History - World War II, Berlin

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This was a vibrant jewish community since 1844 until the Nazi's came to power. There are a few memorials to Holocaust victims on Grosse Hamburger Strasse. One is the names of victims who lived in this area on the side of a couple of apartment complexes.Another is right in front of the old Jewish cemetery. It is of jewish victims that are waiting for the trains on a platform that will take them to any of the death camps under the Nazi's. The tiles on the floor are positioned in a way that they look like train tracks. It also shows the victims as already being malnourished and with the few rags of clothes on their backs.
The other memorial is of the Jewish cemetery itself that was destroyed by the gestapo in 1943 with the bones being disposed of. It is now a garden with plaques commemorating all the dead. They are all very sombre and rightfully so because the world should never forgot this dark chapter in its history.

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Located on 17th June Strasse about a three minute walk from the Brandenburg Tor you will find the Soviet War Memorial or the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Some locals call it the Unknown Rapist due to the fact that Soviet soldiers committed many rapes when they took Berlin. 2500 Soviet soldiers with unknown identities that died in the taking of Berlin are buried here. Materials used were taken from Hitler's Reich chancellery. An inscription in Russian translated as "Eternal glory to heroes who fell in battle with the German fascist invaders for the freedom and independence of the Soviet Union" is written underneath the soldier statue. Red Army ML-20 152mm gun-howitzer artillery pieces and two T-34 tanks flank the memorial on each side. The memorial is located in what was the British sector of Berlin, its construction supported by the Allied powers. Until 1991 Soviet soldiers guarded the memorial. Today it is a site of pilgrimage by Russian war vets and is maintained by the City of Berlin.

When visiting Berlin make sure to visit the Topography of Terror in what was then the SS headquarters. It's an outdoor museum near Checkpoint Charlie. A piece of the Wall sits atop it. This museum documents the brutality of the SS. Entrance is free and an audio guide costs you next to nothing.

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This cemetery was opened in 1909 when Marzahn was just a village. There are a number of memorials but in the northwest of the cemetery is the Soviet Memorial which was inaugurated in 1958. The oberlisk stands about 5m in height and is made out of red granite. A pathway from the oberlisk leads a pergola which has an limestone urn containing the ashes of 125 soldiers. Other graves are laid to lawn with surrounding hedges.

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As you walk into the cemetery via the main entrance, usual for most cemetries there is an attractive pond with stone edges and plenty of wildlife including some ducks. Close by is a sculture called the oath hand which commemorates 3300 victims of allied bombing during WW2. Further into the cemetery and signposted off the main pathway is a memorial to the hundreds of Roma and Sinti victims who were interned in a camp close by during WW2, before they were shipped of to Auschwitz and murdered.

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This air raid shelter was built in 1940 on site of a former Wehrmacht Engineering School. The shelter is 35 m long by 19m wide and the walls over 1m thick. It has 3 floors and could accommodate up to 500 people. It came equipped with showers and toilets. The buildings on the site were used by the Soviets after WW2 for various purposes. The most famous building that is part of the complex is the former officer’s mess which is now the German-Russian Museum where the German Wehrmacht signed the instrument of surrender for WW2. The air raid shelter has suffered from the usual graffiti that pervades Berlin and some of the site may be redeveloped with new housing. There are occasional open days but these are only advertised locally.

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At first glance the Schwerbelastungskörper (heavy load bearing body) looks like a gasometer. The ground in this area is sandy and this huge concrete cylinder was constructed in 1941, at a cost of 400,000 marks. It weights 12,650 tonnes, it is 21 metres in diameter it extends 18 metres into the ground and is 14 metres tall. It was used as a test bed to assess how the ground would withstand such a huge force. It was hoped that the structure would not sink anymore than 6cm but in the end it sunk 18 cm. If things had worked out then a massive Triumphal Arch would have been built close by as one of the main structures for the new Germania. The Triumphal Arch would have stood on the end of 7 km long new avenue of victory. The new avenue would have been120 metres wide and would have formed the north/south axis. But it did not make any diffence in the end as the Nazis lost the war and the arch was never constructed. After the war it was considered blowing up the cylinder but this idea was dismissed as it would have damaged buildings close by. It has now become a listed historical monument. As far as I can ascertain entry can be gained to the site via Berliner Unterwelten who provide guided tours, but only in German. There is information on their website in the German Language section.

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I saw a short piece on a documentary called, The Nazis a warning from history about the deportation of Jewish Citizens from a freight station in Berlin called Putlitzstrasse. I decided I would visit the memorial not realising at the time that I had already been to the site a couple of times before but I had not fully realised the significance of the memorial. The first transport of 1,000 people left on the 18th October 1941 for the extermination camps. From then until the spring of 1945 a further 35,000 people were transported to their deaths. The memorial is made from stainless steel and was completed in 1992 and it is located on the Putlitz Bridge overlooking the freight yard.