History - World War II, Berlin

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This huge Soviet War Memorial and cemetery took 1,200 workers over 3 years to construct and contains the bodies of 5,000 Soviet soldiers who were killed during the battle for Berlin. The focus of the memorial is a 12m tall statue of a soviet soldier with a sword and holding a child, and standing over a broken swastika. Beneath the statue is a room covered in mosaics where wreaths are laid. In front of the statue is a central area lined on both sides with 16 sarcophagi, one for each of the Soviet Republics. The central area contains the remains of 5,000 Soviet soldiers that were killed during the battle for Berlin. In front of the central area are 2 portals in a stylised flag, that are clad in marble taken from the former Reich Chancellery, these are flanked by two statues of kneeling soldiers. This is one of the larger memorials in Berlin covering an area of 10 acres. As part of the agreement when the Soviets left the memorial is now looked after by the German Government and after renovation a few years ago it has been well looked after.

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Topographie des Terrors is on an area of of landscape ground where the Prince Albrecht Palais once stood. This was the HQ of the Gestapo who were the secret police of Nazi Germany. Though their maximum number never exceeded 45,000 (one third the present number of police officers in England & Wales)throughout the war, they were so feared it is often assumed their number was far greater than this. After 1945 the area was all in ruins and remained that way until the 1960s when the area was razed to the ground. The site was opened in 1987 as the Topographie des Terrors which had an outside exhibition and you could walk around and markers explain what was where. There is a large surviving portion of the Berlin Wall behind the new outdoor exhibition. A new state of the art building and documentation centre was opened on 07 May 2010. The exhibition charts the history of the Gestapo and SD with some individual personal stories of its prisoners with photographs and an English translation. There are also special exhibitions on display. The museum is normally open from 10am to 8pm and admission is free. The building also contains a cafe, toilets and library. One side of the of the old foundations of the building are available to view under a covered walkway which is in a trench. There are information stations around the grounds giving information on the history of the site.

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About halfway along Unter den Linden, on the southern side opposite Humboldt University and adjacent to the State Opera House, is a large rather bare-looking square. This is Bebelplatz, and it played a significant role in the inglorious story of the rise to power of the National Socialists. On May 10th 1933, more than 20,000 books by Jews, Communists, and Pacifists, including Bertholdt Brecht, Thomas Mann, Karl Marx and many others, all considered subversive by the Nazis, were looted from the university library on its west side and from elsewhere in the city. They were piled high in the centre of the square to be burned by members of the SA ("brownshirts"), SS, Nazi students and Hitler Youth groups, on the orders of the Nazi minister for propaganda and public enlightenment, Joseph Goebbels.

Today you can peer through a glass panel, set among the paving stones near the opera house, at Michael Ullmann’s underground art installation the Empty Library, with its rows of empty bookshelves a stark reminder of that awful day – although sadly on our visit the pane of glass was misted over and the installation very hard to see. Nearby a bronze plaque (see photo 3) commemorates the event, and next to it another carries a quote from an 1820 work by Heinrich Heine:
"Das war ein Vorspiel nur, dort wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen"
("That was only a prelude; where they burn books, they ultimately burn people").

As well as the opera house and library the square is home to St. Hedwig’s Roman Catholic Cathedral, modelled on the Pantheon in Rome. Across Unter den Linden classical statues look down on the square from the roof of Humboldt University (photo 2), as they would have done on the day of the book-burning. The university was founded by Wilhelm von Humboldt in 1810, although at that time was known simply as the University of Berlin, and later as the Friedrich Wilhelm University, only changing its name to that of its founder in1949. At its gates you are likely to see a book sale being held. The books sold are reprints of those burnt during the Third Reich and the sale is intended to show atonement for the university’s complicity in the burning.

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This is a sort of outdoor museum, which has been developed on the site of the one-time headquarters of the Gestapo and the SS, the principal instruments of repression during the National Socialist era. Here, between 1933 and 1945, the most important institutions of the Nazi terror apparatus operated from the Secret State Police Office, the Reich SS Leadership, and the Reich Security Main Office. These buildings were largely destroyed by Allied bombing during early 1945 and the ruins demolished after the war. When the city was divided this street, then known as Prinz-Albrecht- Straße, was one of several that had the boundary running down the middle, so when the Wall was constructed it followed that line, dividing the street. The south side, renamed Niederkirchnerstraße, lay in West Berlin, and the Wall that sealed it from the East still stands, the longest stretch of this outer wall still remaining (other long stretches, such as the East Side Gallery and in the Mauerpark, are of the inner wall). This section of Wall is interesting because, unlike elsewhere, it has been left exactly as it was after the assaults on it in November 1989, with exposed iron and crumbling concrete. You can almost sense the hands that wielded the tools that caused these scars ...

