I walked a very similar path on my visit in 2017 including what's coming up.
Yes, Andy, it's well-trodden.
So, this is the Bundesministerium der Finanzen, bit it was constructed as the Reichsluftfahrtministerium, Reichsmarshal Hermann Goering's air ministry. Designed by Ernst Sagebiel, we saw his work at Flughafen Tempelhof, the RLM building is a typical piece of Nazi era architecture; the numbers tell it all - at over 250 metres long, there are over seven kilometres of corridors within its seven storeys, 4,000 windows in 2,800 rooms and during its height enclosed some 4,000 bureaucrats and admin staff. Beginning work in February 1935, it was completed in August 1936, an extraordinarily quick gestation time, as was common in Berlin's reconstruction under the Nazis. Post-war, it managed to survive the carnage of Allied bombing, which was remarkable as it was quite visible to the bombers overhead; I've seen air raid photography where the extent of ther RLM building is plainly evident. Owing to its state of completeness, it was refurbished by the Soviets and became the headquarters of the Deutsche Wirtschaftskommission or DWK - German Economic Commission under control of the Soviets, then the East Germans from 1947 to 1949. Within the Festsaal, its main hall, on 7 October 1949, the Deutsche Demokratische Republik, DDR, was proclaimed, with William Pieck as President. As we saw in the previous post, the building became the focal point of the 1953 uprising, directly opposite Ligner's mural depicting a unified 'one big happy family' East German communist state - oh, the irony. After reunification, the building housed the Treuehand, Trust Establishment, which was headed by politician Detlev Rohwedder, whose sad fate was recorded earlier, thus lending his name to the enormous structure. Note that my presence withn the gated compound at the building's entrance is being monitored.
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This is taken from the corner of Zimmerstrasse and Wilhelmstrasse and is looking at the southern edge of the RLM building. Note the stretch of the Wall at the left edge of the picture; this is one of only a few places in the city where an original section of the Wall can be seen. From there the Wall ran across the road to butt into the building, continuing from the building approximately in line with where the grey car is sitting at the intersection on the road. This was all within the Death Strip, and within the building itself, that entire southern wing was barricaded off to prevent access to the western sector. We are on the East German side, looking due west.
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Crossing Wilhelmstrasse, we are now on the corner of Niederkirchenerstrasse, looking at the wall. This is the western face of it as it is covered in graffiti. There was no way that East Germans could get so close to the structure without getting shot. You also could not buy spray cans in East Germany! Now would be a good time to examine the Berlin Wall in a little more detail. Put in place virtually overnight on Sunday 13 August 1961 in the form of road blocks and barbed wire barriers, the Berlin Wall was the most prominent and tangible physical divide that separated the ideologies of the communist East and capitalist West, during the period of the Cold War, but y'all knew that already. Referred to by the DDR government as the Antifaschistischer Schutzwall or the Anti-fascist protection wall, it was the brainchild of eventual DDR president Erich Honecker, and came shortly after incumbent President Walter Ulbricht declared that, "Niemand hat die Absicht, eine Mauer zu errichten!" (No one has the intention of erecting a wall!) The numbers; it was over 156 kilometres long, of which nearly 112 kilometres was concrete barriers, there was 44.5 kilometres of steel mesh netting that ran along the Death Strip, with 186 observation towers watching over the feature from the east.
Throughout its existence from 1961 to 1989, there were four versions of the wall. The first was that erected from August 1961, which comprised simple barriers and wire fencing, then from 1962 to 1965 there was a basic block wall covered in concrete. From 1965 to 1975, the wall conststed of metal poles driven into the ground with concrete slabs slid between them, but this was improved on with the Grenzmauer 75, the Border Wall '75, from then to its end, which comprised prefabricated sections of L shaped concrete inserted in line, with cirular piping at its top end, making it more difficult to climb. Defences within the Death Strip from the wall itself on the Eastern side comprised mesh fencing, signal fencing, anti-vehicle trenches, barbed wire, dogs on long lines and beds of nails, also known as "Stalin's Carpet".
