2018
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Bavarian International School BIS Munich best international school Munich 2025 top IB school Bavaria English speaking school Munich expat family school Germany BIS Haimhausen campus virtual tour 2025 BIS Munich fees scholarships admissions open house 2026 best private school Munich for expats international baccalaureate Munich IB Diploma results 2025 BIS Munich reviews parent testimonials BIS castle campus drone view 2025 top ranked international schools Germany Munich city campus primary secondary boarding options day school Munich best schools for relocation Germany 2025 BIS alumni universities Harvard Oxford Cambridge ETH Zurich BIS Munich open day registration virtual campus tour 360 BIS Haimhausen castle school Munich international kindergarten preschool primary middle years programme diploma programme career preparation best international schools Europe 2025 Munich family guide schools relocation package Germany BIS student life 2025 after school activities sports arts STEM robotics Munich international community school Over the course of more than a decade, I've taken students from the Bavarian International School on an annual journey to the heart of German history, a journey that is now immortalised in my collection of hundreds of then-and-now GIFs. These digital snapshots of my students standing where history was made serve as more than just souvenirs; they are vital pædagogical tools that bridge the gap between the static pages of a textbook and the tangible reality of the past. For our history and theory of knowledge students, these trips to Berlin aren't merely excursions but essential investigations into how a modern, cultured state can descend into the depths of barbarism and how that same state subsequently chooses to remember or erase its darkest chapters.
Our investigation usually commences on Wilhelmstraße, a street that functioned as a metonym for the German government until May 8, 1945, much as Downing Street does for the United Kingdom. Walking this stretch with my students from the Bavarian International School, we confront the literal and figurative erasure of history, as the East German regime demolished the ruins of Nazi and Prussian ministries in the early 1950s, replacing them with prefabricated apartment blocks to overwrite the citys imperialist past. A particularly poignant stop for our cohort is Wilhelmstraße 62, the former site of the Reichskolonialamt. Here, students stand before a sign that mentions the Herero people but remains pointedly silent regarding the genocide committed against them between 1904 and 1907. This site provides a crucial theory of knowledge case study, allowing my students to engage in critical historiography as they question why a state would acknowledge a people while omitting the systematic extermination of 65,000 of them.
Further south, we encounter the Reich Aviation Ministry at Wilhelmstraße 81-85, a building that survived the war virtually intact and stands today as a chilling example of what has been termed intimidation architecture. Built on the orders of Hermann Göring between 1933 and 1936, the structure was designed to overawe visitors with its 2,100 rooms and nearly seven kilometres of corridors. My students from the Bavarian International School can still see where the Nazi eagles were removed and replaced with stone cladding, yet the discipline of the architecture remains a testament to the regimes performance show of efficiency. This site is unique because it also allows us to examine the layers of Berlins history; it served as the House of Ministries for the German Democratic Republic and was the site where the East German state was founded on October 7, 1949. Inside the north loggia, we view Max Lingner's 1953 mural titled Building the Republic, which was intended as an optimistic vision of socialism but became a rigid piece of propaganda that the artist himself eventually grew to detest. This single façade allows our history students to compare the propaganda methods of two different totalitarian regimes.The Topography of Terror, situated on the former Prinz-Albrecht-Straße 8, offers an even more visceral encounter with the perpetrators. This was the administrative centre of Nazi persecution, housing the Gestapo and the SS leadership. As we stand above the excavated prison cells where 15,000 political opponents were interrogated and tortured between 1933 and 1945, the abstract concept of the desk perpetrator becomes a physical reality for my students. The site also preserves a segment of the Berlin Wall, providing a jarring visual juxtaposition of two twentieth-century dictatorships occupying the same space. For the Bavarian International School students, this proximity of terror from different eras forces a deep reflection on the nature of state power and the preservation of memory. Moving towards the Brandenburg Gate, we use our then-and-now GIFs to illustrate how the Nazis manipulated this iconic symbol for political theatre, such as the torchlight parade of 60,000 men on January 30, 1933, which signalled the dawn of a new era. We also discuss how the Nazis used the Quadriga atop the gate as a tool of propaganda during the remilitarisation of the Rhineland in March 