Steel, Glass, Infinity Mirrors and Nazis

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Glyn strode out into the frosty, misty morning purposefully as though he knew where he was going. I followed like I believed it. We had to purposefully walk a bit further after crossing the wrong bit of road and missing the tram stop. However, we managed to catch the correct tram and travelled past the places we’d walked along last night.
We’ve still not sussed where we’re meant to scan or present our travel tickets. Technically we’ve not paid for any of our journeys yet, despite having paid for 4-day travel cards. But no one else appears to be scanning tickets either.
We caught an old fashioned looking underground type train. It was meant to be one stop and would have been, had we gone the right way!
Announcements on the train said that wearing a mask was mandatory but less than 20% of passengers were wearing them or so it seemed at that time.
We arrived at Oranienburger street station before our walking tour guide turned up, despite taking the long route. A few other tours started here also, so we knew we were in the right place. Our tour had 22 people from a variety of countries.
Our guide, Daniel was from Columbia and has been living in Berlin for 4 years. He originally came to get a free education, studying for a masters where even student transport is free. He loves Berlin because of its freedoms:
Financial freedoms - rent is going up but compared to other Capitol and major cities, it is cheap due to the Cold War. Daniel works around 20 hours a week and though he is financially poor, he is time rich. He asked if we’d seen many people in suits, and no, we had not. This place is good for artists, musicians, students and people who like to use their time enjoying interesting persuits rather than soul-destroying jobs. It sounds good to me, although I need to work full time to live in the UK and I’m lucky to earn enough to afford travel and camera gear.
Clothing freedoms - apparently people can wear what they want, including wearing nothing at all, though generally that happens only in the summer. We were told that it wasn’t uncommon to see people naked in the parks as the Germans don’t sexualise the human body as much as many nationalities do, particularly Catholic ones who see body parts as sins.
Sexual freedom - homosexuality became legal in 1967.
Daniel gave us a link to a Google docs download that had photos of Berlin throughout more than the last 100 years to show how it had changed so much. 80-90% of the city had been demolished or wrecked by war and the flat city grew around 10 m-14 hills made from rubble of the wreckage. It was the women of Berlin who created these hills after WW2, covering them in soil and plants, as the men were either dead, imprisoned or invalided.
As Berlin is in east Germany, it was within the Soviet section when it was divided up after the war. Yet, parts of Berlin were under French, US or British rule and so it is an island of capitalism in a communist area.
Naturally the Berlin Wall got mentioned a lot. It came about overnight in August 1961 as East Berliners kept escaping to the more affluent and free West to the point that the Russians thought no one would be left. So, to everyone’s surprise, a human chain of armed Russian soldiers kept guard as a double wall just under 27 miles long with guard dogs, barbed wire and land mines was built. The area between the wall was known as the Death Strip or No Man’s Land and 140 people died within its 29 year existence, including children, as they attempted to flee from the East.
There are markings in the ground where it once stood and you can cycle the route within 7 hours if you drink lots of beer according to Daniel who did it once. The implication being that the beer helped.
The whole group of 22 people and Daniel took the S-Bahn for 2 stops to the Brandenburg Gate without losing any of us. Daniel told us to wear masks. It turns out that despite having bought travel passes last night, we’d not validated them (meaning sticking them in a machine on the platform) so we’d been travelling for free - or illegally, however you want to put it - since we’d arrived.
The Brandenburg Gate was once a symbol of division in Berlin as the wall ran by it. It’s made of sandstone and it’s a miracle it survived the last war, but it is scarred. It once was black due to war and pollution, but now around €1 million per month is spent to keep it in good condition.
Originally you could only walk through the middle arches if you were important and apparently Napoleon thought better of himself than the Germans did. Where we stood today, we would have been shot 36 years ago, for being too close to it.
Factoid: I always thought Napoleon was short, but this was British propaganda and actually he was above average height for his time.
The statue upon the gate is The Quadriga, depicting a two-wheeled chariot pulled by four horses symbolising peace entering the city. The horses' reins are held by Victoria, the goddess of victory who is eyeing up the French embassy. And in return, the embassy’s windows are skewed back at her.
When defeated WW1 soldiers marched back through the gate to the welcoming arms of their families, the Nationalists were annoyed, felt betrayed and thus started the seeds of Nazism.
People were incredibly poor, so the trees in the parks were uprooted to burn for heating and the land used to grow potatoes, carrots and cabbage. There’s a famous photo of a woman burning money because fuel was so expensive, it was more cost effective to burn money rather than buy fuel.