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On the southern side of the wall in the previous picture is this rather desolate looking treelined space, the RLM building is to our right on Niederkirchenerstrasse, with Wilhelmstrasse behind us. During Nazi times it was the scene of the administrative branches of the most feared organisations of the regime. On this block, the Geheim Staatspolizei, the Sicherheitspolizei, Sicherheitsdient fur Reichsfuhrers SS, the SS Einzatsgruppen and the Sturmabteilung all had their headquarters. Their particular methods for enforcing Nazi ideology are detailed in the building at the centre of the site, called Topographie des Terrors and is a permanent exhibition on the horrors of the Nazi regime. Prior to the end of the war, this street was known as Prinz Albrechtstrasse, and directly in front of us was the Hotel Prinz Albrecht at Nr 8. Alongside was an arts school associated with the Kunstmuseum, surviving at the right of the picture as the Martin Gropius Bau behind the Topographie des Terrors building. The arts school building became the Reich Sicherheitsdienst - the Reich Security Main Office set up by Heinrich Himmler and chaired by Reinhard Heydrich, the 'Butcher of Prague', until his assassination in 1942. In the far left corner of the picture was the headquarters of the SA Brownshirts, the senior members of which were purged under Unternehmen Kolibri, Operation Hummingbird, which became known as the Night of the Long Knives on 2 July 1934.
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We are standing on the eastern side of the Wall looking toward the RLM building on Niederkirchenerstrasse, named in honour of Kathe Niederkirchener, a communist activist who was shot in 1944 at Ravensbruck concentration camp. In the foreground are the foundations of the Hotel Prinz Albrecht and the Reich Sicherheitsdienst building, along which an open air exhibition has been placed. The Wall itself also serves as part of the memorial and there are plaques examining its history, too. Continuing on the subject, it's worth remembering that the Wall was constructed not to keep the West out, but to plug the inevitable drain of East Germans seeking a better life for themselves. During the Wall years, some 5,000 'Osties' defected to West Berlin; the actual number of deaths from failed attempts to overcome the barrier is not known and is thought to be as high as 200. All manner of means were used to defect, from scaling the defences, jumping from windows, hiding in vehicles transitting the check points, to the use of air and water traffic. One of the most public escapees was Thomas Kruger, who piloted Zlin Z-42 DDR-WOH and landed at RAF Gatow. Kruger stayed in the West, but the Zlin was dismantled by the RAF and sent back to East Berlin, covered in slogans, such as "Wish you were here" and "Come back soon" etc! The aircraft still flies today as D-EWOH.
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This view was taken from the western end of the Topographie des Terrors site with the building in the middle ground and, in the foreground, the exposed prison cells below ground level of the Reich Sicherheitsdienst. As recounted earlier, the building that occupied this spot was an arts school that was part of the Kunstmuseum alongside it, but in April 1933, Hermann Goering, as Prussian Minister for the Interior established the Geheim Staatspolizei and installed it in the art school building, whose lease had just expired. A year later, Himmer assumed the role of head of the SD and its offshoot departments. Installed in charge of the Gestapo in 1933 was Rudolf Diels, whose task it was to refashion the building for his own purposes; the artists' studios in the building's southern wing became holding cells for political prisoners, within which over the next decade saw heinous torture and other crimes against humanity. One of their most well known inmates was a youthful communist named Erich Honecker, who, as we saw became DDR president in 1971 and was responsible for the Wall that borders the site to this day. Surviving the war, the building was demolished in 1951, but following restoration of the kunstmuseum next door, interest in the place's history grew and a move was made to erect some form of permanent memorial to victims of the nasties that occupied the buildings here. In 1986, these cells were uncovered and the Topographie des Terrors exhibition opened a year later. Note the Mongolfiera Hiflyer viewing platform that ascends to offer an uncompromising view of the city, although we'll see what the tourists see, from the Fernsehturm later.
