Private Third Reich Berlin Tour- Hitler and World War 2

Overview

Berlin does not hide this history and it does not display it as spectacle either. Almost everything the government of the Third Reich used was destroyed in the Second World War or pulled down afterwards, and what stands on those sites now — a documentation centre, a field of concrete, an information board in a car park — represents seventy years of arguments about how a country should mark the places where its worst crimes were organised. This is a private walk through those decisions.

What to expect

The route moves between the government quarter, the ground where the security apparatus had its offices, the memorial field south of the Brandenburg Gate, and the courtyard where the July 1944 conspirators were shot. Most of it is on foot.

The bunker is a car park, and that is the point

The stop that surprises people most. The complex where Hitler spent his last months and died lies beneath a residential block and its parking area, unmarked except for a modest information board put up in 2006. It was not forgotten. Successive city and federal authorities decided that no site connected with the perpetrators should be given a form that could attract pilgrimage, so the entrances were sealed and flats were built. The refusal to make anything of it is the exhibit.

Where the security apparatus had its desks

The Gestapo, the SS leadership and the Reich Security Main Office ran the machinery of terror from a group of buildings on one street. The ruins were cleared in the 1950s and the plot lay waste until citizens began digging on it themselves in the 1980s and uncovered the cellars. The documentation centre standing there today asks for no ticket and is among the most unsparing museums in Europe. One of the longest surviving stretches of the Berlin Wall runs along the edge of the same plot — two dictatorships on one address.

A memorial that explains nothing

The field of 2,711 concrete blocks south of the gate opened in 2005 and carries no names, no symbols and no text at ground level. The floor dips as you walk in and the blocks rise past your head, so the edges vanish and the traffic goes quiet. Peter Eisenman refused to say what it means. There is one detail worth knowing: the anti-graffiti coating chosen for the stelae was made by a company whose subsidiary had manufactured the gas used in the extermination camps. When this emerged in 2003 the trustees debated stopping construction and decided, after argument, to continue rather than exclude a German firm from the act of remembrance.

How to conduct yourself there

Worth saying directly. The blocks are a cemetery in effect if not in law, and people climb on them and photograph themselves smiling. Do not. Walk in, be quiet, come out. The information centre beneath the field lists names of the murdered read aloud continuously; it takes several years to complete the reading.

The courtyard

In a military building west of the centre, an inner yard holds a plaque and a bronze figure. Four officers were shot against that wall by torchlight in the small hours of 21 July 1944, hours after the attempt on Hitler's life failed. The building belongs to the defence ministry today, and the German army swears in its recruits there — an explicit decision about which Germans a modern army descends from.

The parliament building

It burned in February 1933, and the fire was used within a day to justify the emergency decree that removed civil liberties and never lapsed. When the reunified parliament rebuilt it in the 1990s, the graffiti Soviet soldiers scrawled on the interior walls in 1945 was cleaned but kept, and a glass dome was set over the chamber so the public walks above the politicians rather than beneath them.