This page provides an overview of the tours and lectures arranged by the Berlin Historical Association in 2020.
23 February 2020 - Tour of Otto Weidt's Workshop for the Blind.
In 1936 Otto Weidt established a workshop to manufacture brooms and brushes in a Kreuzberg cellar, where he employed predominantly blind and deaf Jews. When he moved the factory to the Rosentalerstraße in 1940, tensions in the country grew and despite the workshop being declared a war- essential industry, the Gestapo began to arrest and deport his Jewish employees. Weidt fought to protect his workers from persecution and deportation by bribing the Gestapo, falsifying documents, and eventually hiding a family behind a backless cupboard in one room of his shop. As the threat grew ever greater he found places for many more to hide. Weidt, forewarned, kept his shop closed on the day of the Fabrikaktion* in February 1943. However, many of his employees were deported. Among those he was able to save were Inge Deutschkron and Alice Licht, both non-blind young women in their twenties. Today, this museum to a citizen-hero is administered by the German Resistance Memorial Centre Foundation. It tells Weidt’s story with archival photos and interviews with some of those he saved.
22 February 2020 - BHA's 25th anniversary lunch.
22 January 2020 - Special Event - Visit to the US Embassy Berlin.
18 January 2020 - Tour of the Berlin Museum of Medical History.
The Berlin Museum of Medical History is an institution of the Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin - and is located in the former museum building of the Pathological Institute on the traditional grounds of the Charité (Campus Mitte). The museum’s permanent exhibition “On the Trace of Life” provides a path through medical history over the past 300 years. The presentation follows the ever-changing historical view of and into the body, finally arriving at the “recipient” of medicine, the patient, and the possibilities inherent in today’s medicine. The heart of the museum is still the specimen hall, the core of which goes back to the collecting activities of Rudolf Virchow. Today, there are around 750 pathologic-anatomical wet and dry preparations on display in this area. In its temporary exhibitions, the museum focuses on different aspects of current medicine and medical history.