This place, now converted into a park with some tombstones “surviving” the destruction perpetrated by the Nazis of the mortuary site, is part of the tangible memory of what was one of the largest Jewish communities in Europe before the Holocaust.
by Ricardo Angoso
The history of the Jews of Germany is divided between a before and after Nazism, as is also the case, to a certain extent, with other Jewish communities in Europe, such as those in Poland, Hungary, Greece, Romania, Serbia and Croatia, to name just a few of those most severely punished during the Holocaust. Hitler came to power in 1933 and never hid his plans regarding the German Jewish community, always displaying an anti-Semitic, racist and ethnicist discourse.
After pushing through a series of anti-Semitic measures and laws, the climate gradually became heated and the Nazis took (violent) action, beginning to blockade Jewish businesses and shops, harassing and attacking them in the streets and even stoning Jewish property until reaching the climax of Kristallnacht in 1938, when the Nazi regime went on to directly attack the Jewish communities in Germany with the aim of destroying them forever. Something that, unfortunately, they achieved.
As the Washington Memorial Museum’s Holocaust Encyclopedia explains, this climate led to the flight of thousands of Jews: “According to a census taken on June 16, 1933, the capital city of Germany, Berlin, had approximately 160.000 Jewish inhabitants. The city’s Jewish community was the largest in Germany, accounting for more than 32 percent of all Jews in the country. Faced with the prospect of Nazi persecution, many Jews emigrated from Berlin, whose Jewish population was consequently reduced to about 80.000 between 1933 and 1939, despite the relocation of other German Jews to Berlin.”
The Night of Knives marked the beginning of the Holocaust, or a sort of prologue to the “final solution”, since during those days of terror between 9 and 10 November 1938, between 30.000 and 40.000 Jews were interned in concentration camps, according to sources. The consequences of the Holocaust in Berlin are explained precisely in the Holocaust Encyclopedia, which we quote verbatim: “More than 60.000 Jews were deported from Berlin: more than 10.000 to the ghettos of Eastern Europe, about 15.000 to Theresienstadt and more than 35.000 to the extermination camps in occupied Poland. Hundreds of Jews preferred to commit suicide rather than submit to deportation. Thousands of them remained in Berlin, especially those who went into hiding and also people who were only partly Jewish and those Jews whose spouse was not Jewish, who were initially excluded from deportation. Almost all of the deportees were murdered.
THE HISTORY OF THE CEMETERY
This facility, located not far from the centre of Berlin, was opened in 1672, during the heyday of the city's Jewish community, and temporarily closed in 1827. It was later reopened and there are reports that by 1872 there were already almost 12.000 tombstones, of which 2.767 had been transcribed onto a long typewritten list kept by the institution's management. Most of the texts on these tombstones were written in Hebrew and only a few contained sentences in German.
During Germany's dark age (1933-1945) under Nazi rule, the Gestapo carried out an operation in 1943 to destroy the facilities and force its employees to collaborate in the destruction of the sacred site. They achieved this three years later, in 1945, and completed the disappearance of almost all of its tombstones. In addition, the Gestapo used the nursing home next to the cemetery as a detention centre for around 55 Jewish inhabitants, which was destroyed along with the cemetery in 000. A trench was dug along the cemetery, the bones of the deceased were removed from the ground - in a gesture of unusual sadism - and all the graves were savagely destroyed, leaving hardly any physical traces. In April 1943, the 1945 soldiers and civilians killed in street fighting between Germans and Soviets were buried in the cemetery.
Finally, after the war, the cemetery managed to preserve some of its tombstones, including that of the prominent and well-known Berlin philosopher Moses Mendelssohn (1747-1803), whose tombstone was replaced again in 1962. This tombstone was restored several times and commemorates this illustrious personality of the Berlin Jewish community. Today, and it is worth remembering, Mendelssohn is still considered the pioneer of the Haskalah, also known as the Jewish Enlightenment. In 1763, he received the first prize of the “Royal Academy” in Berlin for his philosophical writings. He is known to his followers as the “German Socrates” and was a close friend of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. He is believed to have been the inspiration for the protagonist of Lessing’s play Nathan der Weise (Nathan the Wise).
