Third Reich Tour and Berlin Weather

Phillip and I apparently don't always look like tourists. At least once a day during the past few days, someone has just started chatting to us in German. Yesterday, we were on the subway and a woman with a walker got on and sat beside me. The train began moving before she was fully seated, so I grabbed her arm to keep her from tumbling onto the floor and helped her settle on the seat. I know she thanked me ("Danke schon"), but she kept on talking. She was ready to have a conversation with me, but I had to stop her with "I'm sorry, English, no Deutsch." She chuckled and smiled, thanking me again (in German) when she got off before we did. And today, a lady asked us, in German, for directions at the train station. Another "I'm sorry, English, no Deutsch." 

Yesterday, we definitely were tourists as we were part of a tour group of Third Reich Berlin locations. The four-hour tour was one of the better tours that we have taken. Our guide, Benjamin, born in Israel and educated in the USA, was a wealth of knowledge with side stories that made the tour even more interesting. We began the tour in the Jewish sector, at a cemetery. Those figures represent women at the camps. 

The Jews, prior to Hitler, were so integrated in society in Berlin that many examples of non-Jews ignoring the Nazi commands are told. The Catholic doctors at the local hospital would create fake typhoid case paperwork followed by death certificates so that Jews would not be found. The main synagogue, in the picture below, was not burnt by the Nazis because a local non-Jewish police officer physically stopped the Nazi arsonists and the local fire department, contrary to Nazi orders, did put out the fire that the Nazis set. The synagogue was protected by locals throughout the war. It did get accidently damaged in 1945 by a British bomb that was actually meant for a nearby building. 

Benjamin took us to the Brandenburg Gate, a major symbol of Berlin and similar to the Arc de Triumph in Paris. All the German kings of old made a procession thru it. Hitler, when he was first named chancellor, claimed that 500,000 supporters walked thru to gate with him to celebrate his victory. Actually, only 50,000 did. He had those 50,000 people circle the block and walk thru the gate several times to give the impression of more supporters at his rally than he actually had. 

The orange paint is recent graffiti done by climate change activists. The crane is being used to remove it.

Our next stop was the Reichstag, the German Parliament building. It mysteriously burnt down in 1933, a short time after Hitler was named chancellor of the Weimar Republic. Hitler used the opportunity to claim the communists and other enemies torched it, so he suspended civil rights and consolidated his power, banning other political parties. The Reichstag was bombed during WWII and rebuilt after the Cold War, serving again as the German Parliament building.

Near the Reichstag was the Soviet War Memorial, honoring the Soviet soldiers who died fighting the Nazis. (The Soviet soldiers were the first to reach Berlin in 1945, before the British and American soldiers.) An unusual aspect of the Soviet Memorial is that when the partition of Berlin occurred during the Cold War, this memorial ended up being on the West Berlin side, not the Soviet-controlled East Berlin side. 

Benjamin took us to the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. He said that it is not called a Holocaust Memorial as "Murdered Jews of Europe" is more of a stark and honest reminder of what happened and that the crimes involved all of Europe, not just German Jews.  

The Memorial, 2711 stone blocks of varying heights was impactful. It reminded me of the empty chair memorial in Oklahoma City for the 1995 bombing victims. 

We walked further and stopped in a very nondescript apartment parking lot. This was the site of Hitler's bunker. Only a small marker on a side wall commemorates the location. This location had been in East Berlin and the Soviets wanted to destroy every landmark of Nazi Germany, so the bunker was filled in and the parking lot built over it. 

Our last stop with Benjamin was the Topography of Terror display and museum. The exterior portion of the display included a section of the Berlin Wall, as the wall just happened to have been put next to the former location of the SS headquarters. The buildings that housed the Gestapo and SS command were largely destroyed by bombs during the war then the ruins were demolished.

Phillip and I went in the memorial, rooms of a mainly photographic display, where they had extensive pictures of the leaders of the SS (Hitler's secret police.) The Gestapo, who targeted political enemies, were one element of the SS. 

While at the Topography of Terror, it began raining so we went back to our hotel. 

Today, Phillip and I rode the subway to Checkpoint Charlie. It was called "Charlie" because it was the third checkpoint opened in the Wall. Checkpoint Charlie became the most famous crossing point between East Berlin and West Berlin. During September 1961 the checkpoint was designated a crossing point for members of the Allied armed forces, and then a month later it became the scene of a tank confrontation when American and Soviet tanks squared off with each other. Today: a purely tourist location. 

You can see the McDonald's in the background. Everything else there was a souvenir store. I did find a picture display, next to an outdoor souvenir stand, that had a photograph of what Checkpoint Charlie looked like when it was operational. No effort was made to keep anything original at this site.

We did not stay long and I don't recommend it as a destination. I understand why our Cold War tour did not come here! While studying maps of the area, I noticed some murals on nearby buildings that sounded interesting, so that's where I led Phillip as we escaped the Checkpoint Charlie tourist crowds. 

After seeing the murals, we used public transport to return to the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. We had not gone thru the museum on Friday while we were on the tour, and I wanted to visit it. No pictures allowed. It was quite a somber place as you can imagine, visitors only whispering and not much of that. It was again mainly a photographic memorial, pictures of people and storyboards of their lives, lives that ended too frequently with "shot by the Gestapo" or "killed at Auschwitz." When we left the Memorial, it was drizzling rain. We walked around a bit more, but finally came back to the hotel on the bus as it was a bit miserable walking in the rain. 

It's raining steady enough now that we need our umbrellas to go out in search of dinner, although we'll probably just walk to a restaurant in the train station. Tomorrow is supposed to have better weather!