Tiergarten

Standing in front of the Soviet War memorial in Tiergarten on Straße des 17. Juni during my first visit in 2007 and as it appeared during the Cold War when guarded by a Soviet honour guard. After the end of the war, the Red Army erected four Soviet memorials in the city of Berlin. They were to commemorate the Red Army soldiers who were killed, in particular the approximately 80,000 soldiers who fell in the Battle of Berlin. These memorials are not only monuments to the victory, but also memorials in conjunction with military cemeteries and thus Soviet war graves in Germany. The central memorial is the largest complex in Treptower Park. Alongside them were the memorial in the Grosser Tiergarten, the memorial in the Schönholzer Heide and thememorial in the Bucher Schlosspark, the last two situated in the district of Pankow.

 Situated less than a mile away from the Reichstag, it was built at such short notice that it sat in West Berlin, within the British sector. The memorial was designed by sculptors Lev Kerbel and Vladimir Zigal together with the architect Nikolai Sergijewski based on a decision of the War Council of the 1st Belorussian Front and was erected at the intersection of the Siegesallee and the then Charlottenburger Chaussee. It was built as a barrier, across the then existing Wilhelminian Siegesallee. This memorial is the last on the battle route of the 1st Belorussian Front from Küstrin via Seelow to Berlin. On November 11, 1945, the memorial was inaugurated with a parade of the Allied troops shown here. When the wall went up around East Berlin, the monument became inaccessible to the people for whom it was built.

The area in 1945 showing the memorial standing in a wilderness of ruins, the Tiergarten having been destroyed by incendiary bombs and then stripped of timber for firewood during the last months of the war. Today, it is surrounded by the extensive woodlands of the reconstituted Tiergarten. Although the memorial stood in the British sector of Berlin, its construction was supported by all the Allied powers. Throughout the Cold War, Soviet honour guards from the Soviet sector (East Berlin) were sent to stand watch at the memorial; on the right is one such soldier from 1948 and me at the site in 2024.

 Built in a style similar to other Soviet World War II monuments once found all over the former Eastern bloc, the memorial takes the form of a curved stoa topped by a large statue of a Soviet soldier. It is set in landscaped gardens and flanked by two Red Army ML-20 152mm gun-howitzer artillery pieces and two T-34 tanks. Behind the memorial is an outdoor museum showing photographs of the memorial's construction and giving a guide to other memorials in the Berlin area. The Soviets built the statue with the soldier's arm in a position to symbolise the Red Army's putting down of the Nazi German state. The memorial was designed by architect Mikhail Gorvits with the monument of the Soviet soldier by sculptors Vladimir Tsigal and Lev Kerbel. A legend that the memorial was built from stonework taken from the destroyed Reich Chancellery is untrue, but remains popular and persists. Ironically, it was situated at the exact point where Speer had planned his north-south/east-west axis for his planned capital. The material for the monument too aparently came from Hitler's Chancellery, and behind lie today the bodies of 2, 200 soldiers. It was discovered in 1967 that below the Nazis had constructed three motorway tunnels up to 220 metres in length.

The memorial is constructed as an arch with a bronze soldier on top of it. The design actually resembles the Brandenburger Gate which is located only an hundred metres away.
The large Cyrillic inscription written underneath the statue reads:
ETERNAL GLORY TO HEROES WHO FELL IN THE STRUGGLE AGAINST THE GERMAN FASCIST INVADERS FOR THE FREEDOM AND INDEPENDENCE OF THE SOVIET UNION

 The last joint parade of the Allied forces in Berlin on May 8, 1946 in front of the memorial and from the same vantage point today. In the centre of the podium, the Allied commandants of Berlin, American Major General F. Keating, Soviet Major General A. G. Kotikov and British Major General E. Nares are shown. The Soviet War Memorial Tiergarten was provocatively erected on Remembrance Day, 1945, in the hope the British would simply vacate their area and let the Soviets move their zone further into here. Given that the site chosen for the construction of the monument was in the British zone of occupation, permission from the British authorities was required for its construction. At the same time, as follows from the notes that Engineer-Major Beruchan left in his workbook, certain difficulties arose. Marshal Zhukov, whilst giving his consent to the construction of a memorial in the Tiergarten, at the same time proclaimed that he would not go to the British for permission. In this situation, the commander of the 69th military construction detachment of the 23rd UVPS, Major Vladimirov, was instructed to urgently find an interpreter, find out where the British commandant's office was and organise a meeting. On July 26, 1945, the leaders of the 23rd UVPS met with the British military commandant, Major General Line who warmly greeted the Soviet officers, and with sincere gratitude accepted their gift - an album with projects of monuments, the construction of which had already been launched in eleven Polish cities. The general assured that he would apply to the British government for permission to build a monument to Soviet soldiers who fell during the storming of Berlin in the British zone near the Reichstag. Such friendly communication was somewhat overshadowed by an incident caused by an old German translator as part of the Soviet delegation according to Beruchan's notes:

2017 school trip

The British greeted us with smiles, kindly, and praised our heroic Red Army. The short, stout, handsome commandant smiled all the time and smoked his pipe, and suddenly, as if a bomb had exploded, one Englishman said something in the commandant's ear, the commandant changed, lost his smile and began to speak sharply. I saw our old German began to tremble, turn pale. I turn to Vladimirov: what happened? Vladimirov asks the German, the German finally spoke up: the British demand that he leave the commandant's office, they want him to leave immediately. When we found out what was the matter, I asked the commandant if he could speak Armenian, Georgian, Russian, or had their own translator. To everything he answers "no." I say: “The war is over. This German did not fight. You have to have patience. You promised that you would help, so help! "

