Holocaust Memorial

This post is out of chronological order, but I wanted to share that the St. Lawrence study group visited the Holocaust Memorial last Thursday, adjacent to the Brandenburg Gate.  We noted that in a city filled with graffiti on almost every imaginable surface, the block of flat gray stelae that comprise the Holocaust Memorial are kept free of commentary (if one can call graffiti commentary, that is).  We’ll talk more about this today with time (finally) to reflect upon what we’ve seen and experienced thus far in Berlin and Munich.

Something called the “Degussa incident” refers to a scandal in which an anti-graffiti chemical called Protectosil was used in the construction of the memorial stelae.  From Wikipedia, “On October 14, 2003, the Swiss newspaper Tages-Anzeiger published a few articles presenting as a scandal the fact that the Degussa company was involved in the construction of the memorial producing the anti-graffiti substance Protectosil used to cover the steles, because the company had been involved in several different ways in the National-Socialist persecution of the Jews. A subsidiary company of Degussa, Degesch, even produced the Zyklon B used to poison people in the gas chambers.”