Otto Weidt’s face looked worn and wrinkled even before he opened his small shop. Starting a business is never easy, but its especially worrisome to open a business in the middle of a war. Perhaps Weidt didn’t think he had much to loose. He was, after all, almost 60 years old.
His first floor workshop in the Rosenthaler Straße 39 wasn’t much to look at either. Grey and shabby – it didn’t matter anyhow. Most of his employees couldn’t see. They were blind. Others were deaf or mute. Most of Weidt’s employees were not only disabled. They were also Jewish. Day for day they moved mechanically, repeating stupid, minute movements, manufacturing brushes and brooms for the Nazi armies.
At the beginning of World War II, brooms, like helmets and uniforms, had been classified as being ‘critical’ for the German war effort. So Weidt’s decision to sell overpriced brooms to Hitler’s armies, which were handmade by poor cripples, looked like an excellent business opportunity. It might have been too. However what appears on the surface to be a shrewd business decision was, in reality, Mr. Weidt’s determined choice to make a difference.
Mrs. Inge Deutschkron was one who lived. She survived Nazi Germany – thanks to Weidt’s brooms.
Everyone revered Otto Weidt: the blind, the mute, the seeing workers. Those who worked for him included former salemen, lawyers, bank directors, pharmacists – and us, who became eye-witnesses to his confusing but usually successful manipulations. We followed his never-ending efforts to protect us from the pain of our oppressors with a thankfulness we could hardly express in words.
Of all the objects Hitler’s army needed to slaughter millions of people, brooms seem like an unlikely weapon. It was a stroke of genius that led Weidt, a pacifist, to chose brooms as his sword. They were on a list of items needed for the war effort, and Weidt saw a loophole. Combined with bribes, he exploited this opportunity to protect his employees from being sent to concentration camps. When in 1942 a group of employees were rounded up by the Gestapo secret police, Weidt personally went himself to the deportation station they were being held at – a few streets over – to win their release.
Deutschkron was one of Weidt’s healthy Jewish (but still illegal) employees. In her early 20s she worked in the front office and described what happened next.
I don’t know remember anymore when Weidt came back from the Gestapo. But when he entered the office, his face twitched. He didn’t pay any attention to us, rather he went, with overcoat, straight into the workroom.
“It’s been taken care of”, he said to Levi, who was waiting fearfully.
“Taken care of?” Levi mumbled the word incomprehensibly.
“Yes”, said Width and with a wry smile on his face he added, “How should I fulfill my quota for the German army, when my workers are taken away from me?”
The people began to laugh – quietly at first, then growing louder. They understood. Levi wanted to kiss Weidt’s hand, but he decisively disallowed this and disappeared.
Weidt not only won back his Jewish workers on several occasions. He also organized hiding places. Even in his 1st floor workshop, in a secret room in the back, Weidt kept the Horn family for nine months. With the profits from his workshop, he secured food on the black market and organized counterfeit documents. Still, despite all his efforts, Weidt lost most of them. Of the 20 people pictured with him in his Berlin workshop, only 5 are known to have survived, Inge Deutschkron being one of them. Weidt himself survived the end of World War II and led efforts in bombed out Berlin to create shelters for senior citizens and orphans returning from the concentrations camps.
More than 50 years later in 1994, Mrs. Deutschkron’s own efforts resulted in Weidt’s original workshop being turned into a small museum.
We want to show the world that even during an inhuman time there were still people – however few – who’s guiding principle was always caring for others.
Today, this forlorn former factory is but a token to honor Otto Weidt, one of Germany’s truest heroes. Instead, modern Germany has cast Claus von Stauffenberg as a better Hollywood-type role model for new German generations to imitate. Stauffenberg, a privileged Nazi officer, attempted to blow Hitler up with a bomb in 1944, when the war was obviously lost. Each year Stauffenberg is elaborately celebrated by Germany’s army and Federal Ministers. Otto Weidt – who started his rescue efforts when the Nazis were winning – is all but forgotten.