Daniel claimed that the starving people of Germany would have been impressed by the Nazi parades, banners and torches, trying to instil National Pride back into them.
Since WW1 there had been food rations that differed according to race and age
Germans were best fed, food having being stolen from other people so they saw this as being better times.They’d been starving in the 20s and 30s and were now well fed. This was not unusual, like Churchill starved to death many in India so British could eat.
There were Communist and Socialist uprisings in Europe, overthrowing the rich, and Nazis were seen to be dealing with the Commie threat, so the super rich supported them. They didn’t want to lose their money.
Jews were dehumanised as no better than animals (and look how people treat animals!) so most other people were indifferent to their suffering. Whilst many Germans agreed to deporting them, most were against extermination, so the concentration camps were outside of Germany.
There was a lot of propaganda about sick people costing more to keep than an entire healthy family and many doctors were indoctrinated into nazism with terrifying results in shocking medical experiments on prisoners. Worst of the worst was Dr Mengele, who was obsessed with twins and performed brutal experiments upon them. It was deemed acceptable to do vile and deadly experiments on Jews if it could potentially be of benefit to the ‘real’ people. What does it take to hear the screams of others and feel nothing?
Nearby was the most expensive hotel in Berlin, costing around €5k per night. It’s also known for being the place where Michael Jackson dangled his baby out of a window.
Dotted around Berlin are small copper plaques embedded into the pavement with information of people who once lived in the nearby buildings and were murdered by or died because of Nazis. Daniel showed us one of a lady who killed herself before going into a camp. It’s respectful to rub them with your boots as it keeps them polished.
Ironically, before WW2, Berlin was one of the safest places for Jews to live as they tended to get persecuted just about everywhere. Many fled to neighbouring European countries, only for the Nazis to invade later on.
Our next stop was a Memorial to the Sinti and Roma people of Europe (once known as gypsies) murdered by Nazis. It was all about Eugenics, Social Darwinism and other nonsense made up by racists to justify genocide. 500,000 were murdered within 2 years. Daniel told us a story where 140 of these people knew they were going to the ‘showers’ the next day (meaning they would be gassed) so they boarded up their place of confinement, making it hard for the Nazis to get them out. A fight ensued and all of the people died fighting, but the rebellion scared the Nazis enough to march the remaining prisoners to other death camps. Many died, but due to the Russians soldiers fighting back and liberating them, 2,987 survived. Daniel explained that the best way to piss of people trying to exterminate your race is to have babies and hopefully those survivors have gone forth and multiplied a lot.
The memorial was a flowing pond with a black triangle in the middle that had fresh flowers placed on it daily. Names of concentration camps were carved into the surrounding ground stones.
The Black triangle symbolises what category prisoner the Sinti and Roma were at the camps.
Black triangle = anti social, against Nazis and not doing your duty. Roaming people, homeless, alcoholics, non-prescription drug users (although many Germans, including Hitler were on drugs such as meth, amphetamine and cocaine but that was ok if it was part of the war effort).
Red triangle = political prisoners, especially left wingers:
Green triangle = extreme criminals eg murderers - depending on who you murder of course. Green triangles got the best treatment in camps and they interceded between inmates and commanders, getting privileges and eating at the Nazis’ tables.
Purple triangles = pacifists, the majority of which were Jehovah’s witnesses.
Pink triangle = gay men. Gay women were seen more as anti social for not giving birth to blue-eyed white babies, going to church or cooking for men. Gay men were often chemically castrated.
Daniel belittled the Nazis by pointing out that they had no ideas of their own, but took other people’s bad ideas and made them worse. Eg, concentration camps were a British invention during the Boer War. Eugenics and antisemitism were nothing new either.
The tour was three hours btw, so by the time we got to the Reichstag, we were half way through and it was time for a toilet stop at a place where they serve crap coffee. There’s nowhere else to go if you need the loo. There are woods behind, but being winter, there was no leaf cover to do your business for free, so I paid the 50c after buying a fridge magnet to get some change.
Another reason the Nazis rose to power is a fire at the Reichstag that was blamed on Communists. Daniel said “imagine if your parliament was set on fire”, (Glyn shouted “hooray” but only I was amused because I know he was thinking about the current UK bunch of thieves, liars and murderers.) this fire resulted in a State of Emergency where all freedoms of expressions were removed and the nazi dictatorship began.