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Back on Niederkirchenerstrasse with our backs to the Martin Gropius Bau, the former kunstmuseum named for its architect that sat next to the SD headquarters, we are looking at the Abgeordnetenhaus Berlin, the House of Representatives of the Berlin legislature that occupies the original Preußischer Landtag building, named the Herrenhaus. Constructed in 1899, this building housed the Prussian House of Representatives at Prinz Albrechtstrasse Nr 5 and in 1919, the German communist party was founded here, but for our interest's sake, in Nazi times the Herrenhaus was seconded to Goering and he annexed it to the newly completed RLM building in 1936. It was named Haus der Flieger and was used as a casino and social haven for Luftwaffe personnel visiting the RLM next door.
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Leaving behind the administerial hub of the former Prinz Albrechtstrasse, we walk westwards to Berlin's most prominent meeting point - Potsdamer Platz. This memorial stone on its southern edge commemorates young political representative Karl Liebnecht's call against the Great War during a May Day demonstration at Potsdamer Platz on 1 May 1916, following which he was arrested. A member of the Social Democrat Party, Liebnecht had spoken out against the war in the Reichstag, which led to his universal condemnation and his expulsion, which led him to joining forces with like-minded socialist Rosa Luxemburg, both of whom formed the Spartacusbund, an underground socialist movement opposed to the war. Both Liebnecht and Luxemburg, denounced as revolutionaries, were central to the January 1919 Spartacust Uprising, which was brutally suppressed by the police by the 13th, after condemnation by the newly installed Friedrich Ebert as leader of the Weimar Republic. Arrested a couple of days later, Liebnecht and Luxemburg were tortured, then assasinated, becoming martyrs to those who would shape the post-war German communist government.
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This is the original Potsdamer Platz U-bahn station tiled sign, installed when the U-bahn began operations in 1902. Most other central Berlin stations have been refurbished and renovated over the years, but U-Potsdamer Platz' past as an unused station during the Wall years has ensured its original feel has been retained. During the dual occupation of the city in the Cold War, Potsdamer Platz was physically divided down the middle between East and West and its focus as a popular public hub was diminished, to the point that once fortifications for the Wall were erected, the place became a deserted empty space. Belowground in the subway system, U-Potsdamer Platz was a ghost station, a 'Geisterbahnhof' and trains no longer stopped there. At this time, a couple of the U-bahn lines that originated in the West ran through East Berlin, U6 and U8, the platforms of which were patrolled by DDR border guards, with the exception of Friedrichstrasse, a designated border crossing point. East Germans could not board these lines to head west, for obvious reasons.
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The heart of Potsdamer Platz was divided in two from August 1961 with the installation of the Wall, sections of which have been relocated in the revamped space as a reminder of the site's past, although they are the wrong way round; the graffitied side is facing the east, which for reasons mentioned earlier was not possible. The path of the Wall can be traced through the entire city and Postdamer Platz is a focal point of the Wall's story. Initially, before the Wall's erection, the platz's importance as a meeting hub diminished rapidly, as both sides chose to create public centres within their own territory - the West at Kurfurstendamm and the East at Alexanderplatz. The dashed white lines painted around the city, arbitrarily indicating a somewhat fluid border crossed directly through the platz and took on a more permanent fixture with the construction of the Wall. As a result, the remaining buildings around the platz were demolished and what was once a bustling public juncture, inhabited by cafes, eateries and tourist sites, became a barren wasteland that no one dared enter. Here, the DDR border defences were at their strongest, with the Wall dog-legging through the platz' centre, although a strange anomaly of the border divide arose when the Wall, instead of following the official border that ran along the southern edge of the Tiergarten, which was in the British occupied zone, cut straight through Potsdamer Platz, creating the 'Lenne Triangle'; a little slice of unoccupied Soviet territory in West Berlin. Today the entire platz has been rebuilt, with a small sliver of the Lenne Triangle surviving as a green space along Lennestrasse, at the Tiergarten's southern edge, with the rest of it occupied by the hotel buildings visible in the background of this picture.
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Next, more from Potsdamer Platz and the Bendlerblock.