Berlin, Germany

Although I have traveled through Germany before, I had never stopped in Berlin. So this trip gave me a good excuse to see some of the sights of this historic former “bridge / wall” between east and west. And on a hot, sunny day to boot!

After WWII, the Allied forces divided Berlin into four sectors, with the Soviets occupying the east side of Berlin, and the Americans, British, and French occupying three sections on the west side of Berlin. And as tensions between the west and the Soviets increased, the Soviets (and their East German proxies) built the Berlin Wall in 1961 that separated West Berlin from East Berlin and from the rest of West Germany. As a result, West Berlin became an isolated island in Russian controlled East Germany until 1989 when the wall came down. (More info: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_Wall)

The path of the old wall is marked on much of its previous path by a double row of bricks.

Part of the remaining actual wall at an exhibit site built alongside. Really just a series of high, concrete “Jersey barriers” like along U.S. highways.

Checkpoint Charlie – the famous guard house line of demarcation between the former American and Soviet sectors of Berlin

Looking from the old Soviet sector back toward Checkpoint Charlie

The Brandenburg Gate, one of six original gates into the old city. Also where President Reagan famously said in 1987, “Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”
And 2 years later, the wall came down.

As a Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Berlin has an almost 5 acre site on undulating ground that contains 2,711 rectangular concrete blocks of varying heights. Because of the uneven ground and varied block heights, you feel lost while walking through. More info at: https://www.visitberlin.de/en/memorial-murdered-jews-Europe.

There were also many school field trip groups at the site, as pictured above.

I listened in on one group of Danish students talking about the memorial whose English speaking guide asked them, “how many Jews died in the Holocaust?” A student responded, “six million” Then the guide asked, “how many people there are in all of Denmark?” One of the groups’s teachers responded, “somewhere around 5.5 million.” The guide was making the point that more than the entire population of Denmark had been wiped out by the Nazis! A pretty profound comparison to help the students understand the magnitude of the genocide.