The Reichstag is an impressive building with a newish glass dome at the top. It got totally battered during WW2 and Daniel showed us photos of the state it was in.
When the Russians defeated the Nazis and took control of Berlin, they took propaganda photos of the Red Army placing their flag on the Reichstag. In fact, Poland had erected the first flag but you know what they say, ‘pics or it didn’t happen’. They should have brought a photographer with them.
Like soldiers of all armies, the Russians were into looting and it could be clearly seen in the photo that the soldier was wearing two watches, the second would have been taken from a corpse. Some Russians were seen with 6 watches. The
Soviet liberators did an early photoshop by blurring the wrist to hide the second watch.
In front of the Reichstag was lots of construction, I don’t know what they were doing. But it’s the standard for any tourist hot spot worldwide.
Our next stop was the only Soviet memorial in west Germany at Tiergarten, described as ‘Stalin giving the middle finger to both the west and Hitler’. 80,000 soviet soldiers died in the 16 days needed to take Berlin and this memorial was to 2,000 of them. The Red army had suffered more than most during this war, with 28 million lives lost in 6 years, that’s 20% of their population. So all the countries liberated by the Russians became under their control.
Hitler was planning to build a memorial here as the Germanic capital of the world, planning to make it like the Champs elysees in Paris, so another reason Stalin wanted his Soviet memorial here. Stalin didn’t care it was British sector or that it was totally barren around here (due to the felling of trees to burn for heat) and he also used stone from Hitler’s chancery to build it. When Gorbachev signed the treaty in the 90s alongside Thatcher, Reagan and Miteron, to make Berlin independent, one condition was that all Russian memorials be kept and so they were.
After the war, the US got to pick and choose which Nazi scientists they got to keep and integrate into US society. This meant they had great minds that helped get the first men on the moon.
Nazi weapons were superior and so Stalin got blueprints for the atomic bomb, which resulted in abolishing the monopoly that that the US had on war and maybe the reason why WW3 hasn’t happened. Yet.
This memorial was one place where East Germans could protest against Russia, but be safely under British rule - until the wall was built.
The Russians were also raping 100,000s of German women and there’s an unmarked tomb named the unknown rapist. A famous book, ‘A woman in Berlin’ ends with the quote ‘Better to have a Russian in my belly than an American over my head’ meaning it was better to be raped than bombed.
We next took a walk through Animal park where some ruler in the 1500s filled it with wild animals, fenced them off and hunted them. What a brave and lovely man! There are no animals now, save a few birds.
We came across a large stone block housing a small glass screen behind which played a slide show of gay people. It’s Daniels least favourite memorial due to the fact that it was really male gays that got persecuted as female gays were persisted for being anti social and not their sexuality. I can’t see that it matters, they all got murdered for being different.
The Grey blocks of the Holocaust memorial was next, commemorating 6 mil Jews murdered by the Nazis. It was built in 2005 and happened because of reunification. The grey blocks vary in size and some are 4 metres tall. What does it all mean? This is a point of discussion. Maybe it’s symbolic because you have no idea when you are getting out,like war. Or there’s a feeling of isolation. Maybe it’s meant to be a dilapidated cemetery or like
rows of people in camps, stripped of their clothes, hair and identity, all the same shape and colour but different heights.
The memorial is covered with a special paint that means if anyone graffitis on it, the damage can easily be removed with soap and water. This is particularly important as you get disgusting idiots who try to paint swastikas on it, I kid you not. The irony is that the company who won the contract to supply this paint is a subsidiary of another which originally supplied the gas to kill the Jews in the death camps.
Another thing of note was that the Nazi army were all on meths, this was legal so that they could march and fight for three days without sleep. However withdrawal of the drugs may have contributed to why they lost. Germany was the largest importer of cocaine in the world and that was legal and heroin was invented to combat meths withdrawal. Hitler was on opiates, meths and cocaine, some of it was because he had the shits. In total he was on 28 medications, many being psycho active.
We stopped by a street named after Hannah Arendt, another holocaust survivor, writer and philosopher who wrote about the banality of evil. She met with a leading imprisoned Nazi and was struck how dull and mundane he was, rather than a comic book style super villain.
The last stop was the location of Hitler’s bunker which is now a car park surrounded by flats and a bubble tea shop. The reinforced concrete bunker could hold 200 people and was where Hitler spent his last 100 days.
One of the reasons it no longer exists is because people with Nazi fetishes were breaking in and turning it into a shrine. It’s now filled with concrete and a one line sign is the only indication it was ever there.