2021 Bavarian International School trip

The situation was defused by V. G. Vladimirov, who quickly took out a box of "Kazbek" and treated those present with Soviet cigarettes. The negotiations went on calmly and soon all the issues were resolved. The commandant took the general plans, promising to send them with his memorandum and petition to the British command in Frankfurt am Main that day with a messenger on the plane. Immediately the Soviet officers, together with the British colonel, left to inspect the selected construction site, after which the colonel announced that the British side would have no objections to the construction. The very next morning, an oral permission was obtained from the British authorities for the construction of the monument. A document was also issued, signed by General Line, on the provision of assistance from the British troops in Berlin, if the need arise. In addition, the English commandant allocated several buildings near the construction site to accommodate military builders (in all likelihood, one of them was a building located next to the destroyed Kroll Opera). In turn, representatives of the command of the American and French troops reacted with full understanding to the intentions of the Soviet side and expressed their readiness to provide all kinds of assistance. Thus through the British, the leadership of the 23rd UVPS independently and without any bureaucratic delays and endless approvals, managed to build a memorial in the British zone.

From my 2017 class trip and in August 1961 under British guard when the Berlin wall was erected as a sign of communist provocation on West Berlin soil and which had to be protected from West Berliners by valiant British soldiers. This resulted in considerable anger amongst West Berliners and Soviet military vehicles was on many occasions bombarded with stones from angry protesters. In 1970 a neo-Nazi, Ekkehard Weil, shot and severely wounded one of the Soviet honour guards at the monument requiring the bizarre situation where British troops had to protect Soviet troops guarding the monument. On March 8, 1971, a British military tribunal sentenced him to six years in prison for attempted malicious murder. In 2010, the monument was vandalised just before V-E Day celebrations with red graffiti that read "thieves, murderers, rapists", sparking a protest from the Russian embassy in Berlin that accused German authorities of not taking sufficient measures to protect the monument. The German tabloid Bild launched a Bundestag-petition to remove the Soviet tanks from the memorial site as a response to the fascist Russian aggression against Ukraine when it annexed the Crimea in 2014, calling them a "martial war symbol". To be able to visit the memorial it was agreed that Red Army troops had free passage to the memorial on certain days of remembrance.

On November 9, 1990, the Soviet soldiers on guard duty were replaced by German police; shown here are guards on their last day before being replaced. In 1993, the memorial structure was transferred to the city authorities. Bilateral agreements on the care of military graves have been concluded between Germany and the Russian Federation . The memorial is still a site of active commemoration. On the anniversary of VE Day, wreath-laying ceremonies are held at the memorial. It is a site of pilgrimage for war veterans from the countries of the former Soviet Union. It is also a popular tourist attraction, since it is much closer to the centre of the city than the larger Soviet war memorial at Treptower Park. The memorial is maintained by the City of Berlin. There is a sign next to the monument explaining in English, German and Russian that this is the burial site of some two thousand fallen Soviet soldiers. It is located in the heart of Berlin along one of the major roads with a clear sight of the Reichstag and the Brandenburg gate, both symbols of the city. Some of the marble used to build it came from the destroyed government buildings nearby, and it is built on a place which Hitler meant to devote to Welthauptstadt Germania. Besides the main inscription, the columns state names of only some dead Heroes of the Soviet Union buried here. It has earned some unflattering nicknames, such as the "Tomb of the Unknown Rapist", from the local population with references to crimes committed by Soviet occupation troops. 

Hitler had planned the complete transformation of Berlin into "Welthauptstadt Germania", or World Capital Germania and Tiergarten was to be a central location in the new city. The Charlottenburger Chaussee, today known as the Straße des 17. Juni, was to be the central line between the east and west, and was widened from 27 to 53 metres, the same width as the current street. The Berlin victory column was also moved to the Grosser Stern, where it remains to this day. The Second World War caused significant damage to the Tiergarten and its various cultural elements. Many statues were destroyed or damaged; some of the statues still need minor repair. After the war, the Tiergarten underwent a sudden, violent change. Much of the wooded area was felled and turned to firewood due to the shortage of coal, and the now empty fields were turned into temporary farmland by order of the British occupational troops in the region; there were around 2,550 plots of land available for growing potatoes and vegetables. However, these two factors caused the once great forest to nearly disappear; only 700 trees survived out of over 200,000 that once lined the parkway, the bodies of water turned silty, every bridge was destroyed, the monuments lie on their sides, badly damaged. Plans to fill the waterways with debris from the war were also suggested, but were prevented by the head of the Berlin Central Office of Environmental Planning, Reinhold Lingner.  

