so would come with a double payoff: Hitler’s shameless act of self-promotion would be concealed, while the impression would be created that he already was in receipt of widespread support among traditional conservatives.

This led Hitler to Victor von Koerber, a blue-eyed and blond young military hero and writer. A North-German aristocrat, von Koerber was attracted by the promise of a new conservatism fused with the youthful idealism of National Socialism.

The book—published under the title Adolf Hitler, sein Leben, seine Reden (Adolf Hitler: His Life and His Speeches)—was banned soon after publication, limiting its intended impact. Yet the book sheds light on how Hitler—in a moment rife for demagoguery—managed to rise to the top against all odds.

Hitler often paid lip service to the myth—which tends to be believed by historians to the present day—that he was only “a drummer” who was doing the bidding of others and had no ambitions to lead Germany into the future. But in the book, he put into the mouth of Koerber his own determination that he was “the leader of the most radically honest national movement […] who is ready as well as prepared to lead the German struggle for liberation.”

Hiding behind Koerber’s name, Hitler could get away with pronouncing himself Germany’s “messiah.” His autobiography-in-disguise repeatedly uses biblical language, arguing that the book should “become the new bible of today as well as the ‘Book of the German People.’” It also directly compares Hitler to Jesus, likening the purported moment of his politicization in Pasewalk to Jesus’s resurrection:

“This man, destined to eternal night, who during this hour endured crucifixion on pitiless Calvary, who suffered in body and soul; one of the most wretched from among this crowd of broken heroes: this man’s eyes shall be opened! Calm shall be restored to his convulsed features. In the ecstasy that is only granted to the dying seer, his dead eyes shall be filled with new light, new splendor, new life!”

Given that he wrote this stuff, Hitler’s need to pretend to be a mere “drummer” is simple: He had to square the circle. On the one hand, he desired to put himself in a position to head a national revolution. On the other hand, Germany’s conservatives had their own political ambitions. Hitler could only advance by pretending that he would be their tool, while attempting to create the impression that his support among them was already larger than it really was.

The Hitler of this episode belies the common misconception that he was a primitive, raging, and nihilistic dark elemental force. Rather, he was a man with an emerging deep understanding of how political processes, systems, and the public sphere worked. His study of propaganda techniques while serving in World War I had provided him with an appreciation for political narratives that would help him plot his way to power.

Getting Koerber to release his autobiography helped Hitler create a politically useful narrative. By making the case for a new kind of leader, without explicitly naming Hitler, it insidiously created the public perception of a gap that only he could fill: a man without a pedigree coming out of nowhere with an innate gift for seeing the hidden architecture of the world and hence to build a new Germany. In short, Hitler cleverly exploited the way the German political system and the public sphere worked, so as to build a place for himself.

Demagogues come in several varieties, from populists with no genuine core beliefs to ideologues of various political convictions. They include rational as well as irrational actors. Some are figures who know when to retreat to moderation, and others never know where to stop, thus planting the seed of their regime’s self-destruction. The problem is that it is only in hindsight that we can tell how any specific demagogue will develop.

Koerber and other conservatives thought that they simply could use Hitler. But they did not understand, at least in 1923, how the common language and style of demagogues-in-the-making looks very similar at the beginning, while their inner selves vary greatly. Unlike many others, Koerber of course knew how clever a political operative Hitler was, but the young aristocrat could not really see into Hitler and misjudged him.

When confronted with emerging demagogues, in moments when people yearn for strongmen and novel kinds of leaders, history thus cannot tell us until it is too late whether an individual is a Hitler, a Franco, a Lenin—or, for instance, a populist who, while flirting with authoritarianism, ultimately manages to withstand its seduction.

Victor von Koerber eventually learned the hard way that the person he had imagined Hitler to be when lending his name to him was a very different man from the one who would rule Germany. He grew disillusioned with Hitler in the mid-1920s after seeing how he presented himself once his trial (in the wake of his failed putsch) had finally transformed him into a public figure.

In the late 1920s, Koerber began issuing warnings about the dangers Hitler posed to the world. But by then, it was already too late to stop him. Once the Nazi Party was in power, Koerber helped a prominent German Jew to get out of the country. And then Koerber began to feed the British military attaché in Berlin with intelligence. Koerber ultimately landed in one of Hitler’s concentration camps, which he barely survived.

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