That line of wall now forms the backdrop of the Topographie des Terrors, and the ruins of the Gestapo HQ its base. Originally it was the latter that was the focus of attention, with the excavated cellar, where many political prisoners were tortured and executed, turned into a memorial and museum, in the open air but protected from the elements by a canopy, detailing the history of repression under the Nazis. Since reunification a “proper” museum has been built here (opened May 2010), but on our visit we only looked at the displays still located in that cellar area. This is the “Berlin 1933–1945. Between Propaganda and Terror” exhibition, which focuses on Berlin during the “Third Reich” and looks at National Socialist policy in Berlin and its consequences for the city and its population. The displays were detailed and informative, if rather static, and for me were less emotionally engaging than those we had seen earlier the same day at the Holocaust Denkmal’s Information Centre. Instead I found my main interest in studying the few remaining traces of the Gestapo HQ foundations and reflecting on the horrors (terrors indeed) that were perpetrated here. Various information signs around the site explain the locations and the site’s use during the Nazi period.

The museum is open every day from 10.00 am – 8.00 pm, and admission is free.

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I hesitated as to whether to include this as a “Thing to Do”, because there really is very little to see here. But it’s such a significant spot historically that it seems worthy of mention. The place where Adolf Hitler had his war-time bunker is now an unprepossessing car-park for an anonymous-looking block of flats, marked only by this very informative notice. When we were there a group of (we think) Israeli tourists were engrossed by all that their guide could tell them, and this made it a little hard for us to get to and read the board. But we found their interest understandable and were more than willing to wait our turn.

The board describes the layout of the bunker, and the shallower Vorbunker that preceded it here. It describes the different rooms and all that went on there. It also tells the story of Hitler’s last few days. It is very detailed but sticks to the facts, and then goes on to explain what has happened to the site in the intervening years. At no point has it ever been a “tourist attraction” of any sort, as is only right, and I got the impression that it is only quite recently that the spot has been marked in any way, presumably in response to high levels of interest.

As the board explains, with the Soviet Army closing in on Berlin, Hitler committed suicide in the bunker on 30 April 1945, along with his wife Eva Braun. Their bodies were reportedly cremated and buried just outside the entrance of the bunker. This bunker was located below the garden of the Reichs Chancellery or Reichskanzlei. Following the war, the Communist government razed the ruins of the Chancellery and levelled the area, which was near the Berlin Wall. However, the bunkers remained underground. But in 1988-89, apartment buildings were built on the site of the Chancellery and along Wilhelmstraße, and the bunkers were destroyed in the construction process. The roof of the Führerbunker, which was reinforced concrete some 10 feet thick, was broken up and allowed to fall down into the rooms below, and the whole structure then covered over. The remains now lie under the parking lot seen in my photo, while the entrance would have been behind where I was standing to take it, which today is the middle of a road.

The Topography of Terror is an open-air exhibit that stands on the land where the Nazi regime was headquartered from 1933 to 1945, including the Gestapo and SS offices. The Holocaust and many aspects of the Second World War were controlled from the buildings that used to be here. Now, it’s an exhibit with dozens of poster boards explaining in detail the history of the buildings and what happened in those building in the infamous time leading up to the war and during it. There are also some very interesting profiles on individual victims of the war as well as information about prisoners from different countries or ethnic groups. I underestimated how long the exhibit would take as there is a lot of detail and a lot of reading. I found most of it incredibly interesting and we spent at least an hour and a half reading the panels, and we skipped several of the less interesting looking ones. They are building a museum to replace the open-air exhibit, but it was still under construction in August 2009 when we visited.

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This building was a huge public air raid shelter during WW2 and is now the Chamber of Horrors. It now contains 3 different exhibitions on 3 floors. There are monsters, skeltons and medieval medicine on the upper floors. The lower floor contains an exhibition of the shelters’ original use during WW2. The upper floors are popular with children and the lower floor with the dads. The building has some unusual opening times so check out their website.

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The area west of Checkpoint Charlie used to be home to some of the most sinister buildings of the Third Reich, such as the Gestapo and Secret Service Headquarters.

After World War II all of the buildings were demolished except for the cellars. These days, the underground cells now house a very interesting open-air exhibition called the Topographie des Terrors.

This free exhibit documents the history of the brutal institutions of the Nazi regime that occupied its site and their historical importance. It consists of a large series of photographs with German captions. You can get a free audio guide in English from the information booth, or just walk around as we did, finding that the photos were descriptive enough to help us understand the accompanying text.