 The only way to place me amidst the devastation is the 'Amazon on Horseback' behind me. It was originally installed on June 22, 1895, in front of the Alte Nationalgalerie. Crafted by Louis Tuaillon, a Berlin sculptor, the work emerged from a commission by Kaiser Wilhelm II, who sought to enhance the cultural landscape of the newly unified German Empire. The bronze sculpture, measuring 2.85 metres in height, 3.8 metres in length, and 1.5 metres in width, depicts a nude Amazon warrior astride a rearing horse, her right arm raised to wield a spear, now lost, whilst her left hand grips the reins. The horse, muscular and dynamic, conveys motion through its arched neck and tensed limbs, capturing a moment of poised intensity. The statue’s surface, treated with a green patina, was chosen to harmonise with Tiergarten’s natural surroundings. The Amazon’s taut posture and focused gaze evoke strength and discipline, all the more striking given what had occurred all around. Nevertheless, during the war, the statue was removed from its plinth on October 12, 1941, and stored in a Berlin warehouse to protect it from Allied bombings. It sustained minor damage, primarily surface scratches, during transport. Post-war, it was reinstalled on May 18, 1950, after restoration by the Gladenbeck foundry’s successors, who repaired the spear’s mounting point. The statue’s location in Tiergarten, near the S-Bahn bridge and the Hansaviertel, allows visibility from multiple angles, particularly along the Allee der Skulpturen, a pathway lined with 19th-century artworks. The statue’s enduring presence in Tiergarten, surviving urban redevelopment and war, underscores its role as a fixed point in Berlin’s cultural topography. Regular maintenance, last documented in June 2018, involves cleaning the bronze to prevent corrosion and stabilising the granite base, ensuring the statue’s preservation.

Fasanerieallee in Tiergarten with the Victory column in the background post bellum and today. The sculptures shown here were both commissioned by Kaiser Wilhelm II and installed on May 15, 1907 as part of the Hubertusbrunnen ensemble at the Großer Stern in Tiergarten, alongside two other sculptures depicting hunting scenes from different historical periods. The sculpture on the left is Wilhelm Haverkamp's 1903 Churfürstliche Fuchsjagd, a bronze sculpture depicting a fox hunt set during the late 17th century, capturing the electoral hunting traditions of Brandenburg-Prussia featuring a mounted hunter in period attire, a dog handler restraining two hounds, and a fleeing fox. Max Baumbach completed Hasenhatz der Rokokozeit on the right on July 20, 1903, a bronze sculpture portraying a hare hunt set in the mid-18th century, reflecting the æsthetic of the Rococo period. The work features two figures: a standing hunter in a powdered wig and frock coat, holding a musket, and a hare darting across a low base. On April 10, 1938, both sculptures were moved to Fasanerieallee and eventually restored in 1975.

Shown on the right after the war in 1946 with Berliners collecting potatoes is a surviving member of the four original group members, the Altgermanische Wisentjagd statue, created by sculptor Fritz Schaper and cast in bronze by the Aktien-Gesellschaft vormals H. Gladenbeck & Sohn foundry between April 1903 and October 1904. It depicts a dynamic hunting scene, portraying a Germanic hunter in traditional attire thrusting a spear into the flank of a charging wisent (European bison). Two dogs assist the hunter, one positioned between him and the wisent, the other behind, enhancing the sense of movement. The wisent’s tail extends beyond the plinth’s edge, adding to the composition’s dynamism. The scene, intended to evoke a hunt from the era of Albrecht the Bear, likely represents an earlier prehistoric period due to the stylised Germanic costume and the prominence of wisents, which were more common in ancient times. After the war it was reinstalled with minimal alterations, though its plinth underwent cleaning and restoration between March 1986 and June 1987 to address weathering and war-related damage. These statues’placement along Fasanerieallee, a 300-year-old avenue restored between April and October 1985 with replanted trees, aligns with its thematic connection to the Tiergarten’s origins as a 16th-century hunting reserve. The surrounding area, landscaped between 1946 and 1947 under Wilhelm Alverdes, integrates them into a serene park setting, reinforcing the hunting narrative. 

Students standing directly in front during our 2013 trip and after the war.

Before 1953, the street was called Charlottenburger Chaussee, because it ran from the old city centre (Berlin-Mitte) to the borough of Charlottenburg through the Tiergarten. The 1953 name change was made in order to honour an East German uprising and its victims of the Red Army and East German Volkspolizei who shot protesting workers. After Stalin's death many East Berliners began a strike which also caused riots in a vain hope of getting rid of the communists. But the East German police struck back with brutal violence on June 17, 1953. It was made into a paved road in 1799, and owing to Berlin's rapid growth in the 19th century it became a major thoroughfare to the affluent western suburbs. At the outbreak of the Great War in early August 1914, hundreds of thousands of Berliners cheered the military parade, which took place here. At the outbreak of the next world war, no such scenes were ever observed, according to the American journalist and historian William L. Shirer. 

The right shows fifty thousand troops marching past Hitler on his birthday down Charlottenburger Chausee, a part of the Ost-West-Achse (East-West Axis), which during the Nazi period became a triumphal avenue lined with Nazi flags. During the Nazi era, the boulevard was made broader and the old Prussian Victory Column was moved from in front of the Reichstag to the roundabout in the middle of the Tiergarten, where it has remained since 1938.  The Charlottenburger Chaussee was to have formed one aspect of the remodelling of the city of Berlin into the renamed city called Germania, designed by Hitler, Albert Speer, Professor Troost etc. to be the capital of the Reich. In the last weeks of the war, when Berlin's airports were unusable, it was used as a landing strip.

My 2013 cohort at the Memorial to Homosexual Victims in Tiergarten. Paragraph 175 made homosexuality illegal in 1871; it was broadened under Nazism to allow deportation of gay men to concentration camps. 

Homosexuals, were manifestly of no racial value; between 1934 and 1938 the number prosecuted annually under Paragraph 175 of the Reich Criminal Code rose by a factor of ten to 8,000. Since criminality was viewed as hereditary, those who broke the law were also targeted as asocial. The November 1933 Law against Dangerous Habitual Criminals authorized the castration of sexual offenders. 

