On the outskirts of Berlin, Waldsiedlung Krumme Lanke is an idyllic neighbourhood with a sinister past, and a symbol of Germany’s effort to both remember and forget.
One morning in January, Susanne Bücker, a family doctor in Berlin, woke up worried. National elections were approaching, and President Donald Trump’s most vocal advocate, Elon Musk, was publicly supporting Germany’s far-right party, the Alternative for Germany (or AfD), whose leaders have spouted Nazi slogans and downplayed the Holocaust. Bücker sent a letter to her neighbours.
“Tomorrow is the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz,” she wrote, expressing her fear that fascism was again taking root in Germany. Over the next few weeks, about 40 neighbours got together, lighting candles in their front gardens as part of a nationwide “chain of lights” protest against hate and hanging pro-democracy signs in their windows.
“I think we have a special responsibility,” Bücker, 62, said recently over a cup of tea, “because we live on an estate that was built by perpetrators, for perpetrators.”
Their quiet little neighbourhood, Waldsiedlung (or “Forest Estate”) Krumme Lanke, is a sought-after place to live in the German capital. Named after an adjacent lake, its residents compare it to a fairy-tale village: little peaked-roof cottages with wood shutters are built into a dense green forest crisscrossed by mossy paths. Whole swathes are carless. Children play in the gardens, while dogs run free on a sloping meadow. In the summer, a short walk in flip-flops and a bathing suit leads to the lake.
But life here also means channelling Germany’s brutal past: the neighbourhood was built in the lead-up to World War II as an “elite community” for the SS, or Schutzstaffel – the elite guard of the Nazi Reich, whose responsibilities included carrying out the Holocaust.
The SS-Kameradschaftssiedlung (or SS Camaraderie Estate), as it was initially known, was one of the few housing developments built by the Nazis in Berlin. During the war, the roughly 600 small apartments, row houses, duplexes and single-family cottages housed SS members and their families, according to rank. The settlement was designed to embody the Nazi Blut und Boden (“blood and soil”) ideology, which touted Aryans’ quasi-mystical relationship with their ancestral land. War was in the blueprints: the cellars were designed to double as bomb shelters, and the tree cover was useful for thwarting airstrikes.
As a commemorative sign in the village now acknowledges, “The peaceful atmosphere that the settlement, embedded in the landscape, conveys to the unbiased observer today makes it difficult to recall its history.”
It is a history that is still being unearthed – much like the original tenants’ pots, pans and swastika-marked coins that residents (or their dogs) have dug up over the years – and evokes Germany’s nearly century-long quest to both remember and forget.
“Hannah Arendt called it the ‘banality of evil,’” Matthias Donath, a historian specialising in Berlin’s Nazi architecture, wrote in an email. Recently, Donath’s research made headlines when he was able to draw a direct line from Waldsiedlung Krumme Lanke to Auschwitz, where former village resident Joachim Caesar was the head of agricultural operations.
“The residents found ideal living conditions – an idyll,” he said. “And at the same time, they planned monstrous crimes.”
How the residents here have reckoned with the past – or not – has followed larger cultural trajectories. For decades, it was swept under the rug.
“One method of survival in a destroyed and morally devastated Germany was repression,” Donath said. As a result, some of the village’s residents are unaware of its history until neighbours tell them about it.
“Some people say, ‘It’s 80 years ago; it has nothing to do with me,’” said Susanne Güthler, 67, a teacher of disabled children who moved here with her family in 2000. “For me, it’s the opposite. I want to know what happened, here in my house. It’s intimidating to hear about families drowning themselves in the Krumme Lanke or hanging in the attic. But you can’t move forward with silence.”
As time passes and the last witnesses die, physical locations are increasingly important in remembering the Holocaust.
“Place is a connection,” said Christoph Kreutzmüller, a historian and the chair of the Active Museum, Fascism and Resistance, a Berlin citizens action group organised in 1983 to mark the 50th anniversary of the Nazis’ seizure of power. “People want to find out where they live.”
