Stumbling memories
IN the streets of any German town or city you might see small brass plaques embedded into the footpath outside homes that were the last freely chosen residences of the people who lived there before they were taken away to death camps by the Nazis. The people who lived in the house behind these stumbling stones ( pictured) in Berlin were sent to Buchenwald and Auschwitz, where they were murdered. So far 70,000 of these stumbling stones have been placed outside houses and apartments in 1200 cities across Europe and in Russia – a small representation considering six million Jews were murdered. coming up for air. At one stage his senior staff persuaded him to come to the surface to pin medals to the tunics of men fighting to defend the city. He came up for air and presented the medals to the men and then scurried back down into his hole in the ground. The next time he came to the surface it would be as a corpse.
There was one thing about these “men” he presented medals. They were not men. They were boys. Most were 13 and 14 years of age. They were the ones carrying arms, defending Berlin while their Fuhrer, the leader of the Third Reich, hid under concrete in a giant spider hole. At this late stage of Hitler’s war, four million German soldiers had lost their lives. Only boys were left to carry guns. With defeat inevitable, Sarah told us Hitler had turned on his own people. He hated the German soldiers for losing the war and he hated the German people for failing to stay true to their Fuhrer. It was all about Adolf. Before he killed himself, he ordered that both his body and Eva’s be burned. This was to prevent the corpses being paraded as trophies.
Hitler knew what had happened to the corpse of Benito Mussolini after the fascist Italian dictator was executed by machine gun up against a wall by an Italian partisan. Mussolini’s body was hung upside down over a service station in a suburban square in Milan. This was after the corpse was bashed with clubs, spat on, shouted at and shot some more just for the hell of it by a general public hungry for revenge. Hitler, the man who ordered the torture and slaughter of millions of Jews, gypsies, political opponents, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, handicapped and mentally impaired people and American POWS, did not want to suffer the same indignity. At Dachau there is a plaque remembering four female British resistance fighters captured by the Nazis who were gassed. Their bodies went into the ovens.
Hitler’s staff took his and Eva’s bodies to the surface but soon discovered that burning a human corpse takes time. The enemy was at the gate and the Nazis charged with the burning ignored their Fuhrer’s final command and to save their own skins, fled, leaving behind the partially burnt remains. It is thought the Russians might have recovered the bodies. No one knows for sure who might have them. Apart from collectors of the macabre, does anyone care?