First Port of Call: Warnemunde (Berlin), Part 3

Our adventures continued with a stop at the Holocaust Memorial.

The official name (in English) is the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. Once unification was old news in the 1990s, the world turned to Germany and asked them to come together as a unified city. As our tour guide Jim put it "it was a key moment to do something positive, to confront this history at the national level." The question became, how. In 1999 this park was commissioned and built by Peter Eisenman and officially unveiled on V-E Day in 2005. The location is in the former East Berlin, a block away from the Brandenburg Gate.

The park consists of 2,711 concrete blocks of various lengths and widths. There is no significance to the number 2,711, nor to the sizes. People hang out on the blocks and picnic or soak up the sun (hence a picture of us smiling in the park does not feel out of place as it would in similar memorials, mostly I wanted to give a sense of the scale).

Our guide said to walk around and observe. Try to draw our own conclusions. Walk up and down the uneven terrain. See how people disappear and reappear within the taller sections. No two blocks are the same. There is a chilling feeling as the blocks get taller and easier to hide behind.

Don't you feel enlightened?

There is a free museum underground the memorial, but no time on this tour. 

From here we walked to a parking lot that is said to be the site of the bunker where Adolph Hitler took his own life.

In the backyard of Hitler's office, top Nazis had their offices. In its day, it was a huge 400 meter-long building (over 1300 feet-long). The bunker was built between 1943 and 1945 and attached to an earlier bunker built in the 1930s. It was 30 feet below the earth with 12 1/2 foot thick concrete walls. It held 20 rooms for staff. His wife, Eva Braun (whom he had just married) died a day earlier. There have been several attempts over the years to fully destroy it before they finally turned it into a parking lot.


Long story short (feel free to research the full story), his body was destroyed and there is no final resting place, burial place, or memorial to honor his life. Who would want to?

From the parking lot we walked to the Mall of Berlin, the largest mall in Germany. A place where this Paramus-native felt instantly at home.

One quick note -- while credit cards are ubiquitous throughout Europe, to the extent it was perfectly fine to buy a single postage stamp with a credit card, they are not commonly accepted in Germany. Our first stop was to find an ATM and acquire some Euros so we could buy lunch. This was only two times on the trip we ended up with some local currency. Six different countries (eight including connecting flights) and five separate currencies (including Canada and Switzerland). Only came home with Euros, which I'm sure we will be able to put to use.


Our mission during lunch was to find something to eat in the food court, a postage stamp for my souvenir album (which I will write about and link to at the end), saline solution for Ashley, Don was excited about the Aldi's, and enjoy some free wifi and a bathroom break. Happy to report, we had success all around. Even picked up a few pieces of Lindt chocolate for a mid-afternoon snack.

Time to rejoin the group for the afternoon portion of the tour.

Ultradin Linden

Jim, our tour guide, told us to "use our imagination" as we drove through the old part of Berlin. There are never-ending construction sites. Some places that were gutted by fires are being rebuilt within their old walls. Though it has been nearly 30 years since unification, and over 70 years since the end of World War II, the work continues. Some of the old buildings are receiving new names. There is a nice blend of the old and the new within Berlin. Somehow it works. On Ultradin Linden, normally a beautiful street, it has been torn up since late 2009 as a new subway line is being built. Ahh...progress.

Pink opera house

The bus took us past the 1741 opera house (a pink building) and the 1770's royal library. Between 1740 and 1786 Frederick III turned Berlin into the Prussian royal capital. The architecture is amazing. The current Humbolt University was a palace for Frederick the Great's younger brother, Prince Henry, who died before he could move in. After his widow and her 90-person staff moved out, it became Humbolt University. Today it is the oldest university in Germany. Famous alumni include Albert Einstein.

Royal Library

We passed one of the saddest places for a librarian to see -- Bebelplatz, the square where books were burned immediately after the start of World War II on May 10, 1933 when 20,000 books were taken from libraries and stories and burned. Works by Karl Marx and Albert Einstein (and others) were destroyed. It was the first public attempt to impose the Nazi ideology on German people.

We had a stop at the Berlin Cathedral. When I get the new scanner working I'll add in a picture of what it looked like in 1990. Today it is in the process of being restored to its original glory.

This area is called Museum Island because it has five museums in it. It has been declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site. They are on the grounds of the old city palace, which were opened to the public in 1918. These were built during the time of King Frederick Wilhelm the IV, who enjoyed traveling internationally and brought things back with him. In 1905 King Wilhelm II, a spiritual man, had the cathedral built to show his love to God. It was gutted during World War II.


This park-like setting was paved over in the 1930's and turned into a parade ground so Hitler could strut his stuff. To this day, the war damage is visible in the columns.

The white spots are patches.
The black spots are due to oxidation.

We saw the Berlin Television Tower. At 368 meters (1200 feet) it is the tallest structure in Germany. Its claim to fame in our world is in 1990, Don and I had a snack in the restaurant in the top. We had heard it was torn down, but clearly that was a false rumor. 


We hopped back in the bus and crossed the Spree River again for our final stop: Checkpoint Charlie and The Wall. Along the way Jim shared more facts about German history. 

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