Located at Cora-Berliner-Straße 1, 10117 Berlin, the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, also known as the Holocaust Memorial, started construction on April 1, 2003 and opened to the public on May 12, 2005.[1] The location of the site itself is deeply connected to the history of Berlin, as it rests on the land where Joseph Goebbels office once stood, it is near the bunker where Adolf Hitler committed suicide, and on the edges of the memorial once stood the Berlin Wall.[2] After lengthy debates throughout 1999, German Parliament elected to establish a central memorial site designed by New York architect Peter Eisenman.[3] The site covers 19,000 square metres and contains 2711 concrete blocks of different heights in a modern abstract style that allows the viewer to confront the difficult topic in a personal way. The site also includes an underground information centre that includes information on the victims and locations of Nazi extermination camps. As of July 3, 2009 the Holocaust Memorial is also considered the Memorial to the Homosexuals Persecuted under the National Socialist Regime and the Memorial to the Murdered Sinti and Roma of Europe.[4] However, the unveiling of this memorial did not come without controversy. Some criticise the site for its lack of text and information about the Holocaust, with journalist Richard Brody writing in an article for The New Yorker that:

"the assumption of this familiarity—the failure to mention it at the country's main memorial for the Jews killed in the Holocaust—separates the victims from their killers and leaches the moral element from the historical event, shunting it to the category of a natural catastrophe. The reduction of responsibility to an embarrassing, tacit fact that "everybody knows" is the first step on the road to forgetting."[5]

These criticisms over the vagueness of the site, and how it is left open for interpretation, are contested by equal amounts of praise for the same features. In an edition of Architecture from 2005, Max Page claimed "The memorial does not inculcate or preach. It challenges."[6] The act of memorializing such a horrific event is difficult endeavour, and the Holocaust Memorial allows the view to encounter the horrors of the holocaust in an individual way, which positive or negative, evokes its viewers to continue thinking about the memorial, and its subject matter, long after leaving.

This destination is the fifth stop on the Cruel Childhood: the Experiences of Youth Minorities in Nazi Berlin Walking Tour.

The history of the Nazi Party is inseparable from the history of the Holocaust. Life under the Third Reich for Jewish children was defined by Nazi anti-Semitism, and the constant fear for their lives. It is estimated that as many a 1.5 million children, with one-million of them being Jewish, were killed by the Nazi Regime.[7] Children, along with elderly people and pregnant women, were the least likely to survive concentration camps since they were immediately sent to gas chambers at concentration camps like Auschwitz. Prior to the establishment of Nazi extermination camps in 1942, the Nuremberg Laws, established in 1935 severely impacted the ways Jewish people, and youth were able to live in Berlin. The Nuremberg Laws defined what quantity of blood was considered Jewish on rather arbitrary guidelines, and took away rights from Jewish Germans. In Article 4, the Nuremberg Laws state: "(1) A Jew cannot be a citizen of the Reich. He cannot exercise the right to vote; he cannot hold public office. (2) Jewish officials will be retired as of December 31, 1935."[8] Removing parents' rights, and means of gaining employment and income would uproot the lives of Jewish children, especially as they lost the right to enter certain establishments and became marked by the yellow Star of David. On 9 November 1938, Kristallnacht marked the changing tides of the Holocaust as discrimination turned to physical violence against Jews living in Germany. Part of the lead up to Kristallnacht that is often forgotten is the barring of Jewish children from German state elementary schools, which would not be repealed until after the end of the Nazi Regime.[9] Kristallnacht also inspired the beginning of the Kindertransport project, which evacuated Jewish children from Berlin to Britain. Children also suffered within the ghettos, where they died of starvation, exposure, and lack of adequate clothing and shelter.[10] Though much scholarship exists on the lives of Jewish people during the Nazi Regime and the Holocaust, children are afforded little attention. Despite one of the most popular texts coming out of the Holocaust being The Diary of Anne Frank, which tells the story of a young girl hiding from the Nazis, children are often forgotten in the narrative of the Holocaust, with only one major work written about their experiences, Patricia Herberer's 2011 monograph, Children During the Holocaust. The experiences and trauma of the Holocaust suffered by Jewish children would define the rest of their adult lives, if they survived. The Holocaust destroyed a population and a generation, and there is no way to understand lives of children in Nazi Berlin without understanding the role of the Holocaust and how it impacted the lives of Jewish children well beyond their childhoods.

Baptist, Karen Wilson. 2012. "Shades of Grey: The Role of the Sublime in the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe." Landscape Review 14, no. 2 (2012): 75-85.

Brody, Richard. July 2012. "The Inadequacy of Berlin's 'Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe'." The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/th...

Holocaust Encyclopedia. 2019. "Children During the Holocaust." United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Last Modified January 2019. https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/...

Kaplan, Marion. 1997. "The Lives of Jewish Children and Youth in the Third Reich." Jewish History 11, no. 2 (1997): 41-52.

[1] "The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (Information Centre)." Museumsportal Berlin. Last Modified n.d., https://www.museumsportal-berlin.de/en/museums/den...

[2] Karen Wilson Baptist. "Shades of Grey: The Role of the Sublime in the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe." Landscape Review 14, no. 2 (2012): 75

[3] Visit Berlin. "The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe." Visit Berlin. Last Modified 2018. https://www.visitberlin.de/en/memorial-murdered-je...

[4] "The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (Information Centre)." Museumsportal Berlin.

[5] Richard Brody, "The Inadequacy of Berlin's 'Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe'." The New Yorker, July 2012.

[6] Max Page. "Memory Field: in Berlin, remembrance is open to interpretation at Peter Eisenman's Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe." Architecture 94, no. 6 (2005): 42.

[7] Holocaust Encyclopedia. "Children During the Holocaust." United States Holocaust Memorial

Museum. Last Modified January 2019. https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/children-during-the-holocaust

[8] "The Nuremberg Laws." Avalon Project – Documents in Law, History and Diplomacy. Last Modified 2008. http://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/judnazi.asp#origin.

[9] Marion Kaplan, "The Lives of Jewish Children and Youth in the Third Reich." Jewish History 11, no. 2 (1997): 45.

[10] "Children During the Holocaust." United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.