This morning began bright and early as tour participants congregated in time for an 8:00 departure. Our driver today was Klaus, who Konrad informs us “is a true blue Berliner”.

We drive past the Kaufhaus des Westens (the “KaDeWe”) and through a beautiful and upmarket business district, much of which had previously been owned and occupied by Jews. One can only imagine the disarray that littered these pretty streets in November of 1938.

Today, due to Berlin’s prominence as a major international city, law enforcement maintains a very visible presence here, and some department stores have bollards out the front to prevent people driving vehicles into groups of pedestrians in an act of domestic terrorism.

Sadly, the police presence is especially visible around sites of Jewish significance. Local synagogues are decorated with police tape like crime scenes, their services out-of-bounds to all save local members of the Jewish community, and are patrolled 24 hours a day by armed and uniformed police.

Konrad informs us that the Jewish communal offices, located in this district, are not only guarded by local police, but by paramilitary services, sometimes with an armoured vehicle.

We drive past the Bauhaus Museum and make our way to a beautiful part of town, bursting with greenery, forest on both sides of the road. It was to this part of Berlin, from October of 1941, that one third of Berlin’s Jewish population was forced to make their way by foot for the purposes of deportation.

Deportation was expensive, all the moreso since Jews were sent by third-class carriage at least until the borders of the Reich – the better for appearances. To partially defray these costs, Jewish deportees needed to buy tickets, although we are told that children under the age of 4 were able to travel free.

The time between receiving a notice of deportation and being deported was three days. During that time, deportees were allowed to pack a single piece of luggage, weighing no more than 50kg, which was to be clearly labelled. Many, feeling a premonition as to what deportation might entail, and sorrowful for the end of the Jewish/German symbiosis, committed suicide. In fact, despite nobody’s knowing for certain what deportation involved, the rate of suicide amongst German Jews was the highest in all of Europe.

The road to Track 17 of Bahnhof Grunewald is sided with a striking memorial, designed by a Polish sculptor and commissioned by the Deutschebahn. A cold rock wall, it features the forms of walking Jews, heads down and in single file, gouged out of the stone.

At the track, we paused alongside stones and candles that had been placed by those who have come before us, and added our kaddish to the many that have been recited here, repeatedly, over the years. In the silence that followed, Agnes read a poem (“To Forget”) by Israeli poet and Holocaust survivor, Arye Palgi.

I would like to wake up one morning and discover

that there was no Holocaust. That it was only a fable. A passing nightmare.

I would like to not remember anything. Not to tell, not

to pass on, not to gather any more testimonies, not

to build any more monuments, not to explain again

and again what lambs are and what slaughter is, what pain is and what courage is.

…

But the Holocaust is not a weight tied to my feet.

It is a burden lying on my soul. There is no letting go,

no throwing away, no getting rid of it. We need to learn to live with it, to pretend that we are used to it.

To groan in secret.

From the Bahnhof, we drove on and through another very exclusive district, once occupied by SS officers who maintained pretty private gardens. After the war there were no fewer than three DP camps in this area, but the site to which we are heading is one that abuts the lake itself.

The Wannsee Villa, once owned by a Jewish man who was forced in 1940 to sell it to the SS, became a favoured conference centre for the Nazi party and was the site of an infamous meeting that was held on January 20, 1942.

Known as the Wannsee Conference, this meeting was attended by fifteen representatives of the state and party apparatus and was designed to ensure that everybody present should appreciate that the Final Solution (in all of its particulars) is the official domain of the SS and that, in that capacity, its every detail would be subordinated to the authority of Reynhard Heydrich.

There is so little that we know about this conference – an event of which Germans were largely unaware until the late 1970s, and we cannot even say with certainty which room the meeting even took place in. On the basis of the only surviving copying of the protocols (the copy belonging to Martin Luther, Undersecretary of the Foreign Ministry), there are various details that can be inferred about the meeting, which has since served as the subject of two major motion pictures.