Ferguson (265) The War of the World

It was only completely revoked in 1994 after German reunification. In 2002, the German government formally pardoned all homosexuals convicted by the Nazis and in 2003 approved the plan for the Berlin memorial. At the memorial's unveiling in May 2009, the International Gay and Lesbian Association (ILGA) issued a statement pointing out the importance of the monument's location: "It is in the centre of the city from where decades ago the policies of extermination of homosexual people along with such groups as Jews, gypsies, Jehovah's witnesses and political dissidents, was conceived and the deadly orders were given." This central placement was an effort to end the traditional peripheralisation of the stories of gay victims of Nazi atrocities, who continued to be persecuted after the war, and who are largely left out of traditional historical accounts of the Holocaust. As Berlin mayor Klaus Wowerit, who happens to be the city's first openly gay mayor, pointed out when the memorial was first opened, the placement of this monument in the centre of Berlin was meant to form a contrast with the Nazis, who were "a society that did not abolish unjust verdicts, but partially continued to implement them; a society which did not acknowledge a group of people as victims, only because they chose another way of life." In fact, my students and I were shocked to find NO plaque or information at all to explain what this ugly monument actually is supposed to be for; one questioned why the government had created an anti-gay monument. One of my students upon first seeing this structure asked in all seriousness why Germans hated gays so much. The following year another student objected to the film perpetually shown within showing two people of the same gender kissing, complaining that the memorial seemed to limit the idea of homosexuality solely on the basis of sex. In fact, even the name itself has attracted anger- when, in 1996 the planning group decided to include lesbians in the memorial with homosexual men and changed its name from "Schwulendenkmal" (Initiative for a memorial to gay men) to Inititiative HomoMonument,"  Joachim Müller, an early supporter of the initiative for the memorial resigned, protesting in a letter yet another capitulation to the non-stop demands of political correctness, calling into question the balance between appeasing the continual demands of the contemporary gay and lesbian community and honouring historical accuracy.

One of my students received an 'A' from the International Baccalaureate for his Extended Essay examining homosexuality in the Third Reich.

Tiergartenstraße 4

 The headquarters of the Gemeinnützige Stiftung für Heil- und Anstaltspflege and the site today, taken over by a graffiti- covered husk of rusted metal intended to symbolise something intentionally left vague and meaningless as is so often the case in Germany.

Shortly after the start of the war, Hitler signed an order, backdated to September 1, 1939, authorising the systematic killing of mentally and physically handicapped adults and children. Authorisation to direct the program was given on Hitler’s personal stationary to Philipp Bouhler, head of the Führer’s Chancellery, and Dr. Karl Brandt, Hitler’s personal physician. The code-name of this secret program, “Aktion T-4,” derived from the address of the building here on Tiergartenstrasse 4, from which the program was directed. Killings of deformed children had already started before the war. The killings, now extended to adults as well, were conducted by lethal injection or carbon monoxide gassing at several sites disguised as hospitals or nursing homes. These killings marked a further escalation of the eugenic practices that had begun with the Sterilisation Law in 1933.
Ferguson(264-5) writes in  The War of the World

As early as 1935, [Hitler] told a senior Nazi medic that 'if war should break out, he would take up the euthanasia question and implement it'. In fact, he did not even wait for the war. In July 1939 he initiated what became known as the Aktion T-4. It was, he said, 'right that the worthless lives of seriously ill mental patients should be got rid of. Here, as with the persecution of the Jews and Gypsies, the regime encountered little popular resistance and some active support. In a poll of 200 parents of mentally retarded children conducted in Saxony, 73 per cent had answered 'yes' to the question: 'Would you agree to the painless curtailment of the life of your child if experts had established that it was suffering from incurable idiocy?' Some parents actually petitioned Hitler to allow their abnormal children to be killed. Apart from the Catholic Bishop Clemens von Galen, whose sermons against the euthanasia programme in July and August 1941 led to a temporary halt in the killings, only a handful of other individuals openly challenged 'the principle that you can kill "unproductive" human beings'. Others who objected turn out, on closer inspection, merely to have disliked the procedures involved. Some wished for formal legality - a proper decree and public 'sentencing'; others (especially those living near the asylums) simply wanted the killing to be carried out less obtrusively.             

Despite the secrecy of the programme, it was impossible to conceal killing on such a scale, as relatives demanded explanations for the sudden and unexpected deaths of their loved ones. Increasing numbers of complaints and demands for criminal investigations made it necessary to inform the Reich Ministry of Justice and the Ministry of the Interior of Hitler’s secret order which led to Hitler’s decision to end the program on August 24, 1941 after more than 70,000 patients had been killed. Killings especially of handicapped children continued in secret, however, until the end of the war. Under the code-name “Aktion 14 f 13” the killing program was also extended to Jewish inmates of concentration camps in Germany. Many of the T-4 personnel were transferred to occupied Poland where they supplied the technical expertise for the systematic killing by gas of approximately three million Jews in the extermination camps set up for the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question.