During the last days of WW2, Hitler’s generals suggested surrendering to prevent more civilians from dying to which he replied ‘there are no civilians’. Anyone refusing to fight were hung from lampposts as traitors and the rest were told to keep fighting until the very last bullet was shot. Daniel said we should learn from this that no authority should ever go unchallenged. I agree, but fat chance.
Hitler married his long term partner, Ava Braun in the bunker, declaring himself fully Arian as all Nazis must do during a wedding ceremony. How did he even believe that when he looked nothing like a person of his master race? Has anyone done a DNA test on Hitler’s remains to find out his true ancestry?
The day afterwards they both committed suicide with cyanide pills, plus a shot to the head as paranoid Hitler didn’t even trust his personal doctor. His chauffeur was instructed to burn the bodies but as gasoline was so scarce, staff we sent out to syphon the dregs out of burnt out cars. And so Hitler and Braun were burned in a ditch, but not enough and their bodies could be identified through dental records.
Chief Propagandist, Joseph Goebbels also committed suicide with his wife after having first killed their children with a morphine potion and then cyanide. Apparently it was better to die than live with no Hitler. I beg to differ. However there was a suicide epidemic afterwards as it was seen as preferable than surrender.
Moving forward, many Turkish immigrants helped rebuild the current city. The Berlin Wall was built and though generally not seen as a good thing, it was still better than war. During 1959, a war between the USA and Russia almost began in Berlin that could have sparked WW3. So maybe a walk was better?
There was a lot to take in during this free tour, although we gave big tips - so paying really!
We were beginning to get cold and hungry standing in Hitler’s carpark and lucked upon a nearby vegan Japanese restaurant. For the area it was located, it wasn’t expensive and we were instantly served with much needed free hot tea. Both service and food was exceptional.
I wanted to visit the Film Museum that covered German film and TV right from the beginning. The huge building has metal stairs, floors and railings. The walls were and elevators were mostly glass.
The old guy at the desk asked where we were from for marketing statistics plus he wanted to practice his English on native speakers. His English was very good but he was concerned that his vocabulary was too formal. I said no, but he said my tone suggested otherwise! It was great to talk to him as he told us we’d be into the film stuff but the tv section not so much as telly is just sport and propaganda.
We spent a couple of hours in this wonderful museum and if I had all the time in the world, I would have stayed longer. I learned that the original German movie stars were females. The clips I saw seemed less pretentious than clips I’ve seen from similar times from the UK or USA.
I discovered Henny Porten and Asta Nielsen plus saw a lot of info on Marlene Dietrich. This amazing museum was full of movie clips displayed amongst angular shapes, glass and infinity mirrors.
Metropolis was naturally covered but I was surprised that there was no mention of Nosferatu. There were models of the futuristic city in Metropolis and it really was before it’s time. The whole place was fascinating, even if you’ve never heard of any of the films, just for the history and how it was displayed.
Of course they covered Nazi Propaganda films. One area had metal drawers and pulling on them revealed displays or screens that played clips. One most disturbing was ‘Jud Süß’, which is a particularly disturbing Jewish hating piece of propaganda.
The TV section wasn’t of much interest to us as it was about German TV that we’d never seen.
We walked back to the Reichstag, ready for our tour early, so stopped at the crap coffee place where I had a non crap beer.
Security for the Reichstag was similar to airport security but the guard I spoke to took my word that I wasn’t carrying a knife. Btw, I wasn’t carrying a knife.
The Reichstag is a huge building, battered during WW2 that rather than being restored is more adapted. So the old stone structure is capped with a new glass dome. Steel and glass walkways run through the old arches. The ceilings are high and the lighting dim. We were there in the evening so maybe it’s brighter in the day.
There were just nine of us on our pre-booked tour. The first point of interest was where the actual parliament meets, with lots of glass and purple seats. Plus a giant metal eagle. We got told photography was allowed so long as you avoided police and staff. But I still got told off for using a flash despite there being no signage or instruction to not use flash.
We were taken through areas where Russian soldiers had graffitied at the end of WW2 and through brightly lit tunnels to other important government buildings.
The tour ended up at the very cold dome that had a spiral path to the top. It being dark with rain on the glass, the view was less than amazing but still, it was impressive. Signs gave a brief history of the place. We were there for a couple of hours.
We ended the day with a disappointingly small Christmas Market near Potsdamer Platz, but I did get to try grüh wine that was very warming!

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