The simplicity of his former workshop only magnifies the giant shoes of a man, modern Germany hasn’t yet been able to fill.
Thanks to Mrs. Inge Deutschkron for permission to use excerpts from her autobiography, “I Wore the Yellow Star“.
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Wilhelmstrasse was comparable to Downing Street. Most ministries had their home in the Wilhelmstrasse – as did the Foreign Ministry and Reich Chancellery. Wilhelmstrasse was, at the end of the 19th century and at the beginning of the 20th century, identified as the street in Berlin where the government power was located. So for instance the New York Times asked sometimes, if they wanted to know what German foreign policy was going to do, ‘What is the Wilhelmstrasse going to do?’. So this shows that there was almost a kind of shared identity between Wilhelmstrasse and the institutions of the German – of the Federal German government.
Whilhelmstrasse was always the street where the central institutions of the German government had their home. That means at the time of the Emperor you had the Reich Chancellery and the Foreign Ministry, as these were the two ministries which were very important for a central government. During the time of the Weimar Republic you have even more Ministries which were located in the Wilhelmstrasse. The Nazis, the National Socialists, when they seized power in 1933, just used these structures for their purposes. They added some new buildings, but the buildings were government buildings before. So in that sense you have continuity since the 19th century. Some of the buildings might have even been there in the 18th century, but let’s say primarily 19th century when the German imperial state was being formed.
After liberation in 1945 there were a few buildings in the Wilhelmstrasse which could still be used. One of them was the Reichsluftfahrtministerium, the Ministry of Aviation, which had only to be reconstructed in parts. And as of course a new administration, be it of the four powers, be it of the GDR, had to use these buildings which were available. So the House der Ministerien the House of the Ministries of the former GDR moved into the former Ministry of Aviation. But as it turned out on the one side you had the Berlin Wall, the border to the West, and to the other side – for example on the 
I’m no so certain that the average German who is not a specialist in the field of history would really know what the Wilhelmstrasse meant. Today as you can see when you walk though it, people are living here, you have school buildings. Yes, you also have some government buildings, but its no longer a place which is identified with German politics of the 21st century or the new government which we have – the Federal Government of Germany.
The post office was built to be a kind of state temple, an expression of Prussia’s new place in Europe. It was also built to keep up with the Jewish Synagogue a few houses down and which also has a huge dome. It would have been unheard of for the Prussian Kaiser’s new building to be any less in statue that that of the Jewish community’s symbolic structure – a religion that the state at that time tolerated at best. The post office back then wasn’t just a simple functional building. It represented Germany, the Kaiser and the country’s values. In a similar spirit as the Brandenburg Gate, the architecture of the Post Office was designed to demand respect and show off a little, saying Prussia has now arrived in the top league of European countries.
Only two buildings survived World War II at Potsdamer Platz: House Huth and part of the luxury hotel Esplande. Today, you have to look hard to find them because of all the traffic and newly fashionable buildings. House Huth – at Daimler City – houses the 
In the 1920s, Potsdamer Platz was just a major traffic intersection – a huge circular intersection, cars, buses, horses-drawn buggies, streetcars, pedestrians, all competing with one another to find the fastest way to the other side. Because of the chaos, Berlin installed Europe’s first traffic light. The authorities weren’t sure if anyone would really pay attention to the light, so two policemen also stood next to the light, directing traffic the old fashion way, by waving their arms. A copy of the original has been added back to the square.
Jump forward in history to the Second World War. By the end of all the bombing and street fighting, essentially every building at Potsdamer Platz had been destroyed. Not to mention that Hitler had a number of buildings here purposely torn down here. He had planned to build an entire neighborhood as part of his “world capital”. The beginning of the Cold War left the Potsdamer Platz divided between Soviet Union on the one side with the Americans on the other. A huge illegal market flourished. If a dealer was on the run from the police, he’d only have to go a few meters into the next zone, where he’d be home free. The authority of each zone’s police ended at the border so dealers simply ran from section to section to avoid being caught.