 Fascist-era embassies along Tiergartenstraße

The Spanish embassy after the war with the Franco-era eagle replaced today with the current Spanish coat of arms. The building had been constructed from 1938 to 1943 through Speer's Office of the Inspector-General for buildings and which shows a similar style favoured by the Nazis. It reopened in 2003 after the war damage was repaired and its fascist symbols removed. Before the war the Alsen district near the Reichstag and the villa district around St. Matthew's Church south of the Tiergarten Park were very prestigious and preferred sites for diplomatic missions since the nineteenth century. Its buildings were demolished to clear space for Speer's planned North-South Axis, and to compensate the countries for the loss of their real estate, the Nazi regime had seven new embassy buildings built under supervision of the GBI in western parts of the Tiergarten Park area that were not threatened with demolition, which was declared a “diplomatic quarter” in 1937. German architects submitted the design plans, such as Johannes and Walter Krüger for the Spanish embassy and Johann Emil Schaudt for the Danish embassy (today the hotel Das Stue). The two palatial neo-Classicist buildings, with their natural stone façades, form a prestigious unit along Thomas-Dehler-Strasse.
The Italian embassy after the war and today. The 200-room complex on Tiergartenstrasse was was the first to have been completed in the Tiergarten between 1938 and 1943 as  Hitler's "present" to the Italian dictator and was part of the Nazi leader's grandiose plans to turn Berlin into "Germania", the intended capital of a vast empire. But after the war it remained a near-derelict, bombed-out shell and only one wing of the building was used, as a consular office. "It was the right decision to restore everything and retain the traces of history because we are not trying to be politically correct," said Silvio Fagiolo, the Italian ambassador at the time. "The Berlin embassy is a place of continuity."The Fascist symbol - two stone fasces, a bundle of rods with a projecting axe blade - has been removed from the embassy's lavish reception hall to be put on display in the inner courtyard, directly above a huge bomb shelter. Restored golden birds of prey, Renaissance fireplaces and marble columns inside show that no expense was spared when it came to building what was briefly the embassy of Germany's closest wartime ally. Friedrich Hetzelt, one of Speer's protégés, modelled the embassy on an 18th-century Roman palazzo, which the Nazi leader greatly admired. The Italian and German architects who did the €20 million restoration stopped short of creating a complete replica of the 1943 embassy; the exterior walls remain pockmarked and a bomb-shattered colonnade overlooking the central courtyard has been left a ruin - as testimony to the defeat of Fascism. Yet it still presents an eerie reminder of the days when Berlin was capital of the Third Reich standing next to the renovated embassy of Japan, another wartime ally of Nazi Germany. According to David Irving in his book Göring: A Biography, this was the site of one of Goering's greatest humiliations,

when he saw the fabulous decoration that he coveted, the diamond-studded Collar of the Annunziata, bestowed at the Italian embassy upon his smirking rival [Ribbentrop]. He took it as a deliberate slight and raised hell at every level up to the king of Italy, being mollified only by the award, twelve months later, of the identical Collar in consolation.

The Japanese embassy on the left also maintains its symbols of fascist ideology a reminder of the man-made tsunami it had launched upon humanity beginning in 1931 which required two atomic bombs and countless allied lives and suffering to put an end to. On November 24, 1937 Hitler attended a reception here, given by the Japanese Ambassador Mushakoji in Berlin on the anniversary of the Anti-Comintern Pact. The building itself had been built between 1938–1942 according to plans by Ludwig Moshamer under the supervision of Albert Speer but expected to meet the expectations of the German leadership, resulting in a comparatively sterile classic building style. Above all, the building was to impress with its size; the pillars at the main entrance were a defining style element. Above the cornice , a half-storey attic above the main entrance forms the visual end of the building. In the central visual axis there is a golden chrysanthemum as a symbol of the imperial family. Although the German builder furnished the building with a lot of luxury inside, in fact a large part of the administration took place in bunkers and other air raids during the war.

At that time, part of the Japanese embassy was relocated to the north of the city to the existing estate of the Jewish family Zwillenberg, who had been forced to sell their property. As early as 1943, an aerial bomb destroyed the side wing. Badly damaged, the building was empty for several decades. In the mid-1980s, Germans and Japanese agreed to set up a German-Japanese cultural centre in the dilapidated building. The German monument protection authorities pushed for the historic building to be preserved, but the Japanese found it in a state that could no longer be saved. In order to keep the agreements with the Germans as close as possible, Japan had it rebuilt as identically as possible by Kishō Kurokawa and Tajii Yamaguchi. For its new use as an embassy building, it underwent extensive renovations and additions by the architect Ryohei Amemiya between 1998 and 2000. A complete office wing was newly built and a Japanese garden was laid out. The main entrance was also relocated from Tiergartenstrasse to Hiroshimastrasse, which branches off from it. A golden chrysanthemum, the imperial seal, is still emblazoned above the former main entrance, which is now the entrance to the ambassador's residence. Both architecturally and historically, the Japanese embassy is very similar to the Italian embassy directly opposite.

The former Embassy of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia at Rauchstraße in 1938 and today, where it serves as the offices of the German Council on Foreign Relations (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Auswärtige Politik, DGAP). The building was completed by 1939 by Werner March, the architect of Berlin’s Olympic Stadium, as the diplomatic mission for the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. The property at Rauchstraße 17 was owned by the Mendelssohn-Bartholdy family until 1938. The family was forced to sell the property to the German Reich for 170,000 reichsmarks shortly before they emigrated. The property at Rauchstraße 18 was handed over to the German Reich in accordance with a 1940 expropriation resolution. Until the occupation of Yugoslavia in 1941, Ivo Andric, who would later win the Nobel Prize for Literature, was stationed in the new building as Yugoslav ambassador. Afterwards, the building was used by German Reich and party officials. After Germany’s surrender in 1945, the building was given back to the People’s Republic of Yugoslavia. The Yugoslav military mission resided in the building until 1953, when it moved to Grunewald. Beginning in 1953, the building housed the Supreme Restitution Court of the Allied Forces in Berlin. On June 29, 1964, the court accepted the Mendelssohn-Bartholdy family’s reimbursement claim and ordered the People’s Republic of Yugoslavia to cede a co-ownership share in the building.

