Memorial sights in Berlin
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Gedenkstätte Plötzensee
Nearly 3000 people were executed at Plötzensee prison during the Third Reich, about half of them German resistance fighters. The room where the beheadings and hangings took place is now a hauntingly simple memorial. Housed in a plain brick shed, only a steel bar with eight hooks pierces its emptiness. Next door, an exhibit documents the Nazis’ perverted justice system, which gleefully handed out death sentences like candy at a parade. The extent of their cruelty knew no bounds. The families of the condemned even had to pay for the cost of the execution, while executioners received a bonus for each bloody deed. They were particularly busy in 1944 when many of the conspirat…
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Sowjetisches Ehrenmal Treptow
At the heart of Treptower Park, the gargantuan Soviet War Memorial (1949) looms above the graves of 5000 Soviet soldiers killed in the Battle of Berlin, a bombastic but sobering testament to the immensity of the country’s wartime losses. For the full effect, approach from the north and walk past the statue of Mother Russia grieving for her dead children. Two mighty walls fronted by soldiers kneeling in sorrow flank the gateway; the red marble used here was supposedly scavenged from Hitler’s ruined chancellery. Beyond lies a massive sunken lawn lined by sarcophagi representing the then 16 Soviet republics, each decorated with war scenes and Stalin quotes. This all culminat…
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Denkmal für Homosexuelle NS Opfer
Although it’s rarely talked about, the gay community suffered tremendously under the Nazis. They were humiliated, socially ostracised and made to wear pink triangles on their clothing. About 54,000 were imprisoned and 7000 tortured and murdered in concentration camps. A pink-granite triangle on the south façade of Nollendorfplatz U-Bahn station in Schöneberg commemorates their plight. People often leave flowers here, and not only during Pride Week. In June 2008 the city unveiled an ‘official’ memorial, the Denkmal für Homosexuelle NS Opfer, on the eastern edge of Tiergarten park. The 4m-high, solitary, warped concrete box echoes the vast Holocaust Memorial across…
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Wall Installation by Ben Wagin
The Berlin Wall ran right behind the Reichstag, which accounts for the Mitte area’s multiple memorials in honour of those who died trying to escape across it. Near the northeastern corner of the building, the Gedenkstätte Weisse Kreuze (White Crosses Memorial) consists of seven white crosses placed here in 1971 right where the Wall ran into the Spree. Across the river, in the basement of the Marie-Elisabeth-Lüders Haus, a Wall installation by Ben Wagin features original segments of the Wall, each painted with a year and the number of people killed at the Wall in that year. Enter from the Schiffbauerdamm riverwalk, and if doors are closed, sneak a peak through the big wind…
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Gedenkstätte Günter Litfin
The Berlin Wall had been in existence for 11 days and Günter Litfin was 24 years old when a hailstorm of bullets ripped through his body as he tried to swim to freedom across a 40m-wide canal. On 24 August 1961, a Sunday, the skilled tailor became the first victim of the GDR’s shoot-to-kill policy. Jürgen Litfin learned about his older brother’s death later that day – on TV. Since 2003 he has kept Günter’s legacy alive in an authentic GDR watchtower. Come to peruse the modest exhibit but mainly to meet this outspoken eyewitness to history.
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Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche
On Breitscheidplatz, the boulevard's eastern terminus, the bombed-out tower of the landmark Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche serves as an antiwar memorial, standing quiet and dignified amid the roar. Built in 1895, it was once a real beauty as you'll be able to tell from the before-and-after pictures in the memorial hall on the ground floor. Also duck into the adjacent octagonal hall of worship, added in 1961, to admire its midnight-blue glass walls and giant floating Jesus.
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Luftbrückendenkmal
The Luftbrückendenkmal (Airlift Memorial) right outside Tempelhof airport honours all those who participated in keeping the city fed and free during the Berlin Airlift. Berliners have nicknamed it Hungerharke (Hunger Rake), a moniker inspired by the trio of spikes representing the three air corridors used by the Western Allies. The names of 79 airmen and other personnel who died during this colossal effort are engraved in the plinth.
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Gedenkstätte Deutscher Widerstand
The Gedenkstätte Deutscher Widerstand deals with German Nazi resistance. Exhibits are in the very rooms where high-ranking officers led by Claus Graf von Stauffenberg plotted the ill-fated assassination attempt on Hitler on 20 July 1944. He and his co-conspirators were shot in the courtyard right after the failed coup. The 2008 movie Valkyrie, starring Tom Cruise, is based on the story.
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Schiller Denkmal
The memorial to Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805), one of Germany’s most revered poets and playwrights ( Maria Stuart, William Tell ) sits dignified in the middle of Gendarmenmarkt. Crafted by Reinhold Begas in 1871, it was squirreled away by the Nazis and ended up in West Berlin after WWII. In 1988 it returned across the Wall following an exchange of artworks between the two German states.
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Holocaust Denkmal
This poignant memorial to the Jewish victims of the Nazi-planned genocide was designed by Peter Eisenmann and consists of 2711 sarcophagi-like columns rising up in sombre silence from undulating ground. For context, visit the subterranean Ort der Information (Information Centre), whose exhibits will leave no one untouched.
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Neue Wache
For Schinkel, return to neoclassical Neue Wache. Originally a Prussian guardhouse, it's now an antiwar memorial whose austere interior is dominated by Käthe Kollwitz's emotional sculpture Mother and her Dead Son.
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Gedenkstätte Berliner Mauer
Swing by the Gedenkstätte Berliner Mauer, a soon-to-be-expanded memorial that combines a documentation centre, an art installation, a short section of original Wall, a chapel and an outdoor gallery.
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