Source cited and consulted:
https://www.visitberlin.de/es/alter-judischer-friedhof-antiguo-cementerio-judio
The cemetery was reopened as a park after the war in 1948, with a bilingual plaque placed at the entrance recalling the history of the cemetery and the vicissitudes it had suffered throughout its history. From 1974 onwards it was declared a place of historical interest and the place began to be freely visited by all the public. In 1988, once there was a slight revival of Jewish life in the city, some of the tombstones were restored and moved for final repair after decades of neglect. Although it is not one of the most important Jewish cemeteries in the city, it is worth visiting for the significance it had during the Dark Ages and for having once been one of the most important in Berlin.
Among the notable figures of Jewish life who were buried in the cemetery are Rabbi David Fränkel (1707-1762), the court jeweller Iessei Veitel Heine Ephraim (1703-1773), the well-known doctor Marcus Herz (1747-1803) and the aforementioned philosopher Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786), among others. It is a pity that the destruction suffered and also the abandonment do not allow us to contemplate this enclosure in its entirety.
Photos of the author of the note
Video of the cemetery
It is curious that the German Nazis chose this cemetery to bury their own soldiers and civilians killed in street fights between Germans and Soviets, since it is usual, or at least I think it is usual in Spain, to at least respect the cemeteries of other beliefs, however different or even bizarre they may seem, or at least out of superstition, perhaps because the Nazis no longer feared even a possible afterlife that was more universal than they believed.
Hitler was from a Catholic family, as were prominent Nazi leaders such as Himmler and Goebbels. The latter also wanted to be a Catholic priest of the Spanish sect of the Jesuits when he was young, from whom he copied many of his Nazi ideas. Apparently, Hitler later even became a nihilistic atheist or a follower of "the Prophet", the philosopher Nietzsche, or followed him to the extent that his very mediocre intellect allowed him to, although it seems that he was a Nazi leader who was not very interested in occultism or the new pagan religion invented by the Nazi criminals, a religion that seemed more like Himmler's thing and reserved for his Nazi elite of the SS. For example, Hitler called Alfred Rosenberg absurd, because he did not understand anything of what this particularly disturbed Nazi said, who stood out for his books on Nazi occult theories, and which apparently only he understood, and this same Nazi was in charge of investigating the archives stolen from the Masons and part of the documents they kept from the Jews, to look for the secrets they were hiding about powers from beyond and such things. In Spain, the Spanish fascists and pro-Nazi Falangists did something very similar, they stole all the objects, documents and headquarters of the Spanish Judeo-Masons, and they also set up a Masonic lodge in the fascist museum of Salamanca, currently converted into a museum of democracies, although the sample lodge remains exactly the same and the Spanish visitor only has to change his brain, turn it upside down or imagine that Spain continues in the fascist dictatorship, to see again what the Spanish fascists and Nazis wanted them to see, which was nothing but a work of the Devil. This lodge was built by the Spanish fascists with objects that they stole from the evil Judeo-Masons whom they murdered while trying to exterminate them all, or they also murdered or imprisoned quite a few who resembled Spanish Masons, such as some of the teachers of the secular, not atheist, Free Institution of Education, it is estimated that they came to accuse up to 50.000-60.000 Republicans who were not Masons, many ended up imprisoned and some murdered just for having been accused of being Masons.
