Visiting Brandenburg an der Havel

On my way back to Berlin, after visiting Brandenburg an der Havel. The Brandenburg Prison is interesting, the information is very well presented, in German and English. I'm glad I went, but I would not take students there, it's not worth the 90 minutes' ride (and 15 Euro on top of the Berlin ABC public transport card).
The Memorial for the Victims of the Nazi Euthanasia Program, on the other hand, would be a great addition to any visit to WWII sites in Berlin with students or teachers. It tells, also in German and English, a very dark and sad chapter in the history of the Third Reich in a clear, comprehensive and convincing manner. Including the continuity between the T4 program and Operation Reinhardt.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A little bit about myself

Image
My name is Yonathan Bar-On (Bert de Bruin). Born and raised in the Netherlands, I have lived in Israel since 1992. I am a historian and a columnist for the Dutch daily Friesch Dagblad, and I have been teaching English at the high school of the Leo Baeck Education Center in Haifa, Israel for the last 15 years. In my classes, besides the English high school curriculum, I usually have time to do extracurricular projects. I have developed class projects (often using material provided by Centropa ) on topics like human rights, refugees, Holocaust, migration, and resistance in Nazi-Germany. You can get an impression of those and other projects by clicking here . I've participated in Centropa seminars in Berlin, Hamburg, Vienna, Sarajevo, and Prague. With two different Ukrainian schools, in 2024 and 2025 I did a project titled 'Comfort Food in Times of War', in which our students shared experiences from the wars in their country and made videos about dishes that helped them cope ...
Read more

The Man in the Clouds - A trilingual book for interreligious and intercultural dialogue and education

Image
This project will be the main focus during my stay in Berlin. It started in 2016 as an idea for a workshop in Stuttgart for Palestinian and Israeli teachers: to have Israeli, Palestinian and German students translate a Dutch children's book into Arabic, Hebrew and German, get a trilingual, fully illustrated edition of the book published, and use that book in Israeli, Palestinian and German elementary schools. The book was written by Koos Meinderts and Annette Fienieg, whose permission to use the text and illustrations I asked and received before I started working on the project. The book is  The Man in the Clouds (De man in de wolken) , and it deals with the importance of giving, sharing, accepting the other, and the dangers of greed and materialism. Its main themes are universal, which together with the beautiful illustrations makes the book a great tool for intercultural and interreligious dialogue and education. I teach English at the Leo Baeck Education Center in Haifa, and fou...
Read more

Surprise

Image
Tomorrow is Christopher Street Day, the yearly big gay pride parade in Berlin. I googled the term and found that the Nollendorfplatz (the U-Bahn station near my hotel) has played an important role in the LHTBQ+ scene in Berlin since the early 20th century, and that it became the focus of Nazi anti-gay terror in the 1930s. Since 1982, the wall of the station has a memorial plaque in the form of a pink triangle that says "Beaten to death - Ignored/Silenced to Death: for the homosexual victims of National Socialism". I learnt this only this afternoon, which is slightly ironic, since I have been 'touring' monuments and museums for two weeks. I think I have done quite a thorough job, but I am sure, after I finish my article, that memorials will (have to) be added. That is the advantage of publishing something online (besides the accessibility): it is easy to make additions and changes when and where necessary. The plaque below the triangle says: "The 'pink triangl...
Read more