Quote from a letter by Joseph Wulf
Audio Text
In August 1974, Joseph Wulf wrote to his son David – and his despair was only too evident:
“I have published 18 books about the Third Reich and they have had no impact. You can provide the Germans with evidence until you are blue in the face, the most democratic government may exist in Bonn, and yet the mass murderers walk around freely, have their little houses and grow flowers.”
Wulf grew up in Krakow and, before the Second World War, trained as a Rabbi. He survived the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp and managed to escape while on one of the ‘death marches’ shortly before the end of the war. From the 1950s, he began to inform people in West Germany comprehensively about the Holocaust, in particular through his books. In 1966, he wanted to create a new structure to support this work. So together with friends and supporters, he founded the International Documentation Centre Association with the aim of setting up in this villa a research and documentation centre about the history of National Socialism and its consequences. The centre was to collect as many documents as possible on the Nazi era and its consequences – and, in particular, the trials of war crimes just starting in the late 1950s.
But this plan met with fierce resistance from various quarters. The Berlin Senate refused to give up the country school hostel in the villa, run by the Neukölln district since 1952. Some parts of the press and some organisations also took up this argument. But during the course of this public debate, it became increasing clear that, above all, there was no willingness to confront Nazi crimes. For example, Klaus Schütz, a member of the Social Democratic Party and Berlin’s Governing Mayor, feared the villa could become a ‘macabre cult site’, while the conservative Protestant weekly Christ und Welt called it a ‘memorial of shame’.
In view of the widespread resistance to his plan, Joseph Wulf ultimately saw his life’s work as a failure. He never lived to experience the opening of the memorial site in 1992. In 1974, two months after he wrote the letter to his son quoted earlier, Joseph Wulf took his own life.