Berlin, Germany

We awake to our typical good breakfast of breads, sausage, and cheeses. We really love our hotel in Berlin!

This day starts with a tour of the Topography of Terror. The actual sight of Gestapo and SS headquarters. The sight is still in ruins and will never be rebuilt because of the activities planned and carried out here. They have built a wall of photos, quotes, and information that show the history of the rise and fall of the Nazi party. Set among the ruins of Gestapo headquarters it was pretty powerful stuff.

Next was a a tour of the Checkpoint Charlie Museum. This is the history of post-war Berlin. The GDR erected a 100 mile wall to keep it’s people from escaping to the free west side in 1961. 3 million people left between 1949-1961. In 1961 this wall was literally put up overnight to keep the people on the East from escaping to the West. Many families were split because of this. The main crossing point from East to West Berlin was called Checkpoint Charlie. Both sides had guards posted there. It was named “Charlie” because it was actually the 3rd checkpoint in a series. The first was “Alpha”‘ 2nd was “Bravo”, and the third was “Charlie”. As the cold war heated up there was not a lot of traffic between the two sides and was limited down to this one entry point.

The private museum is located right at the point where you would have crossed. It has accumulated most of the escape vehicles, boats, scuba gear, balloons, fake passports, zip lines, etc that people used to escape from East Germany between the years of 1961-1989. Attempting an escape was very risky, and if you got caught guards would simply shoot you. The museum was room after room of objects that told of the horrors of life behind the wall and the measures and risks people were willing to take to escape them. It makes me wonder what my mind would have thought up to get out.

My favorite was of a Guy who had been kicked out of engineering school for disciplinary reasons on the east side. He decided he needed to escape to the west, So he built a gasoline powered, hand held, diving motor and used it to propel himself down the river far enough to escape. He was almost immediately hired by an engineering company in west Berlin after his escape. His invention was awarded three patents. Melissa liked the car escapes. One girl escaped in the passenger seat ( her boyfriend cut out the seat and rebuilt in around her). She was actually IN the seat. Amazing ideas were thought of, which tells a lot about how bad it must have been to live on the east side. Over 20 years after the fall of the wall, these two sights were great reminders of how things were.

To this day, only small pieces of the wall remain. When the wall fell, the city replaced the areas the wall stood with a double row of cobblestones. This pathway of cobblestones are in the exact route of the wall that went through the city. The cobblestone path goes through buildings, streets, parks…where ever the wall was, the path is today. There is a enough of the wall standing to get a feel for how imposing a 100 mile wall, randomly cutting through a city would have changed things overnight. This city that once rivaled Paris and London for the best in Europe (it does again today) had this wall cutting through the middle surrounded by guard gates, barbed wire, arm guards, attack dogs, and trip weapons that automatically open fired if someone entered the forbidden territory. Guards were ordered to shoot to kill and were executed themselves if they failed to do so when people even came near this forbidden territory.

Just a few things I learned today:

catcher- a Jewish person who helped the Nazi’s find hiding Jews. They would do this for special favors like food, or safety for their family.

The hotel had a guidebook that someone had left a few years back. We spent about an hour in the afternoon trying to find an open air market. We could never find the area and we finally realized the book we were using as a reference was from 2002. In this city, that is ancient history. So much has happened and continues to happen since reunification.

KaDeWe (The store of the west) is the largest department store in Europe. 7 stories of stuff you can find from food, jewelry, clothes, shoes, toys, stationary, fabric, furniture, electronic items, appliances, and more! You can buy over 380,000 different items here. The store has 2100 employees. We walked through and had a great gourmet dinner on the glassed in 7th floor buffet. Not the kind of buffet we think of… All you can eat, it was hundreds of options of made to order food. Whatever you want… They make it!

Curry-wurst- sausage with a curry sauce, a Berlin specialty