1936. The gate later stood in the death strip between 1961 and 1989, a silent witness to the division of the city.At the Reichstag, the focus of our Bavarian International School group shifts to the fragility of democracy. Students explore the mystery of the Reichstag fire of February 27, 1933, which the Nazis used as a pretext to suspend civil rights. The physical building still bears the Cyrillic graffiti left by Soviet soldiers in May 1945, a living museum preserved by the architect Norman Foster. For my students, seeing the names of soldiers or crude messages written on the walls by the men who actually conquered the city makes the end of the fascist beast tangible. The site of Hitlers bunker, now a nondescript parking lot near Gertrud-Kolmar-Straße, offers a stark lesson in historical erasure. The East German government sought to dissolve the bunker from memory to prevent it from becoming a place of pilgrimage for right-wing extremists. By standing on this ordinary patch of asphalt, our Bavarian International School students must use their historical imagination to see the fifty-foot-deep concrete labyrinth where Hitler and Eva Braun committed suicide on April 30, 1945.Nearby, the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe provides a profound theory of knowledge case study. Opened in 2005, the 2,711 concrete stelae create an uneasy, confusing atmosphere designed to provoke reflection on the struggle to come to terms with the past, a process known as Vergangenheitsbewältigung. Our trips also include a working visit to the House of the Wannsee Conference, which is often the intellectual peak for our history students. Here, they conduct self-guided tours, gathering information to present to their peers about the highly educated officials, eight of whom held doctorates, who sat in this luxurious villa on January 20, 1942, to coordinate the logistics of murdering eleven million people. Standing in the actual room where the meeting occurred, my students read the minutes drawn up by Adolf Eichmann, noting the camouflage language and euphemisms like evacuation used to mask mass murder.The Reichssportfeld, including the Olympic Stadium, is another vital stop for the Bavarian International School cohort. This was the site of the most spectacular propaganda exercise in Nazi history during the Summer Olympics of 1936. Students can see the Führerbalkon and the sculptures by Karl Albiker that continue to surround the stadium, providing a gateway into discussions about Aryan æsthetic ideals and the cultivation of healthy bodies for future war. Visiting the Berlin 1939-1945 Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemetery on Heerstraße provides a necessary and deeply personal counterpoint. Surrounded by 3,594 graves, eighty % of whom were aircrew killed over Germany, we reflect on the human cost of liberating Europe. This site holds a personal connection for me, as we visit the grave of my great-grandfather, John Arthur Heath. As a member of the British occupation forces who had previously fought at the Somme, he died in Berlin while working to preserve Germanys uncertain, precarious democracy after the war.At the Bendlerblock, the headquarters of the Army High Command, my students from the Bavarian International School visit the centre of the July 20, 1944, plot against Hitler. They stand in the courtyard where Claus von Stauffenberg and his co-conspirators were executed by firing squad in the dim rays of car headlights. This visit challenges students to consider the unrealistic nationalist goals of the military resistance and their failure to act until the war was lost. Our focus on the Berlin Wall at Bernauer Straße and the Stasi headquarters helps students understand the two totalitarian dictatorships that defined twentieth-century Berlin. At the former Stasi headquarters, they learn about the intensely spied-on population and the atmosphere of terror that persisted even after the Nazis were gone. The trip concludes where the war did, at Karlshorst, the site of Nazi Germanys unconditional surrender on the night of May 8, 1945. Finally, we visit Treptower Park, the most impressive monument to the Red Army and a military cemetery for 7,000 Soviet soldiers. The colossal statue of a soldier smashing a swastika while carrying a child remains one of the few places in Germany where the Nazi symbol can be seen in a public, smashed state. Experiencing these sites in person is essential for our history and theory of knowledge students at the Bavarian International School to grasp that history is a series of stepping stones rather than a set of static dates, ensuring that the lessons of the twentieth century are not just remembered, but felt.The administrative heart of the Third Reich was not just a collection of buildings but a carefully constructed stage for the performance of power. On our Bavarian International School trips, we walk the Wilhelmstraße history mile to see how the landscape was manipulated to reflect the regimes ideology. The Reich Aviation Ministry, for instance, remains a document in stone displaying the reawakened military will of the new Germany. It was designed to overawe, a goal it still achieves today as my students look up at its massive façades. Yet, within these