Berlin · DE
Dark History — Berlin Under the Third Reich
A walk of remembrance through the heart of the Nazi capital.
What's the walk about?
Welcome to a difficult but necessary journey through the heart of Berlin. After Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor on the 30th of January 1933, this city became the capital and the stage of the Nazi dictatorship. On this walk of remembrance we trace that story along a single line through Mitte: the Reichstag fire and the seizure of power, the planned monumental capital of Albert Speer, the apparatus of terror run from Wilhelmstraße and the Gestapo and SS headquarters, the persecution and deportation of Berlin's Jews, and the fall of the city in 1945. This is not entertainment but a walk of remembrance. At the memorials we visit, please maintain a respectful demeanor.
What you'll see
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1
Friedrichstraße Station
start
One of Berlin's busiest rail hubs and the meeting point for our walk. Beneath its bustle lies a divided memory, for this station was both a doorway to rescue for Jewish children and, later, a transit point in the deportation of the city's Jews.
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2
"Trains to Life – Trains to Death" Memorial
Memorial
A bronze group of seven children stands outside Friedrichstraße station, frozen between two destinies. Two figures face the trains that carried them to safety in England, while five turn the other way, toward the trains that carried Berlin's Jewish children to their deaths.
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3
Reichstag Building
Landmark
The seat of German democracy, crowned by a luminous glass dome. On a winter night in 1933, fire tore through this building and gave the Nazi regime the pretext it needed to dismantle the republic.
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4
Soviet War Memorial (Tiergarten)
Memorial
A sweeping curved colonnade crowned by a towering bronze Red Army soldier, flanked by two T-34 tanks and field guns. It marks the graves of more than 2,000 Soviet soldiers who fell taking Berlin in 1945.
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5
Brandenburg Gate
Landmark
Berlin's neoclassical triumphal gate, crowned by the Quadriga chariot, became a backdrop for Nazi propaganda after 1933 and a battered ruin on the front line in 1945. It stands today as a monument to both the city's grandeur and its catastrophe.
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6
Akademie der Künste (Pariser Platz 4)
building
Behind a vast modern glass facade on Pariser Platz stand the surviving halls of the old Prussian Academy of Arts. From 1937 these rooms were taken over by Albert Speer, Hitler's chief architect, to draft the megalomaniac plans for a Nazi world capital called Germania.
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7
Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (Holocaust Memorial)
Memorial
A vast, undulating field of 2,711 grey concrete stelae just south of the Brandenburg Gate. This is Germany's central memorial to the up to six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust, with an underground Place of Information beneath it.
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8
Site of the Führerbunker
Historic Site
An ordinary residential car park is all that marks the spot where Adolf Hitler spent the final weeks of the war and took his own life on the thirtieth of April 1945. A single modest information board is the only acknowledgement of what lies buried beneath the asphalt.
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9
Wilhelmstraße (ministries quarter)
street
Once the administrative spine of the German state, this unassuming street was where the Nazi dictatorship was governed. The Reich Chancellery, the Foreign Ministry and Goebbels's Ministry of Propaganda all stood within a few steps of one another here.
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10
Niederkirchnerstraße — Göring's Air Ministry (Reichsluftfahrtministerium)
building
A vast, fortress like government block that was Hermann Göring's Air Ministry and the headquarters of the Luftwaffe. One of the very few major Nazi buildings in central Berlin to survive the war almost intact, it still looms over the street today.
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11
Topography of Terror
end
On the very ground where the Gestapo and SS once directed a continent-wide machinery of persecution, this documentation centre lays the terror bare. An open trench of excavated cellar walls runs beneath a stark grey hall, beside the longest surviving stretch of the Berlin Wall in the city centre.
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