The men who were to discuss so casually the fate of Europe’s Jews were neither thugs nor petty bureaucrats, but accomplished professionals with careers that preceded their involvement in party politics. Of the fifteen men present, over half had university degrees at a time when only 5% of the German population was receiving higher education. Of those men, fully eight of them (Dr Schöngarth, Dr Klopfer, Dr Lange, Dr Leibbrandt, Dr Meyer, Dr Bühler, Dr Freisler and Dr Stuckart) had PhDs.

Clearly, there can be no greater testament to the fact that an education cannot guarantee quality of character than that one of those men (Dr Lange, whose PhD was in Law) was the SS-Sturmbannführer responsible for the mass murder of Jews in Latvia at that very time.

Our guide, a very knowledgeable and well-spoken man named Matthias, related to us how the very first shipment of German Jews from Berlin had arrived in Riga on November 29th. Much to the consternation of Heinrich Himmler, their train was rerouted to Rumbula, since the ghetto was too full to accommodate them, and the roughly 1,000 passengers were all shot.

Matthias’ intention in telling us this was to underscore the fact that the Final Solution had been in full pace since June of 1941, and was unrelated to any decision made in Wannsee. Since we had spent this morning at Track 17 of Bahnhof Grunewald, where those very Jews of whom he was speaking may have been standing with their luggage but two days before they were murdered in Rumbula, the powerful reality of this history was really brought home to us.

As Konrad pointed out, there was an additional agenda item mentioned in the protocols, and one to which Matthias had not yet made mention. It was Heydrich’s aim to include Jews in mixed marriages in the deportations from Germany, which was strongly opposed by some other attendees on the grounds that it would create a legislative nightmare. Ultimately, Heydrich was to be unsuccessful in this goal, and many of those Jews were to survive the war within Germany itself.

It is a curious quirk of fate that Martin Luther, whose copy of the Wannsee protocols was discovered in 1947, should have been sent to Sachsenhausen for having sought to oust his boss, von Ribbentrop. His having been sent to that infamous camp provided a link between Wannsee and the rest of our afternoon, for it was to Sachsenhausen that we drove next.

Established in 1936, this early concentration camp went through two broad phases. Originally run by the SS as Himmler’s model camp, it became a Soviet prison in 1945 for former Nazis and for Germans who did not conform to a Stalinist ideal. It is only in recent years that the post-war history of Sachsenhausen is memorialised.

To my mind, one of the most interesting things about this camp was the manner in which it also now serves to memorialise previous attempts at memorialisation – the most obvious being a large tower with eighteen red triangles. These symbolised political prisoners from eighteen different countries. Political prisoners exclusively, that is: no gay men, no “Gypsies” and no Jews.

Designed like an amphitheater, fanning out from before the entrance, the camp was a 25min walk from the Oranienberg railway station and a convenient distance away from prying eyes in the city. Towers mounted near the entrance allowed guards a vantage point to see every corner of their sprawling camp, in which prisoners were systematically degraded and in which some 30,000 of them were murdered.

This gate, nicknamed Station A, served as the entrance. Station Z, at the further end of the camp, housed a gas chamber and a crematorium. In spite of this, Sachsenhausen was also the site of a new development in streamlined shooting, which was to claim the lives of a large number of Soviet POWs in particular. In fact, from October-December of 1941, approximately 500,000 Soviet POWs were murdered by the Nazis, in a variety of different camps, every month.

We note the ironic declaration on the main gate that work is liberating (“Arbeit Macht Frei”), and observe the painted time face on the clock tower. Set on 11:07, it marks the time at which the Soviet liberators are said to have arrived.

Led in two groups, some of us have the chance to explore a temporary exhibit titled: “In the Country of Numbers, Where the Men Have No Names”. Dedicated to the experiences of the so-called “November Jews”, who were dumped in camps like Sachsenhausen until they could prove that they would emigrate, it was a touching exhibit that illustrated well the hierarchy amongst victims that the Nazis had established.

Finally, we went to the Jewish barracks, which were the only barracks still standing. Sadly, two Neo-Nazi youths in 1992 (one of whom currently heads Germany’s Neo-Nazi NPD party) burned these barracks to the ground after a visit from Israeli Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin.

