There were four locations on the Berlin itinerary today: the memorial at Gruenewald station, platform 17, the House of the Wannsee Conference, the home of the offices of the SS, the SA, the Gestapo, and the Reich Security Main Office, and the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe near Hitler's bunker in the government offices section of the city.
The railroad station and the surrounding neighborhood struck me the most, the place where Jews were assembled to be shipped by train for murder at death camps in Poland. It's in mixed upper middle class neighborhood where many affluent Jews lived.
It was my second visit to Wannsee and the Memorial; Judy, Lily and I visited 3 1/2 years ago when Lily was studying in Holland and we visited over Christmas break and then drove to Berlin. Today, Dr. Thomas Lutz spoke to us at the documentation center of the site for the German state police apparatus, a site that is adjacent to the remnants of the Berlin Wall by the way.
Tomorrow we travel by bus to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in northwest Germany.
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