POLITICS: Into the Bin of Berlin
Fund, John H.
POLITICS JOHN H. FUND Into the Fain of Berlin BERLIN IS A CITY HAUNTED BY ITS PAST. The Nazis left an indelible stain on it during their 12 years of terror. Then the Communists moved in, built...
...Hildebrandt of promoting the "Disneyfication" of the Cold War...
...POLITICS JOHN H. FUND Into the Fain of Berlin B ERLIN IS A CITY HAUNTED BY ITS PAST...
...He points out that Americans also lost their lives as a result of the division of Germany...
...Berlin authorities claimed their hands were tied when it came to stopping the demolition of the monument...
...The razing of the memorial had been originally scheduled for July 4, until outraged former American soldiers who had been stationed in Berlin defending the city in the 50 years after World War II became furious at the thought of having it destroyed on America's Independence Day...
...Following expiration of the one-year lease, the company decided to end the arrangement and ask for the memorial's destruction...
...Reuben Doetsch, a 15-year-old visiting from Chicago with his high-school German class, looked on and told the Associated Press that it was "sad for Berlin since it's part of the city and the history...
...Americans living in Berlin clearly believe a political agenda was at work in the destruction of the memorial...
...Hildebrandt confronted them by saying: "Do you really want to defend this process...
...A bulldozer completed the job by leveling the site...
...As part of the memorial, Alexandra Hildebrandt, the director of the adjacent Checkpoint Charlie Museum, also re-erected a 420-foot section of what the East Germans used to call "the anti-fascist protective barrier" to resemble the old wall...
...The clearing of this site is an absolute low point when it comes to remembering the victims of the second German dictatorship," the head of the local Christian Democratic Union party, Frank Henkel, told reporters as the bulldozers arrived...
...In the meantime, everyone agrees the image of Berlin has certainly taken a hit...
...Mario Roelling, who was a prisoner of the East German Stasi secret police, told reporters that "in nearly 16 years, no politician has managed to build a proper memorial for all the victims of this regime...
...As Hans Peter Nerger, Berlin's director of tourism, told reporters: "When pictures go around the world of bulldozers mowing down crosses, that is bad for Berlin...
...The company had no immediate plans for the site and refused to negotiate a compromise...
...John H. Fund, The American Spectator's Politics columnist, is author of Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy (Encounter Books...
...The only official site commemorating the wall is a small information center in the north of Berlin that's open only a few hours a day...
...Now Berlin's city government has created another enduring image: in July it destroyed the only full-blown memorial to the victims of the Berlin Wall, among whom are numbered three Americans...
...Those who took the initiative to memorialize this site have been blocked by those who seem to have no regard for its significance...
...A crane dragged away the sections of the wall, which the museum had brought out of storage for the memorial...
...She received no reply...
...Republicans Abroad and a Berlin resident...
...Even Berlin officials acknowledge that a proper memorial to the victims of the Berlin Wall won't exist once Ms...
...But the project was a thorn in the side of Berlin's 46 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 2005 city government, which is run by a coalition of Chancellor Gerhard Schroder's Social Democrats and the Party of Democratic Socialism...
...The memorial and museum quickly became the most visited exhibition site in Berlin, drawing 3,500 people from around the world every day...
...Unlike Berlin officials, she doesn't want to forget the past by wiping out memorials to the victims of that dictatorship...
...Four men who had been persecuted by the East German Communist regime chained themselves to crosses but then unchained themselves after a lengthy conversation with the police...
...But Ms...
...orkers then methodically unscrewed the crosses from their pedestals before hauling them away...
...The PDS is a direct descendant of East Germany's Communist Party, which constructed the Berlin Wall, and it accused Ms...
...Mr...
...Michael Donnermeyer, a spokesman for Berlin's city government, claims, "The city of Berlin has its own concept of how to remember the victims of the wall...
...Then the Communists moved in, built the Berlin Wall, and kept the city divided and families separated for three decades...
...Merkel grew up in East Germany...
...The monument, which consisted of 1,067 wooden crosses commemorating each of the individuals who were either shot trying to escape over the Wall or protesting it, was a private effort unveiled last November on the 15th anniversary of the Berlin Wall's fall...
...City bureaucrats promise that a commission of historians will evaluate the need for a future memorial...
...They pointed out that Ms...
...A crane dragged away the sections of the wall, which the museum had brought out of storage for the memorial...
...SEPTEMBER 2005 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 47...
...In fact, the Allied Museum in Berlin recently dedicated a memorial stone to the memory of Major Arthur Nicholson, the last American to die in the Cold War...
...Workers then methodically unscrewed the cross-es from their pedestals before hauling them away...
...Checkpoint Charlie is an icon of the great friendship between the United States and Germany," says Henry Nickel, chairman of the U.S...
...I won't be holding my breath waiting for city officials to build another memorial to replace the Checkpoint Charlie memorial anytime soon...
...Instead, some 190 police officers and workmen showed up at dawn on JOHN H FUND July 5. Several hundred protesters jeered and whistled at the workers as they began their work...
...Hildebrandt leased the property on which the memorial stands from BAG, a private conglomerate that owns the site...
...Hildebrandt says she has evidence that BAG was pressured bycity officials to end the lease...
...Hildebrandt's memorial is destroyed...
...Nickel and other Americans living in Berlin are hoping that Chancellor Schroder's Social Democrats will be ousted in elections this September by Angela Merkel, the pro-American leader of the Christian Democrats...
...He was gunned down by Soviet troops in 1985 while conducting a reconnaissance mission of their installations in East Germany...
...Hildebrandt says she will put the crosses in storage and continue to petition the bank that owns the land to sell the plot to her at a reasonable price...
...Nickel told me he was especially upset that the Berlin court that ordered the demolition refused to move the date so it would not coincide with America's Independence Day...
Vol. 38 • September 2005 • No. 7