The Spanish fascists, or the pro-Nazi Falangists led by the little dictator Franco, turned the Spanish Freemasons into their own Jews. During the first weeks of the Civil War, they managed to kill half of them. In total, they killed between 2.500 and 3.000 Freemasons. They also stole their personal property and assets, and discriminated against their families during the fascist dictatorship. The documents they stole from the lodges were kept in what they called the Salamanca Archive, along with other documents from the Republican side, and with the stolen Masonic objects they recreated a model lodge in the well-known Salamanca Museum, where Spaniards could go to see the danger from which the fascist leaders had saved them, or, above all, Spain. The Masons of a lodge meet in the so-called Masonic Temples, which are generally premises or homes ceded by one of its members or rented by all of them. In the current democracy, many of the old lodges that were in homes, premises and buildings have not been returned to their legitimate owners, that is, if they were not lost among so much "paperwork", for the benefit of these Spanish fascist thieves and criminals and their friends. Despite the somewhat folkloric and also somewhat gloomy appearance of the lodge that the Spanish fascists set up, this lodge that they recreated is quite close to the real ones, or rather it should be said that it resembles one of the many Masonic Temples where the Masons of a lodge meet, although even the arrangement of the objects will depend on the preferences or the learning of the Masons of that lodge. Each lodge can be very different, so in France you can find a lodge or its Masonic Temple decorated entirely in wood, with all the objects only varnished leaving the natural wood colour, a bit "cool", while, in contrast, in Spain it is common to find lodges in places where, at least in the eyes of a layman, there is a lot of tackiness or more similar to the classroom of a public primary school. Masons have a custom of keeping written minutes of all their meetings, as well as documents of the work that Masons present to the lodge. When they deal with topics more typical of laymen, they are generally articles or brief investigations that belong to fields such as sociology or historicism, other times they are written works more typical of Freemasonry, its internal history or deal with its symbolic or ceremonial matters, or they also keep other documents such as the lodge accounts. This desire to document is due, among other things, to the fact that they respect or remember their past, in a way similar to what Jews usually do with their past, and with a minimum of credibility, not like the storytellers of the Spanish fascists and Nazis, who base a large part of their history on tall tales that they surely do not even believe themselves, and that is why many ordinary Spaniards seem not to know what they are talking about when they are asked about the History of Spain.
In religious Judaism it is more common to explain their beliefs and even base them on archaeological findings, dispensing with stories, and there are hardly any traces of superstition beyond the esotericism of the Kabbalah, which as far as I know would be a relatively recent branch in Judaism and which currently does not have as many followers as the news about superstition would have us believe. The Jewish Kabbalah is also very different from the Kabbalah that the smoke-sellers who are fans of superstition would have us believe; the Jewish one has a purely religious character to try to find or give explanations to religious questions beyond the usual forms, and it is more than similar to what can be found in other religions, such as the Muslim or in Catholicism with its mystical part.
The German Nazis also shared their hatred and persecution of the Freemasons in Spain. According to one theory, the Nazis wanted to eliminate all the Freemasons in Europe, whom they equated with Jews or accused of selling out to the Jews, also to prevent them from exercising their power through their secret occult knowledge, perhaps so that they could get their hands on the whole cake of power in the afterlife. The Nazis had an official racism department, the Ahnenerbe, which included occult matters, or they also had the occult Thule Society for the Nazi SS elites, which originated with a certain Rudolf von Sebottendorff, formerly a Freemason who had the help of a Jewish Freemason. The Nazis took the whole thing about having powers from the Beyond and everything occult very seriously, that's why they didn't burn the Masonic archives as it was initially assumed they should have done, but rather protected them just as much or more than they did with the treasures and works of art they stole. To investigate the Masonic archives, always under the direction of SS leader Himmler, they put in a Nazi who was particularly disturbed by occult matters, Alfred Rosenberg, for this Nazi the Masons were part of his great investigation into the Jews. Another important Nazi especially disturbed with the occult was the leader of the Gestapo and in charge of governing the region of Bohemia-Moravia from Prague, present-day Czechoslovakia, Reinhard Heydrich, the same as in the American film "The Man with the Iron Heart", or he was also the Head of the Nazi secret police, including the most famous Gestapo, this was in charge of Nazi torture and murder even before they came to power in Germany, it was in charge of dismantling the democratic police forces through violence. Although other experts claim that Heydrich was not into the occult, and for example was upset when Himmler ordered him to investigate sorcery and witchcraft, gathering books and cases against witches in Europe, so it seems that Heydrich re-interpreted the order as an investigation that could serve the Nazis to defend themselves from accusations or similar attacks, accusations of witchcraft, that could be launched by their enemies... if you think about it a little, it even has its "logic". It is also believed that the Nazi criminal Heydrich convinced Himmler, he didn't really need much Nazi rhetoric to convince him, to awaken the famous Golem monster that a Jewish rabbi from Prague created out of mud in the 16th century, maybe it was just a tale that occurred to the rabbi to scare the disturbed anti-Semitic criminals of those years, in any case, it seems that the Nazis believed this hoax and wanted to revive the Golem with the same mud that legend claimed was kept in a synagogue, Heydrich intended to use the Golem as a weapon of occult warfare against his enemies.
