This is the final (whew, because we are ALL exhausted) BErlin post.

Other Berlin sites we visited:

* The Topography of Terrors: 

The first photo shows both the basement of the original building and the remaining outer (West Berlin side) Wall. 

This extraordinary and free museum is built on the exact place that headquartered the Gestapo and the SS. The basement level held cells where people were tortured and executed. It consists of the sort of exhibits (all of it translated into English) that can, and did, keep people like myself absorbed for 4+ hours, explaining the rise of the Nazis, and the development—and eventual end—of the Gestapo and SS. Actually, we got kicked out after 4 hours, when the place closed. We had not finished. One of the exhibit areas focused on what happened after the war to the many, many agents involved in the police state. As most of you know, most of them were never prosecuted, and most of them found “normal” places in society, as doctors, lawyers, judges, etc. And, of course, the US found places for many of the Nazi scientists and officers in our scientific and “intelligence” communities. 

The site of the museum is just outside, on the West Berlin side, of the Berlin Wall system. The segment of the Wall that shows in the photo is the longest remaining continuous segment of outer wall, being contiguous with the American sector. When the site was excavated and the basement cells were discovered, the Americans and East Germans cooperated to construct the first version of the exhibit. If you go to Berlin, you really ought to visit this museum. It is an awesomely humble and honest gift to the world by Germany/Berlin, not defensive, not hiding things, but offering an in-depth look at how and why certain things happened. The most chilling parts of the exhibits were these:

-The absolute joy and amusement on the faces of those photographed shooting prisoners, along with no signs of being emotionally traumatized on the faces of those engaged in mass murder. On the other hand, the deadness in the eyes of the leadership right from the start gives one a sense of who these men were;

-And the descriptions of how a society descends into horror, which, I am sorry to say, remind me so much of things currently taking place in the US—and in Western Europe—that it is pretty scary. Men like Rush Limbaugh and the bullies on Fox News would have fit right in. I am not being political here. The parallels of irrationality, rage, lying, the construction of ‘us’ vs ‘them,’ the persecution complex on the part of those not persecuted in the least,  the blaming-the-victim approach, and the cruel, dehumanizing language used by men like Limbaugh are eerily reminiscent of language used by the fascists during and after their rise to power.

·      Wilhelmstrasse

Okay, I told you I would get to this street, which runs from the grand boulevard of Unter den Linden past The Topography of Terrors.  During the Nazi era, it was the location of many of the most important government ministries, including Hitler’s Chancellery, in front of which he had the urban landscape redesigned in order to construct a HUGE plaza where thousands could gather while he spoke from the balcony (we have all seen film of this). Goebbel’s Ministry of Propaganda Building was on this street, too. The Allies, of course, concentrated bombing on this street, and all of the buildings are gone, except, oddly (in my opinion), Goring’s Ministry of Aviation building which is today the German Ministry of Finance. The East German government, understandably, had torn down the ruins of the other buildings, but housed various ministries in this one. 

Also currently along Wilhelmstrasse: the rebuilt British Embassy and the Czech Embassy; a memorial to one of the civilians who attempted to assassinate Hitler; and, in a parking lot, a sign indicating the approximate site that Hitler committed suicide in his bunker under the Chancellery, after giving the order for the top leadership to evacuate Berlin. The East Germans first, and then the unified Germany, blasted the entrance to the site and then filled it with rubble so as to prevent it from becoming a place of pilgrimage. It is only a block or two from the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, built itself within the Berlin Wall Death Zone.

* Checkpoint Charlie, 

and the Outdoor exhibit on the Cold War at Checkpoint Charlie (there is also a museum of the Wall right there, which we did NOT have time to go into, the Mauer Museum).  Checkpoint Charlie needs no explanation, other than to say that it was at this spot where East and West Berliners met for the first time, filling the street there, when the Wall was opened. The photo shows a young American soldier on the large photo above the checkpoint; on the opposite side of the street is the same kind of photo of a young Eastern bloc soldier.  There is an informative free outdoor exhibit (mounted on fencing) that explains and displays photos of big moments in Cold War history.