Berlin Victory Column (Siegessäule)

Designed by Heinrich Strack after 1864 to commemorate the Prussian victory in the Danish-Prussian war, by the time it was inaugurated on September 2, 1873 Prussia had also defeated Austria in the Austro-Prussian War and France in the Franco-Prussian War, giving the statue a new purpose. During the Nazi era Albert Speer's plans for the World Capital Germania envisaged the north-south axis on the Siegesallee route. As part of the urban redevelopment, the Victory Column on the Großer Stern, surrounded by the monuments of Bismarck, Albrecht von Roons and Helmuth Karl Bernhard von Moltkes, was to form a "Forum of the Second Reich." In addition, the monuments on Siegesallee were moved from May 1938 to Große Sternallee, which branched off as a pedestrian path south-east of the Großer Stern, and was now called "Neue Siegesallee." At the inauguration of the forum complex on the occasion of the great military parade for Adolf Hitler's 50th birthday on April 20, 1939, the statues of the Siegesallee already lined the Neue Siegesallee. That year the Nazis relocated the pillar to its present location at the Großer Stern, a large intersection on the visual city axis that leads from the former Berliner Stadtschloss through the Brandenburg Gate to the western parts of Berlin. At the same time, the pillar was augmented by another 7.5 metres, giving it its present height of 66.89 metres. The monument survived the war without much damage. Some of the figures were damaged, others have since been lost. The relocation of the monument probably saved it from destruction, as its old site in front of the Reichstag was completely destroyed in the war.

The Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders of Canada (Princess Louise's) parading in front of the Siegessäule on July 25, 1945.

[B]y by 28 April, troops of the 3rd Shock Army, advancing from the northern districts, were in sight of the Siegessaule column in the Tiergarten. Red Army soldiers nicknamed it the `tall woman' because of the statue of winged victory on the top. The German defenders were now reduced to a strip less than five kilometres in width and fifteen in length. It ran from Alexanderplatz in the east to Charlottenburg and the Reichssportsfeld in the west, from where Artur Axmann's Hitler Youth detachments desperately defended the bridges over the Havel. Weidling's artillery commander, Colonel Wohlermann, gazed around in horror from the gun platform at the top of the vast concrete Zoo flak tower. `One had a panoramic view of the burning, smouldering and smoking great city, a scene which again and again shook one to the core.' Yet General Krebs still pandered to Hitler's belief that Wenck's army was about to arrive from the south-west.

Beevor (340)  Berlin: The Downfall 1945

Before the war with the Eiserner Hindenburg in front and after. The monument unfortunately fell within the French section of Berlin, generously given to them when the British realised they were growing bankrupt from the war and required assistance.

The French perpetrated a few acts of childish spite: they mutilated a few inscriptions on the Siegessäule – or Victory Column – in the Tiergarten, which commemorated German triumph in the Franco-German War, and festooned it with French tricolours. In Schwanenwerder they found a fragment of the Tuileries Palace which had been burned down by the Paris Communards in 1871, and removed a high-minded panel that talked of the fate of nations. The Germans themselves did not waste much time on the French – they realised they were second-division conquerors.

MacDonogh (123) After the Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation

Standing in front after an early morning run through the centre of Berlin and as it appeared at the same spot in May 1945 with a T-34/76 tank being driven by victorious Soviet soldiers. The model variants of the T-34 now commonly referred to as T-34/76 were originally just called T-34, M19xx. Only after the appearance of the T-34/85 were they referred to as T-34/76. The first 117 pre-series vehicles were built in 1940 by the Kharkov locomotive factory “Komintern” and one can still see examples in front of the Soviet memorial in Tiergarten shown above this page. 

The appearance of the 34‑ton T‑34 caused much consternation to the German Panzerwaffe. Developed in relative secrecy six years before, its 76mm gun was the largest tank armament (apart from the 15cm KV‑2) then mounted. Its 60% sloping armour was revolutionary in terms of the increased armoured protection it offered against flat trajectory anti‑tank shells, which often simply ricocheted off. Josef Deck, a German artilleryman with Regiment 71 in the central sector, complained that the 37mm standard antitank fire ‘bounced off them like peas’. Adapting the American Christie suspension system, the T‑34, with extra‑wide tracks and a powerful lightweight diesel engine, possessed an enormous relative power‑to‑weight ratio, conferring superior mobility on the Russian vehicles. It was to prove the outstanding tank design of the war, and was a formidable adversary, even in the hands of a novice. Alexander Fadin, a T‑34 commander, remarked: ‘As soon as you start the motor it begins throbbing, and you feel part of this powerful machine. You pick up speed and no obstacle can stop you. Nothing, not even a tree.’ 

Kershaw,  War Without Garlands

Standing in front of the Bendlerblock building complex and as it appeared in 1942 during the war. From 1914 onwards, the building was used by various military offices and has been the second headquarters of the Federal Ministry of Defence since 1993. During the Nazi era,the building at Bendlerstrasse 11-13 was the headquarters of the General Army Office and the Commander of the Reserve Army in the Army High Command (OKH). The centre of the resistance group of the assassination attempt on July 20, 1944, led by Colonel General Ludwig Beck and Colonel Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, was located there. The permanent exhibition German Resistance Memorial Centre in some of the former offices and the memorial to the officers executed there in the courtyard commemorate the resistance fighters. 