Not much is known about daily life on the SS estate, though it was certainly a place where quality of life was predicated on plunder. “If you would go to the Forest Estate in 1943, how many women would you see wearing fur coats?” Kreutzmüller said. “Probably they all had fur coats, and they all came from murdered Jews.”
Historians agree that as the Red Army approached, some families fled, while others likely died by suicide.
“The SS estate was not a place to hide,” Hanno Hochmuth, a historian with the Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History Potsdam, said during a recent walk through the development. “The soldiers may well have come upon a peaceful estate – you don’t see any bullet holes – then opened the doors to find dead bodies, or floating in the Krumme Lanke lake.”
After the war, the abandoned homes were given a new purpose: now located in Berlin’s American sector, they were used as shelter, with preference given to victims of Nazi persecution, including resistance fighters and refugees. The family-friendly layouts, which had been designed to encourage couples to produce as many future Nazis as possible, quickly overflowed with the displaced. Street names were changed.
Some of the older current residents arrived around this time.
Gisela Michaelis still lives in the 900-square-foot row house she moved into when she was 5 years old, in 1945, with her mother, two older brothers and two younger sisters, after the family fled the advancing Red Army in the east. Her father, who fought for the German Wehrmacht, never returned from the war.
“There were endless children here,” said Michaelis, 85, a retired accountant. She and her friends would roam the estate, illegally gathering kindling from the forest, testing their courage in the cellars or pilfering apples and pears from the gardens of empty houses. “It was a beautiful childhood.”
Some families of defeated SS operatives probably also returned. “This was typical of postwar Germany,” Hochmuth said. “Persecutors, bystanders and victims, all living door to door without too much struggle. There was a tendency to forget, to want to start over.”
Michael Joachim moved to the estate with his family in 1946, when he was 3, and remembers both a happy childhood and the stories his father would tell about the families who preceded them: “That neighbour went into the Krumme Lanke with his whole family. That one hung himself from the rafters in the attic.”
Joachim, 82, a retired school principal, recalled a quiet Jewish couple who lived in what is now Bücker’s house. “I can still see him in my mind’s eye, grey-haired and stooped,” he said. “Only later did I think, ‘What kind of a fate must they have had?’”
Joachim and his wife converted to Judaism in the 1990s, thanks to an affinity for Jewish life and culture that dates back to his childhood, when his father would listen to a weekly American-sector radio programme dedicated to the subject. He later served as chair of the Representative Assembly of the Jewish Community of Berlin. When assembly members would visit his home, the location never raised any eyebrows.
“For me, it’s a conquering of the past,” he said, “that a place that was created for the Nazis has been totally taken over by other people.”
(The first real research into Waldsiedlung Krumme Lanke) was published in the 1980s, around the time a grassroots approach to reevaluating history, known as “Dig Where You Stand,” was gaining traction in West Germany. It included details of how the estate was funded; the SS did not want to pay for it, so a semipublic housing company called GAGFAH built it for them.
Raking leaves beneath her cherry tree, Ingrid Fiedler, 86, said she knew nothing of the estate’s history when she moved into her little duplex in 1985. At the time, she worked for the GAGFAH housing company, which still owned and ran the estate. One sunny autumn day, she and her husband went for a bike ride around the lake. As they rested on a bench, another couple asked if they knew where the “SS estate” was. Fiedler had heard of it but didn’t know where it was. “The next day at work, my colleague said, ‘Don’t you know you live there?’ That was news to me,” she said.
The discovery didn’t change how she felt about her home. “I lived through the Hitler time,” she said. Now she worries about the ascent of the far right. “If people keep voting this way, we’re going to have it all again. I don’t want that.”