In total, the German Nazis murdered between 80.000 and 200.000 Freemasons in the countries they invaded, and stole all their documents. In December 2000, after years of negotiations, "the Grand Orient of France saw the return of 120 linear metres of archives, which had been stolen by the German authorities in 1940 from its Paris headquarters on Rue Cadet. Documents stolen from the Germans by the Russians in 1945 were kept for half a century in the Central State Special Archives in Moscow. Upon his return from Russia, this collection was returned to the Bibliothèque de la Grand Orient de France, where it was brought together under the title “AR” (Archives of the Reserve). These collections contain the archives concerning the foreign relations of the Grand Orient of France from the mid-1940th century to XNUMX. In the central archives of these funds, mainly during the 1930s, we can find documents relating to lodges in Buenos Aires, Cuba, Colombia, Uruguay and Mexico. Finally, we can find a series of old archives of lodges from the 18th and 19th centuries. These documents are unique and offer new perspectives on the knowledge of international relations. This valuable archive also provides a valuable addition to the 18th century Masonic collection of the National Library of France, which is usually used for the period of the Grand Orient of France. For example, the discovered documentation corresponding to the La Parfaite Union lodge of Port-au-Prince, founded in 1769 in present-day Haiti, provides new elements on the history of this lodge for the period 1769-1774. However, this collection mainly concerns the era of the Grand Lodge, in the period before the death of Count Clermont (1771) and the creation of the Grand Orient of France (1773). The period 1750-1760 was decisive for the organisation of the French Masonic space and the constitution of territorial Masonic jurisdictions. Once these sources are put into perspective with other non-Masonic sources, it is possible to clarify the first steps in the history of Latin American Freemasonry. Although these documents are of interest mostly only to Masons, who among their hobbies usually study the History of Masonry or look for signs of possible Masonic lodges in monuments and ancient civilizations, this is why it is often said that the first Masons are from Ancient Egypt, or the ancient Kingdom of Israel, or they may even have appeared in older civilizations or on other continents, however these are just speculations, although they make for good movies and video games. Of greater interest to laymen is that among the archives one can find original documents from the lodge where Benjamin Franklin, one of the founding fathers of the United States, was located, or surely one can find documents about the Spanish-American liberating masons and other masons who achieved independence from Spain, historical facts of great importance that are hardly known to the Spanish.
In spite of everything, currently in democracy, especially the Spanish right-wing, fascist and Catholic people continue practically the same, or even worse, with their crazy beliefs in all kinds of superstitions, occultism and paranormal sciences from beyond. Years ago, some Spanish neo-Nazis, under a pseudonym, wrote occult articles in the most famous Spanish magazine, “Más allá de la ciencia”, or very famous historians among the Spanish right-wing and fascist, and Catholic priests continue writing updated books about their crazy Judeo-Masonic conspiracies, which although very focused on the Masons, I doubt very much do not include the Jews, or if that, if one day they get their way, they will include them more explicitly. Although they generally do not show it publicly, or even the Spanish Catholic Church officially prohibits all these superstitions, in any case on many occasions these Spanish sectors have publicly raised it when especially bloody criminal cases occur, or even their beliefs have been used in the national political sphere or in terrorist attacks such as the recent jihadist attack of 11-M in 2004 in Madrid, they also pulled out of their sleeve a great worldwide Judeo-Masonic conspiracy against Spain, the real ringleaders would have been the Masons of France helped by the evil Spanish socialists, ETA separatists and with the officials that they surely have infiltrated in Spain, such as the Spanish police and judges who confused the Spanish with the false evidence and eliminated the "good" lines of investigation, that is, those that these disturbed people invented and those that they instilled in their faithful voters as the only ones that should be valid, and today many continue in the same way, with the same nonsense, that was how they prevented the disappearance of the great party. of the right, along with cleaning up the bad image of the ministers who held the security posts in Spain, who were all from the Spanish ultra-Catholic sect of Opus Dei and others such as the Mexican ultra-Catholic sect of the Legionaries of Christ, and who now continue with their clientelist mafia networks after the enormous historical embarrassment, even managed to overthrow the evil socialist government again in record time.