ABSTRACT
Based on the bomb-strike pattern on the aerial photograph from 1945, wemust assume that the Lufthansa camp was severely damaged during air raids. As our excavations revealed, the remaining parts of the huts were stripped down to the foundations. Photographic evidence of the clean-up by the US Army at another camp on the Tempelhof airfield after the war suggests that some of the building materials were later reused (Ed Collins, personal communication). While the demolition must have been mainly a response to the air-raid damage, we cannot assume that the only reason the camp was not repaired was a lack of resources. Without arguing that this is proof of a sense of wrong among the perpetrators, the demolitions at Tempelhof could also have been an attempt at silencing history. In that case, if we consider what remains and what does not remain, the objects we encounter may present to us the things we cannot remember, which manifest in various kinds of absences that I trace in the next section of the paper.