In 1992, Berlin made the estate a historically protected site, as an example of a Nazi-era housing development built in the “Heimatschutzstil,” or “homeland protection style,” of architecture. But reluctance to grapple with the past lingered: when historian Karin Grimme researched the estate in the 1990s, she did not find a single interview partner. In the 2000s, the estate was privatised – sold, divvied up and resold – and historical information, including old tenant contracts, was probably thrown out.
“We don’t have it,” said Matthias Wulff, a spokesperson for Vonovia, the company that bought GAGFAH and now serves as the landlord for the estate’s 300-odd apartments, calling it “disappointing”.
In 2009, despite the objections of some local politicians and residents, who feared that drawing attention to the estate could turn it into a rallying point for neo-Nazis, the city district erected a door-size sign with historical information at the entrance to the estate.
Berlin journalist Peter Nowak, who has written about the estate, said the placard’s snowy unveiling was sparsely attended. “I had the feeling they just weren’t very interested,” he said. One exception was Dora Dick, a Jewish refugee and Communist Party activist who had escaped the Nazis, returned from exile in England after the war and spent the rest of her life in the estate. Nowak recalled one interview in which Dick, then in her late 90s, pointed to the piano in her apartment and told him that the SS family who’d lived there had tried to sue her to get it back.
Among current residents, Elmar Bassen and Caroline Frey know more about their home’s past than most do. The woman who sold them the house in 2011 was a journalist. After they toured it, she pressed a book titled Medicine Without Humanity into their hands and told them that a Nazi doctor named Joachim Mrugowsky had lived in the house.
Mrugowsky, chief of the Hygiene Institute of the Waffen-SS, was tried in Nuremberg and executed for his war crimes, which included putting poison on a bullet and shooting concentration camp prisoners in the thigh and then documenting their efforts to gag themselves as they died. He also experimented on human subjects for a typhus vaccine.
“When we heard that, we thought, ‘Can we do that? Can we move here?’” said Frey, who used to run a music magazine. “It was like, ‘Are the bricks evil?’”
Sitting in their eat-in kitchen, a vinyl box set by Berlin cult band the Beatsteaks prominently on display, Bassen, who is studying to become a human rights lawyer, and Frey, a schoolteacher, said that after much soul-searching, they decided to forge ahead. The building, they reasoned, couldn’t be held responsible for the deeds of its first inhabitants. And maybe their liberal worldview was just what the place needed.
The couple, both 55, have been happy here, as has their 9-year-old foster son, Juan. They were glad to join the new neighbourhood initiative’s rejection of the AfD before the national elections, in which the party made historic gains.
“We hung signs from our windows to make it clear, in this estate, that we are against this; we find it horrifying,” Frey said. “We want to remember, because remembering this horrifying thing might help it not happen again.”
Still, while living in Waldsiedlung Krumme Lanke has a way of making the past feel present, “we don’t think about it every day,” she said.
Like many residents, the couple said the tangled legacy of this village as a peaceful, healthy place for families, created to enable a genocide, remains irreconcilable. The conflict is dyed into the fabric of modern life in Germany.
“I don’t know if it’s something Americans can understand,” said Henning Müller, 41, who lives here with his wife, Milena Fernando, 40, and their two young children. “Here in Germany, we have this nice life. And at the same time, this dark history is part of your everyday.”
Four years ago, when Fernando, who works in administration at the Jewish Museum Berlin, learned that her family could take over an acquaintance’s lease on an airy three-bedroom converted attic, she jumped at the chance. The family was glad to move out of their cramped one-bedroom in the city, where prices were skyrocketing and apartments were scarce.
Now their children are growing up not too dissimilarly from Gisela Michaelis or Michael Joachim, or even from the first children who ever lived here – “families like us, with kids who learned to swim in the Krumme Lanke,” Fernando said. “It’s a crazy thing to imagine that SS members lived a normal family life here, then went to work at the concentration camps. It’s hard to grasp.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Sally McGrane
Photographs by: Patrick Junker
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