walls, we also find stories of resistance, such as the Red Orchestra group led by Harro Schulze-Boysen, who worked within the ministry while secretly opposing the regime. This duality is a recurring theme on our tours, as we seek to uncover the hidden histories beneath the surface of the modern city. The Topography of Terror further reinforces this by documenting the institutionalisation of fear. The Gestapo card indices, which categorised citizens with coloured tabs—dark red for a communist, violet for a grumbler—illustrate the meticulous bureaucracy required to maintain a state of total surveillance. For our students, this serves as a cautionary tale about the dangers of unchecked state power and the importance of protecting civil liberties.Our visit to the Olympic Stadium often sparks intense debate among the students from the Bavarian International School regarding the role of sports in political propaganda. While the 1936 Games were designed to showcase Nordic superiority, the success of Jesse Owens, a black American athlete who won four gold medals, offered a powerful rebuttal to Nazi racial theories. We discuss how the regime attempted to camouflage its anti-semitism during the Games by removing offensive signage and even including a half-Jewish athlete, Helene Mayer, in the German team as a token gesture to ward off international boycotts. This smokescreen was effective for many foreign visitors, who returned home impressed by the regimes organisation and efficiency, a fact that highlights the power of stage-managed enthusiasm to blind observers to hard realities. For theory of knowledge students, this is an excellent example of how sensory perception can be manipulated by those in power to shape a desired narrative.The personal connection to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemetery at Heerstraße is a vital part of the Bavarian International School history trip. Standing at the grave of John Arthur Heath, my great-grandfather, allows the students to connect with the individual human stories that are often lost in the vast statistics of the war. His journey from the battlefields of the Great War to the occupation of Berlin represents the long and difficult struggle to establish a lasting peace in Europe. The fact that he died while working to rebuild German industry and hunt down war criminals underscores the complexity of the post-war period, where former enemies had to learn to live and work alongside one another. This site provides a space for quiet reflection on the sacrifices made by thousands of British and Commonwealth personnel, many of whom remain buried in German soil.The end of our journey at Karlshorst and Treptower Park brings the students face-to-face with the symbolic and literal collapse of the Third Reich. At Karlshorst, we stand in the room where Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel signed the unconditional surrender, an event that marked the formal end of the war in Europe. The site, now the Museum Berlin-Karlshorst, emphasises the war of annihilation and the shared suffering of all Soviet nationalities. Treptower Park, with its massive monument to the Red Army, serves as both a sign of gratitude to the Soviet liberators and a tool of Soviet soft power designed to intimidate. The Colossal statue of the soldier smashing the swastika is a powerful image of the total defeat of the Nazi regime. For our students from the Bavarian International School, these sites are the final stepping stones in an immersive investigation that moves from the administrative heart of a murderous regime to the final reckoning of its collapse. By navigating this topography of terror and memory, they become active investigators of the human heart and the traces of evil that remain among us, ensuring that the history they have experienced in Berlin stays with them long after they return to the classroom.The GIFs we produce each year are more than just digital captures; they are a record of our students engagement with the past. Seeing a student from the Bavarian International School today standing in the same spot where a victorious Soviet soldier stood in 1945 creates a powerful visual link across time. It forces us to recognise that history is not something that happened to other people in another world, but is a continuous process that shapes our own lives. The preservation of these sites, even those as nondescript as Hitlers bunker, is essential for providing future generations with the evidence they need to understand what occurred. As the director of the Topography of Terror has noted, these remnants serve a pædagogical purpose, ensuring that the documentation of Nazi crimes is substantial and accessible. Our decade of trips has shown us that there is no substitute for being there, for touching the cold stone of a ministry building or standing in the silence of a war cemetery. These experiences justify the logistics and effort required to bring our students to Berlin each year, as they provide a depth of understanding that no other form of study can replicate. The Bavarian International School remains committed to this journey of discovery, ensuring that our students continue to confront the ghosts of Berlin and learn the vital lessons they have to teach.