After the First World War, the Versailles Treaty required the government of the Weimar Republic to not only drastically reduce the size of its armed forces, but also to downsize the command authorities of the Reichswehr and Reichsmarine, which now used the building together. The air force,including the naval aviators and naval airships,were completely disbanded. The first Reichswehr Minister, the Social Democrat Gustav Noske, moved into the Grand Admiral's official residence and the then Chief of the Army High Command, General Walther Reinhardt, took over the rooms of the former Imperial Naval Authority. During the Kapp Putsch in March 1920, the head of the Troop Office, Major General Hans von Seeckt, refused to put down the Berlin uprising of the Freikorps soldiers. In the Reichswehr Minister's office, he's said to have refused government protection with the words "troops do not shoot at troops". The members of the government then fled Berlin and moved to Stuttgart for a short time. As a result of the uprisings, Noske was dismissed from office. In 1920, Otto Geßler moved into the building as his successor and Major General von Seeckt took over the post of Chief of the Army Command in the same year. 

Inside Stauffenberg's former office, now an information centre, which still has its swastika motif remaining on the parquet which I'm shown inspecting. Shortly before Hitler was appointed Chancellor, the Reichswehr leadership discussed his chancellorship in January 1933. Despite concerns, including from the then Chief of the Army High Command, General Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord, an opponent of the Nazis, the inauguration took place without opposition. Just a few days later, on February 3, 1933, Hitler gave a speech in Hammerstein-Equord's private apartment in which he revealed his political goals. Amongst other things, he spoke of "the eradication of Marxism root and branch", "strictest authoritarian government and the elimination of the cancerous damage to democracy", "the fight against Versailles" and "the conquest of new living space in the East and its ruthless Germanisation". This resulted in differences with Werner von Blomberg, who was appointed Reichswehr Minister in January 1933 and who influenced the Reichswehr with Nazi ideas. Hammerstein-Equord then submitted his resignation in December 1933. He was succeeded in January 1934 by Lieutenant General Werner von Fritsch. 

On the neighbouring properties at Bendlerstrasse 10–13, which had been acquired in 1926, additional extensions and new buildings were built up until 1938 based on designs by the architect Wilhelm Kreis. During this time the building complex was given the name "Bendlerblock", which was never officially introduced but became common. The main building on the Landwehrkanal housed parts of the Naval War Command in the High Command of the Navy (OKM) and the largest part of the Foreign/Defence Office in the High Command of the Wehrmacht (OKW) under Admiral Wilhelm Canaris. The main part of the Bendlerblock on Bendlerstrasse was used by the General Army Office in the OKH under General Friedrich Fromm- whose office is shown here on the right at the time and when I visited in 2024-, from 1940 General Friedrich Olbricht and the Commander-in-Chief of the Army- after the dismissal of Blomberg and Fritsch- Colonel General Walther von Brauchitsch, until Hitler himself took over command in December 1941. During the war, the Bendlerblock served as a command post for the combat commander of Berlin, General Helmuth Weidling, in the last days of the Battle of Berlin, until soldiers of the Red Army occupied it on May 2, 1945. After the war damage had been repaired, the building complex housed numerous offices and federal authorities from the 1950s onwards, including the Federal Disciplinary Court and the Federal Supervisory Office for the Credit System (BAKred).

Already in the early 1940s, the OKH Army Office under the leadership of General Olbricht became the focus of military resistance to the Nazi regime. In October 1943, Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg was transferred to the General Army Office as chief-of-staff. The first military resistance headquarters was formed in the Foreign Office/Abwehr– the German military foreign intelligence service, which was housed in the Bendlerblock. In 1938, a group led by General Hans Oster planned to overthrow theNazi regime in order to prevent Hitler from taking military action against Czechoslovakia during the so-called Sudeten Crisis. However, when the European powers agreed to the annexation of the Sudetenland to Germany in the Munich Agreement, the plan could no longer be carried out. The "Abwehr" in the Bendlerblock remained a central point of military resistance until it was disempowered by the Gestapo in 1943. In the offices of the east wing, another resistance group led by General Olbricht was working on a plan to overthrow the Nazi regime in the early 1940s. A secret Wehrmacht plan called "Valkyrie" was manipulated for their own ends so that after Hitler's death, important positions could be filled immediately in favour of the resistance. Stauffenberg carried out the assassination attempt on Hitler on July 20, 1944, because as chief of staff under the commander of the reserve army , Colonel General Fromm, he had access to the briefings at the Führer's headquarters in Wolf's Lair. Not knowing that it had failed, he travelled back to Berlin, where the resistance group in the Bendlerblock tried in vain to implement the plan night of July 21, on the orders of Colonel General Fromm, the resistance fighters General Olbricht, Colonel von Stauffenberg, Colonel Albrecht Ritter Mertz von Quirnheim and Stauffenberg's adjutant  First Lieutenant Werner von Haeften, were shot in the courtyard of the Bendlerblock, Fromm forced retired Colonel General Ludwig Beck, who had been involved in the coup attempt, to commit suicide as an accomplice to the coup plan, Fromm was arrested one day later, sentenced to death and executed on March 12, 1945.

Here on the left members of the ϟϟ and Wehrmacht, including Otto Skorzeny arriving the day after the failed plot at the site with me in front of the spot where the plotters were executed. During the Battle of Berlin in the last days of the war in late April and early May 1945, General Helmuth Weidling, commander of the Berlin Defence Area, used the Bendlerblock for his command and control, before he proceeded to General Vasily Chuikov and surrendered to the Soviet Red Army at 6:00 a.m. on May 2. Following German reunification, the Federal Minister of Defence's Berlin office was moved to the Bendlerblock.