·      YES!!!!! I am now finished with the horrifying sites of my visit to Berlin!!!!!

·      We also went on a tour boat cruise on the river, which WOULD have been entirely worth it (German and English both spoken), but last week seemed to be the height of German school trips to Berlin, and right before our boat left the dock, about 60 teenagers got on board, and proceeded to scream at each other for the entire ride, so no one could hear anything!! Still, it was a cool place on a hot, sunny day, with the breeze on the river. Our table-mates were a Norwegian family of four, whose two adult members had married each other that day at the Norwegian Embassy in town, and who were all still dressed up, enjoying ice pops.

       Along the river, as well as in other places, Berliners have created “beaches,” with beach lounging chairs, bars, music, plenty of alcohol, and even, in at least one place we saw (across the street from Checkpoint Charlie), sand!

·      

The Willie Brandt museum. I popped into this on our last day in Berlin, and only managed to see some of it (again, there were English translations of the most important information). Willie Brandt was a West German Social Democrat politician who became Chancellor of [West] Germany in 1969, and who won the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1971 for his attempts to normalize relations between East and West Germany, and West Germany and the other Soviet Eastern European countries (“Ostpolitik”). He was Mayor of West Berlin when the Berlin Wall began being built in 1961 (because over a million East Germans had fled that country). He was a Socialist who fled the Nazis and spent the pre-war years in Norway, and then (when Norway was invaded) Sweden (on a Norwegian passport), writing and publishing articles against fascism. One of his most famous writings of the period told the rest of the world that not all Germans were Nazis.

Okay, one last comment before I leave behind Berlin. Can someone please give me a GOOD reason why on earth the French were given control of one of the Allied sectors of West Berlin, and why they had ANY say in post-war business in Berlin? I know that De Gaulle had a French government-in-exile, and there were free-French military, including pilots (my step-dad Harry was part of a mission to deliver small American planes to the French aviators—including Antoine se Saint-Exupery, author of The Little Prince), but other European countries also had governments-in-exile and had military units on the Allied side (The Belgians and Luxembourgians were granted minor occupation zones with the French zone for a while). Neither the Brits nor the Americans WANTED to include France, but De Gaulle pretty much made a pain of himself until they finally gave in. One reason, besides their minor role in the war, to EXclude them was  because the Germans and French pretty much hated each other.  Were the French included because they HAD been included in the post WW1 treaties?

I read about two things the French REALLY mucked up during the post-war era there:

From Wikipedia: “The original Allied plan to govern Germany as a single unit through the Allied Control Council broke down in 1946–1947 due to growing tensions between the Allies, with Britain and the US wishing cooperation, France obstructing any collaboration in order to unwind Germany into many independent states, and the Soviet Union unilaterally implementing from early on elements of its political-economic system (mass expropriations of land, nationalisation of businesses).

 Another dispute was the absorption of post-war expellees. While the UK, the US, and the Soviet Union had agreed to accept, house, and feed maybe six million expelled German citizens from former eastern Germany and four million expelled and denaturalised Czechoslovaks, Poles, Hungarians, and Yugoslavs of German ethnicity in their zones, France generally had not agreed to the expulsions approved by the Potsdam agreement (a decision made without input from France). Therefore France strictly refused to absorb war refugees who were denied return to their homes in seized eastern German territories or destitute post-war expellees who had been expropriated there, into the French zone, let alone into the separated Saar protectorate.^[4] However, the native population, returning after Nazi-imposed removals (e.g., political and Jewish refugees) and war-related relocations (e.g., evacuation from air raids), were allowed to return home in the areas under French control. The other Allies complained that they had to shoulder the burden to feed, house, and clothe the expellees who had to leave their belongings to Poles and Soviets.”

So, in other words, the division of Germany into 2 countries was partly, at least, due to the damn French trying to dismantle Germany into even MORE partitioned bits and pieces. And then they refused to take in refugees other than those who had started out on French soil.