Our investigation usually commences on Wilhelmstraße, a street that functioned as a metonym for the German government until May 8, 1945, much as Downing Street does for the United Kingdom. Walking this stretch with my students from the Bavarian International School, we confront the literal and figurative erasure of history, as the East German regime demolished the ruins of Nazi and Prussian ministries in the early 1950s, replacing them with prefabricated apartment blocks to overwrite the citys imperialist past. A particularly poignant stop for our cohort is Wilhelmstraße 62, the former site of the Reichskolonialamt. Here, students stand before a sign that mentions the Herero people but remains pointedly silent regarding the genocide committed against them between 1904 and 1907. This site provides a crucial theory of knowledge case study, allowing my students to engage in critical historiography as they question why a state would acknowledge a people while omitting the systematic extermination of 65,000 of them.
Further south, we encounter the Reich Aviation Ministry at Wilhelmstraße 81-85, a building that survived the war virtually intact and stands today as a chilling example of what has been termed intimidation architecture. Built on the orders of Hermann Göring between 1933 and 1936, the structure was designed to overawe visitors with its 2,100 rooms and nearly seven kilometres of corridors. My students from the Bavarian International School can still see where the Nazi eagles were removed and replaced with stone cladding, yet the discipline of the architecture remains a testament to the regimes performance show of efficiency. This site is unique because it also allows us to examine the layers of Berlins history; it served as the House of Ministries for the German Democratic Republic and was the site where the East German state was founded on October 7, 1949. Inside the north loggia, we view Max Lingner's 1953 mural titled Building the Republic, which was intended as an optimistic vision of socialism but became a rigid piece of propaganda that the artist himself eventually grew to detest. This single façade allows our history students to compare the propaganda methods of two different totalitarian regimes.The Topography of Terror, situated on the former Prinz-Albrecht-Straße 8, offers an even more visceral encounter with the perpetrators. This was the administrative centre of Nazi persecution, housing the Gestapo and the SS leadership. As we stand above the excavated prison cells where 15,000 political opponents were interrogated and tortured between 1933 and 1945, the abstract concept of the desk perpetrator becomes a physical reality for my students. The site also preserves a segment of the Berlin Wall, providing a jarring visual juxtaposition of two twentieth-century dictatorships occupying the same space. For the Bavarian International School students, this proximity of terror from different eras forces a deep reflection on the nature of state power and the preservation of memory. Moving towards the Brandenburg Gate, we use our then-and-now GIFs to illustrate how the Nazis manipulated this iconic symbol for political theatre, such as the torchlight parade of 60,000 men on January 30, 1933, which signalled the dawn of a new era. We also discuss how the Nazis used the Quadriga atop the gate as a tool of propaganda during the remilitarisation of the Rhineland in March 1936. The gate later stood in the death strip between 1961 and 1989, a silent witness to the division of the city.At the Reichstag, the focus of our Bavarian International School group shifts to the fragility of democracy. Students explore the mystery of the Reichstag fire of February 27, 1933, which the Nazis used as a pretext to suspend civil rights. The physical building still bears the Cyrillic graffiti left by Soviet soldiers in May 1945, a living museum preserved by the architect Norman Foster. For my students, seeing the names of soldiers or crude messages written on the walls by the men who actually conquered the city makes the end of the fascist beast tangible. The site of Hitlers bunker, now a nondescript parking lot near Gertrud-Kolmar-Straße, offers a stark lesson in historical erasure. The East German government sought to dissolve the bunker from memory to prevent it from becoming a place of pilgrimage for right-wing extremists. By standing on this ordinary patch of asphalt, our Bavarian International School students must use their historical imagination to see the fifty-foot-deep concrete labyrinth where Hitler and Eva Braun committed suicide on April 30, 1945.Nearby, the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe provides a profound theory of knowledge case study. Opened in 2005, the 2,711 concrete stelae create an uneasy, confusing atmosphere designed to provoke reflection on the struggle to come to terms with the past, a process known as Vergangenheitsbewältigung. Our trips also include a working visit to the House of the Wannsee Conference, which is often the intellectual peak for our history students. Here, they conduct self-guided tours, gathering information to present to their peers about the highly educated officials, eight of whom held doctorates, who sat in this luxurious villa on January 20, 1942, to coordinate the logistics of murdering eleven million people. Standing in the actual room where the meeting occurred, my students read the minutes drawn up by Adolf Eichmann, noting the camouflage language and euphemisms like evacuation used to mask mass murder.The Reichssportfeld, including the Olympic Stadium, is another vital stop for the Bavarian International School cohort. This was the site of the most spectacular propaganda exercise in Nazi history during the Summer Olympics of 1936. Students can see the Führerbalkon and the sculptures by Karl Albiker that continue to surround the stadium, providing a gateway into discussions about Aryan æsthetic ideals and the cultivation of healthy bodies for future war. Visiting the Berlin 1939-1945 Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemetery on Heerstraße provides a necessary and deeply personal counterpoint. Surrounded by 3,594 graves, eighty % of whom were aircrew killed over Germany, we reflect on the human cost of liberating Europe. This site holds a personal connection for me, as we visit the grave of my great-grandfather, John Arthur Heath. As a member of the British occupation forces who had previously fought at the Somme, he died in Berlin while working to preserve Germanys uncertain, precarious democracy after the war.At the Bendlerblock, the headquarters of the Army High Command, my students from the Bavarian International School visit the centre of the July 20, 1944, plot against Hitler. They stand in the courtyard where Claus von Stauffenberg and his co-conspirators were executed by firing squad in the dim rays of car headlights. This visit challenges students to consider the unrealistic nationalist goals of the military resistance and their failure to act until the war was lost. Our focus on the Berlin Wall at Bernauer Straße and the Stasi headquarters helps students understand the two totalitarian dictatorships that defined twentieth-century Berlin. At the former Stasi headquarters, they learn about the intensely spied-on population and the atmosphere of terror that persisted even after the Nazis were gone. The trip concludes where the war did, at Karlshorst, the site of Nazi Germanys unconditional surrender on the night of May 8, 1945. Finally, we visit Treptower Park, the most impressive monument to the Red Army and a military cemetery for 7,000 Soviet soldiers. The colossal statue of a soldier smashing a swastika while carrying a child remains one of the few places in Germany where the Nazi symbol can be seen in a public, smashed state. Experiencing these sites in person is essential for our history and theory of knowledge students at the Bavarian International School to grasp that history is a series of stepping stones rather than a set of static dates, ensuring that the lessons of the twentieth century are not just remembered, but felt.The administrative heart of the Third Reich was not just a collection of buildings but a carefully constructed stage for the performance of power. On our Bavarian International School trips, we walk the Wilhelmstraße history mile to see how the landscape was manipulated to reflect the regimes ideology. The Reich Aviation Ministry, for instance, remains a document in stone displaying the reawakened military will of the new Germany. It was designed to overawe, a goal it still achieves today as my students look up at its massive façades. Yet, within these walls, we also find stories of resistance, such as the Red Orchestra group led by Harro Schulze-Boysen, who worked within the ministry while secretly opposing the regime. This duality is a recurring theme on our tours, as we seek to uncover the hidden histories beneath the surface of the modern city. The Topography of Terror further reinforces this by documenting the institutionalisation of fear. The Gestapo card indices, which categorised citizens with coloured tabs—dark red for a communist, violet for a grumbler—illustrate the meticulous bureaucracy required to maintain a state of total surveillance. For our