 Hitler ultimately oversaw the purge and execution (in some cases, accompanied by show trials) of some five thousand people he believed were implicated in the plot. All were known opponents of the Nazi regime. Many were tortured to death and some hanged by the neck using piano wire. Despite broadly supporting Nazi expansionist aims in the East until it was clear after D-Day that the war was over and they had to save their own necks, Stauffenberg and the other plotters are remembered in modern Germany as heroes of anti-Nazi resistance and today the courtyard in the centre of the Bendler Block is dedicated to the memory of the officers executed here on the night of July 20, 1944. Shirer described the event on page 958 of his Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich:

In the courtyard below in the dim rays of the blackout-hooded headlights of an Army car the four officers were quickly dispatched by a firing squad. Eyewitnesses say there was much tumult and shouting, mostly by the guards, who were in a hurry because of the danger of a bombing attack – British planes had been over Berlin almost every night that summer. Stauffenberg died crying, ”Long live our sacred Germany!”

This section of the Bendlerblock around the courtyard where I am standing was where Stauffenberg and the other conspirators were executed (shown during Zhukov's visit after the war). The complex now houses the Memorial to the German Resistance which is also used as one of the ceremonial sites where new members of the Wachbataillon of the Bundeswehr take their oaths. Beevor supports Shirer's account in his book D-Day: The Battle for Normandy, describing the

chaos in the Bendlerblock. Generaloberst Fromm, in a doomed attempt to save himself from suspicion, ordered the arrest and instant court martial of four of the other officers involved. He allowed Generaloberst Beck to keep his pistol, provided he used it immediately on himself. Presumably because his hand was shaking, Beck shot himself twice in the head. He grazed his scalp the first time, then inflicted a terrible wound with the second shot. An exasperated Fromm ordered a sergeant, some accounts say an officer, to finish him off.
The four, including Stauffenberg, who tried to take all the responsibility for the attempted assassination on himself, were executed in the courtyard of the Bendlerblock by the light of automobile headlights. A detachment of Remer’s men, who had just arrived, provided the firing squad. When it was Stauffenberg’s turn, illuminated by the headlights, he called out, ‘Long live holy Germany!’ Fromm, as desperate as ever to save himself, gave a grotesque speech over their bodies in praise of Hitler and ended with a triple ‘Sieg Heil! ’

In fact, this military resistance has been criticised by historians for failing to act until the war was lost and for pursuing unrealistic nationalist goals. A Gestapo report listed Stauffenberg’s conditions for a negotiated peace allegedly transmitted to England by unnamed emissaries in May 1944 which included restoration of Germany’s 1914 borders, the retention of Austria and the Sudetenland, and continuation of the war, if necessary, in the east against the Soviet Union. As the leaders of the conspiracy were summarily shot in the courtyard, the Bendlerblock also includes the Memorial to the German Resistance. My Bavarian International School students are shown flanking the memorial within the courtyard during our 2013 class trip. Since 1993, the building complex has served as a secondary seat of the German Federal Ministry of Defence which has tried to restrict access to the Bendlerblock due to its historical significance and lingering sensitivities about Germany's role during the war, and yet filming permission was first granted in 2003 to a TV studio for the filming of Stauffenberg, starring Sebastian Koch. Though awarded with the Deutscher Fernsehpreis, the film was also criticised for factual inaccuracies by Stauffenberg's son Berthold. The Ministry hesitated to grant permission for filming scenes of the Tom Cruise-starred movie Valkyrie about the July 20 Plot, especially a re-enactment of the execution on the original location. However, money talked and filming took place. Director Bryan Singer, currently accused of serious sexual abuse allegations, led the film crew in a minute of silence before filming began, in honour of those who were killed on the site in 1944.  

The bronze memorial in the inner courtyard of the Bendler Block, Young Man with Bound Hands, by Richard Scheibe was unveiled on July 20, 1953 and bears the inscription designed by art historian Edwin Redslob: "You didn't bear the shame, you resisted, you gave the great, eternally awake sign of repentance, sacrificing your hot life for freedom, justice and honour."

The statue was chosen for the poster of the Deutschen Historischen Museums in Berlin's 'Divinely Gifted' exhibition which my class visited to compensate the closure of the museum for years due to renovation. The exhibition highlighted the postwar careers of a select group of artists, academics and curators who rose to prominence with the support of the Nazi regime, provided key propaganda works to bolster Hitler’s dictatorship and were then able to continue their careers virtually unhindered in West Germany including Scheibe. They were placed on a list first compiled on behalf of Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels in August 1944 which ended up including 378 artists, among them 114 sculptors and painters, who were considered “indispensable” and were exempted from military duty and work assignments. In fact, the year after this memorial was inaugurated Scheibe was honoured with the Great Cross of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany and in the same year with the Goethe Plaque of the City of Frankfurt am Main; the the only honouree who received both this medal and Hitler's Goethe Medal in 1944. Indeed, the statue Scheibe produced for those killed by the Nazi regime was practically nothing more than a slight variation of the sculptures that he produced for the Nazi regime such as Symbol für die Bereitschaft der Luftwaffe (1937), Zehnkämpfer (1936), Thinker (1937), or Jüngling (1938).

The building after the war amidst the rubble and today.     The Bendlerblock  The Bendlerblock  2 THE BENDLERBLOCK