Berlin - Day Two

We awoke to another beautiful Sunday and as per usual got up nice and early to get started on the days activities with Hamish now rocking some jeans. Unfortunately we keep forgetting that things in Europe (museums, cafes, monuments, supermarkets) don’t usually get going until 10am, so we found ourselves wandering around the empty streets for awhile. With bread and meat for breakfast again, we waited for the Museum underneath the Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe to open. 

This was a really striking museum, they had chosen 10 Jewish families that were affected in different ways during the War. It was pretty intense. They also had a room where the names of every single Jew that was murdered during the Nazi period was read out along with where they were born and where they were killed in English and in German. As there were approximately 5.9 million Jewish people killed, the length of time it would take to read out all the names is just over 7 years.

We then went to the meeting point for our next tour, the tour of the concentration camp - Sachenhausen. We caught the train for the hours journey north of the city where the camp has now been turned into a memorial.

Sachsenhausen was opened in 1935 as a work camp for criminals and people that were deemed antisocial (political activists, criminals and homosexuals), it was meant to be the model camp that all other concentration camps were designed on. Next door to the camp was the training camp for the SS guards which is now used to train police. This a a contriversial decision with the logic being the facility is purpose built and training them there will remind them of past mistakes and be a consant reminder not to abuse power.

Model of the entire camp. We only visited the triangle part Mike is pointing to.

Some of buildings left standing in the concentration camp are the Entrance tower with the slogan “Work will set you free” on them (how ironic), and the clock on top of the tower is stopped at 11.07am which was the time that the Soviet army liberated the camp back in 1945.

Entrance and main guard tower. This would of been the prisoners first glimpse of the camp

The fortifications were pretty solid with concrete walls, barbed wires and armed guards towers everywhere. The camp is triangler in shape and what was most amazing was the size of the camp, it was huge, and it was hard to get your head around the fact that 200,000 people lived at Sachsenhausen between 1936-1945. To show where all the barracks once stood, there are now concrete blocks and many of these have flowers strewn over them.

Electric and barbed wire fence behind the "neutral" (death) strip.

 It’s a challenge to describe everything we saw, it was hard as it was a beautiful sunny day and we were in the middle of the stunning German countryside with some of the trees turning orange, and we were standing in a place where so many human atrocities took place only 50 years ago.



There were 2 monuments in the camp, the first set up in 1961 by the then Soviet government, it is an obelisk with a statue of a Soviet solider liberating 2 prisoners, and on the wall behind it is has red triangles which were used to identify political prisoners. Obviously all the other prisoners that suffered weren’t happy about this, and another memorial was built. Excavation works had revealed the gas chambers that were used to gas prisoners and a statue has been erected there, that is much more fitting of what happened here.

Firing range for killing prisoners. Padded with logs so no chance of a ricochet.

Remains of a gas chamber. Gas was used so as it was more efficient - SS soldier's didn't have to look person in the eye before the execution and also bullets were expensive and needed for the front line.

We left the camp quite exhausted, physically and mentally. We were quite surprised at how much the Germans wanted to talk about and remember what happened in their city, there is no attempt to hide anything or to skew what happened so it doesn’t sound as bad. Quite a few people on our tour were Germans and every memorial we went to there were flowers left on them, which was really nice to see.

After the train ride back we headed to another symbolic area of Berlin, Alexanderplatz where the infamous TV Tower was built in 1965. It was built basically to annoy West Berlin and show that things are all good on the east side. It looks staggeringly like the Sky Tower and has no real purpose, there is a viewing platform and a revolving restaurant at the top. We went up the top and had a beer at the highest bar in Berlin, and tried to take some good sunset photos again! Having blown our budget the day before we succumbed to a cheap nasty dinner at a café near our hotel. Amazingly, they have even managed to incorporate sausage meat into a donor kebab (that’s kebob to you Dave) which was a bit yuck.

Day 2 a success - still massively sore feet.

Highlight: Understanding that the German nation is doing its best to rebuild its country whilst not forgetting its past. It makes for a really interesting cool vibe in the city.
Lowlight: Dinner - you can’t just cut sausages really small and put it in a kebab!!!
Interesting fact: When the sun shines on the TV Tower’s tiled stainless steel dome, the reflection usually appears in the form of a crucifix. This effect was neither predicted nor desired by the planners.