On our way to Schloss Moritzburg, I noticed a sign for Kathe-Kollwitz- Gedenkstaette. The name rang a bell, so after touring the amazing hunting castle of Augustus the Strong we went looking for it. About 300 meters away was her house - not her long-term house in Berlin, obviously, but the house where she fled to avoid the Allied bombings for her last two years and where she died on 22 April 1945.
She was a committed pacifist and socialist who eventually became attracted to communism, and as a result the Nazis, when they came to power in 1933, removed her from the faculty of the Akademie der Kuenste, removed her work from museums, and banned her from showing her work as painter, printer, and sculptor. When the Gestapo visited her and her husband and threatened them with confinement in a concentration camp, they vowed to commit suicide should that come about. Fortunately, her international fame as an artist saved her from future harrassment, but she turned down offers of American sanctuary for fear of reprisals against her family. Her hisband died in 1940 and her grandson died in combat, as her son had died in World War One.
One of her works, Mother with Her Dead Son, is the centerpiece of the Neue Wache Memorial in Berlin. Her work can be a vital and viable tool for helping to teach this period and the breadth of those affected by the Nazis. In 1969, an unknown soldier and an unknown Holocaust victim were buried under the floor in the soil from World War Two battlefields and concentration camps. The statue is located under the oculus so that it exposed directly to Berlin's weather.