One response to this act of vandalism was to preserve the smouldering ruins in a glass display, that they should now memorialise ongoing antisemitism in a modern-day Germany, but the decision was taken that such people should not be given the final word. Instead, the barracks were reconstructed from original materials, and amplified with the addition of more information pertaining to the treatment of Jews in this horrific camp.

Sachsenhausen was the first camp that we have seen, but there will be many more. We all appreciate now that this trip will be emotionally challenging, but by continually debriefing and reflecting on our experiences, we hope to create a safe space for us each to explore this history, and to learn so much in the time that we have.

With but two days left before we head to Warsaw, there is still so much to see in this sprawling, complicated city.

With great anticipation, participants began gathering in the hotel lobby at 2:00. After some brief introductions, we all began to file onto the bus.

Our driver, Kamal, is a third-generation Turk. His community comprises the largest ethnic minority in the country, and this city (we are told) has more doner kebabs than any other city on the planet.

Our guide for most of the trip will be Fil, but today we have the pleasure of Prof. Konrad Kwiet.

Our first port of call is a city square called Bebelplatz, not far from Humboldt University. It was in this square, in May of 1933, that a major book burning took place, and we take the time to admire a very creative monument: an underground room, visible through a glass ceiling set into the stone floor of the square, in which can be seen empty bookshelves.

The National Socialists, ever the enemies of free thinking, had condemned to the flames (as a symbolic gesture) books written by enemies of the Reich, as well as texts that promoted ideas (or even tolerated ideas) inimical to National Socialism. Books by Jews, by Communists and by known dissidents were burned together with works of research into human sexuality in a public expression of triumph over an old and decaying order.

Boarding the bus again, we drive past the enormous and sprawling Russian embassy (the largest in the world), and see the Brandenburg Gate in the near distance. Although we do not stop there, we are given a glimpse of the Reichstag and the political residence (nicknamed “the laundromat”, due to its similarity to a large washing machine).

Berlin is spectacularly green, and a drive through the Tiergarten is incredibly refreshing. These trees had all been destroyed during the war, but the entire area has been reforested over the past forty years.

Not far from the Presidential Palace is a monument to German unification: the spectacular Victory Column. Topped with a golden statue to the Roman goddess of victory, it is an impressive sight, as are its general environs. Of the contributions of Hitler’s chief architect and minister of armament production, Albert Speer, all that remains in this area are the public toilets.

We continue driving, past a Bauhaus-themed architectural hub and a market where one can buy many items of Nazi memorabilia. Our guide, Konrad, informs us that most of them are fakes. We pass Berlin’s second largest university, as well as the impressive Charlottenburg Castle, and come to a stop at the Tempelhof Airfield.

Designed by Albert Speer, this neo-classical structure is truly awe-inspiring. One cannot help but feel that the man achieved his aims: fascinated always with the “ruin value” of an edifice, he hoped that his vision of Berlin would one day testify, even in a dilapidated state, to the glory of the Third Reich. While Berlin was to find itself in ruins a thousand years before he had imagined that it would, those structures of his that live on continue to overwhelm tourists with their grandeur.

Climbing back into the bus, we continue our tour of Berlin through a poorer sector, more noticeably populated with recent migrants. Entering the Turkish area, we note the dramatic increase in graffiti, which continues as we move through the even poorer Arab area, where tensions have recently been exacerbated by the arrival of Syrian refugees.

We continue through this area until we reach an old Jewish district, and alight at a park: the Bayerische Platz. Around the park, signs advertise anti-Jewish decrees, together with their dates of enactment, and stolpersteine can be seen on the footpath, announcing the names of former Jewish residents, together with the dates of their deportations and the locations of their murder.

We board the bus again for a short trip back to the hotel. Not far from our destination, we pass Berlin’s memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe, to which we will be returning on Wednesday.

It has been an informative afternoon, but one that has set the stage for what promises to also be an emotionally taxing but intellectually rewarding fortnight.