MA Program in Holocaust Communication and Tolerance Jewish Studies | Holocaust Studies
Berlin - Then and Now
All decisions related to the persecution of European Jewry, the murder of six millions Jews, and millions of other victims were made in Berlin, the capital of Germany. Between 1933 and 1945, the entire machinery of discrimination, persecution, torture, deportation and extermination was headquartered in Berlin. From here, Nazi politicians and SS leaders orchestrated the book burning (May 1933), passed the Nuremberg laws (1935), planned the pogrom against the Jewish population (1938), started the attack on Poland (1939),and coordinated the “Final Solution” at the infamous Wannsee Conference in January 1942.
In and around Berlin, with its centers of the Gestapo and the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (Reich Main Security Office), SS leaders such as Heinrich Himmler, Reinhard Heydrich, and Adolf Eichmann had their offices. Today, on the ruins of these places, memorials and places of reflection have been built. A few miles north of Berlin is the former concentration camp of Sachsenhausen - which also housed administrative headquarters for more than twenty concentration camps in occupied Europe. Some miles further north of Sachsenhausen was the Ravensbrück concentration camp for women and children. More than 130,000 prisoners were murdered there between 1939 and 1945.
But Berli n was also a place of courage and resistance. Liselotte Hermann, a young mother, passed on information about the secret rearmament program of the Nazis. She was executed in the Plötzensee prison in Berlin-Charlottenburg. The brush manufacturer Otto Weidt hid Jewish women and men, many of them blind, and thus saved them from deportation. In the spring of 1943 quite a few non-Jewish women successfully protested in Berlin against the deportation of their Jewish husbands. And right in the center of Berlin, Claus von Stauffenberg, a prominent officer in the German army, planned the assassination of Adolf Hitler. He and his co-conspirators were shot in the courtyard of the Bendlerblock building. Today, the German Resistance Memorial Center is housed there.
As part of our unique MA Program in Holocaust Communication and Tolerance, students visit these former places of Nazi terror and brave resistance. Many important libraries and archives, such as the German Federal Archives,are located in Berlin. The estate where the Wannsee Conference took place is open to the public and houses a huge research library. The Topography of Terror Documentation Center, located in the center of Berlin, was built on top the ruins of the former Gestapo and the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (Reich Main Security Office) headquarters. Close to this site and right next to the famous Berlin landmark, the Brandenburg Gate, is the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. A little south of this memorial is the Jewish Museum, built by Daniel Libeskind, presenting the long and multifaceted history of Jewish life in Germany and in Europe. Today, the museum also documents the beginning of Jewish life after 1945 — thus also serving as a center for Jewish identity and community activities.
Our Program
Since 2009, our MA Program in Holocaust Communication and Tolerance at Touro College Berlin has cooperated with the Institut für Judaistik (Institute for Judaic Studies) at the Free University (FU) of Berlin. Our students can take courses at the FU, and they have access to the huge holdings of the university's libraries - including the video archive of the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation with more than 52,000 interviews with survivorsand witnesses of the Shoah.