students, this serves as a cautionary tale about the dangers of unchecked state power and the importance of protecting civil liberties.Our visit to the Olympic Stadium often sparks intense debate among the students from the Bavarian International School regarding the role of sports in political propaganda. While the 1936 Games were designed to showcase Nordic superiority, the success of Jesse Owens, a black American athlete who won four gold medals, offered a powerful rebuttal to Nazi racial theories. We discuss how the regime attempted to camouflage its anti-semitism during the Games by removing offensive signage and even including a half-Jewish athlete, Helene Mayer, in the German team as a token gesture to ward off international boycotts. This smokescreen was effective for many foreign visitors, who returned home impressed by the regimes organisation and efficiency, a fact that highlights the power of stage-managed enthusiasm to blind observers to hard realities. For theory of knowledge students, this is an excellent example of how sensory perception can be manipulated by those in power to shape a desired narrative.The personal connection to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemetery at Heerstraße is a vital part of the Bavarian International School history trip. Standing at the grave of John Arthur Heath, my great-grandfather, allows the students to connect with the individual human stories that are often lost in the vast statistics of the war. His journey from the battlefields of the Great War to the occupation of Berlin represents the long and difficult struggle to establish a lasting peace in Europe. The fact that he died while working to rebuild German industry and hunt down war criminals underscores the complexity of the post-war period, where former enemies had to learn to live and work alongside one another. This site provides a space for quiet reflection on the sacrifices made by thousands of British and Commonwealth personnel, many of whom remain buried in German soil.The end of our journey at Karlshorst and Treptower Park brings the students face-to-face with the symbolic and literal collapse of the Third Reich. At Karlshorst, we stand in the room where Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel signed the unconditional surrender, an event that marked the formal end of the war in Europe. The site, now the Museum Berlin-Karlshorst, emphasises the war of annihilation and the shared suffering of all Soviet nationalities. Treptower Park, with its massive monument to the Red Army, serves as both a sign of gratitude to the Soviet liberators and a tool of Soviet soft power designed to intimidate. The Colossal statue of the soldier smashing the swastika is a powerful image of the total defeat of the Nazi regime. For our students from the Bavarian International School, these sites are the final stepping stones in an immersive investigation that moves from the administrative heart of a murderous regime to the final reckoning of its collapse. By navigating this topography of terror and memory, they become active investigators of the human heart and the traces of evil that remain among us, ensuring that the history they have experienced in Berlin stays with them long after they return to the classroom.The GIFs we produce each year are more than just digital captures; they are a record of our students engagement with the past. Seeing a student from the Bavarian International School today standing in the same spot where a victorious Soviet soldier stood in 1945 creates a powerful visual link across time. It forces us to recognise that history is not something that happened to other people in another world, but is a continuous process that shapes our own lives. The preservation of these sites, even those as nondescript as Hitlers bunker, is essential for providing future generations with the evidence they need to understand what occurred. As the director of the Topography of Terror has noted, these remnants serve a pædagogical purpose, ensuring that the documentation of Nazi crimes is substantial and accessible. Our decade of trips has shown us that there is no substitute for being there, for touching the cold stone of a ministry building or standing in the silence of a war cemetery. These experiences justify the logistics and effort required to bring our students to Berlin each year, as they provide a depth of understanding that no other form of study can replicate. The Bavarian International School remains committed to this journey of discovery, ensuring that our students continue to confront the ghosts of Berlin and learn the vital lessons they have to teach.
