Nazi Sites around Pariser Platz and Reichstag

The Brandenburg Gate in a Nazi poster and my students from the Bavarian International School during our 2018 annual trip. The first instance that highlights the Brandenburg Gate's role in Nazi propaganda was the Torchlight Parade held on January 30, 1933, commemorating Hitler's appointment as Chancellor, which was conducted under the arches of the Gate. It involved approximately 60,000 SA and ϟϟ men marching in torchlight ranks, and was widely captured and disseminated by media, showcasing Nazi dominance and the dawn of a new era. This spectacle was a tangible demonstration of the Nazis' power, depicting them as a formidable and unified force. As Richard J. Evans argues, this spectacle was strategically orchestrated to symbolise the beginning of the Nazi era, aiming to inculcate in the German populace a sense of awe and acquiescence towards the new regime. The parade was extensively covered in contemporary newspapers and newsreels, imprinting the Nazis' intended image of power and unity on the national psyche.
Moreover, the Nazis made strategic use of the Brandenburg Gate during their annual Labour Day parades. The diary entries of Joseph Goebbels, the Propaganda Minister, reveal that the location of these parades was deliberately chosen. Goebbels noted in his diary entry dated May 2, 1937, "[t]he parade was a grand display of the strength of our movement... the choice of the Gate helped to elevate it." By staging these parades at the Gate, the Nazis visually aligned their ideologies with the spirit of German labour and manufacturing prowess, reinforcing their populist narrative. These parades were covered widely in Nazi-controlled media outlets like the "Völkischer Beobachter", maximising their propaganda impact. As part of the transformation of Berlin into the so-called "world capital Germania", the gate was to be located on the east-west axis and a seven-kilometre section between the Brandenburg Gate and Adolf-Hitler-Platz (Theodor-Heuss-Platz today) was expanded and put into operation in 1939. In the further expansion of the East-West axis the side pillared halls were to have been removed from the Brandenburg Gate and the traffic then would not only have passed through, but also around the gate. 

During the time of two totalitarian dictatorships. The depiction of the Quadriga, the statue atop the Brandenburg Gate, in Nazi-controlled media was another aspect of their propaganda strategy. The Quadriga, depicting the goddess of victory driving a chariot, held immense symbolic value. When the Nazis controversially remilitarised the Rhineland in March 1936, a move that directly violated the Treaty of Versailles, they employed the Quadriga's imagery as a tool of propaganda. Photos of the Quadriga were widely circulated in newspapers such as the "Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung," implying that the remilitarisation was a 'victory' for Germany. This manoeuvre sought to depict the Nazis as the torchbearers of German pride and resilience. Bachrach, in her book The Nazi Olympics: Berlin 1936, posits that the dissemination of the Quadriga's images was a deliberate tactic to align the provocative foreign policies of the Nazis with the nationalistic spirit of victory embodied in the Quadriga. To reinforce her argument, Bachrach refers to various editions of "Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung" from 1936, showing how the Quadriga's images were prominently featured following major policy. During the war in 1942 a plaster cast was taken from the Quadriga, a chariot drawn by four horses sculpted by Johann Gottfried Schadow; through bombing and the battle for Berlin the Quadriga was severely damaged several times. In fact, of Schadow's original work only a horse's head was preserved which is on display today in the Märkisches Museum. The building itself was damaged with a pillar shot up. The state of the Brandenburg Gate at the end of the war also played a role in Nazi propaganda, albeit from a defensive standpoint. After the Gate's destruction, especially the missing Quadriga, it served as a symbol of German devastation in Allied propaganda. Yet, Hitler's last propaganda minister, Werner Naumann, attempted to use this destruction for a final act of Nazi propaganda. Naumann compared the subsequent restoration of the Quadriga to the prospective resurgence of National Socialism. This narrative is documented in Naumann's post-war letters, now preserved in the German Federal Archives. His correspondences, particularly a letter dated February 3, 1951, underline his efforts to galvanise remaining Nazi sympathisers by drawing parallels between the restoration of the Quadriga and the potential resurrection of the Nazi ideology.

From the first British cover of the bestselling 1992 thriller by Robert Harris set in a world in which Germany won the war to providing the inspiration for the entrance to a millionaire's estate on Xiaoyun Road here in the capital of 'communist' China. 
Before the war Pariser Platz was the grandest square in Berlin, flanked by the American and French embassies, the finest hotel (the Adlon Hotel), the Academy of the Arts, and several blocks of apartments and offices. During the last years of the Second World War all of the buildings around the square were turned to rubble by air raids and heavy artillery bombardment. The only structure left standing in the ruins of Pariser Platz was the Brandenburg Gate, which was restored by the East Berlin and West Berlin governments. After the war and especially with the construction of the Berlin Wall, the square was laid waste and became part of the death zone dividing the city. When the city was reunited in 1990, there was broad consensus that the Pariser Platz should be made into a fine urban space again. The embassies would move back, the hotel and arts academy would be reinstated, and prestigious firms would be encouraged to build round the square. Under the rules of reconstruction, eaves heights had to be twenty two metres, and buildings had to have a proper termination against the sky. Stone cladding was to be used as far as possible. Interpretations of these constraints, however, have varied to a great extent.

Pariser Platz during the official reception of Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands in May 1901; within two decades she would provide sanctuary for Kaiser Wilhelm II after his abdication. The square was named after the French defeat at the hands of the Anglo-Prussians in 1815 and now is again the main square in Berlin, after having fallen within the so-called 'Death Strip' during the time of the Berlin Wall. It had suffered severe damage during the war, especially during its last days during the Battle of Berlin. The East German regime had the remaining buildings demolished before the Berlin Wall was built with only the rear part of the Palais Arnim preserved. After the fall of the Wall in 1993, the reconstruction of the square was a matter of controversy leading to it being rebuilt according to the design specifications of Bruno Flierl and Hans Stimmann, supplemented by the specifications of the Berlin Senate which required that the height of the buildings not exceed 22 metres and that only vertical windows be used in the new buildings and that a maximum of fifty percent of the façade area be made of glass in order to tie in with the “golden days” of the square.

During my Bavarian International School 2018 class trip and Provisional President Friedrich Ebert saluting returning troops from the war exactly a century earlier on November 10, contributing to the so-called stab-in-the-back myth (Dolchstoßlegende) with the declaration that "no enemy has vanquished you" (kein Feind hat euch überwunden!) and "they returned undefeated from the battlefield" (sie sind vom Schlachtfeld unbesiegt zurückgekehrt). The latter quote was shortened to im Felde unbesiegt ("undefeated on the battlefield") as a semi-official slogan of the Reichswehr. Ebert had meant these sayings as a tribute to the German soldier, but it only contributed to the prevailing feeling that Germany had been betrayed at home, widely believed and promulgated in right-wing circles that the German Army did not lose the Great War on the battlefield but was instead betrayed by the civilians on the home front, especially the republicans who overthrew the monarchy in the German Revolution of 1918–19. Advocates denounced the German government leaders who signed the Armistice on November 11, 1918, as the "November Criminals" (November­verbrecher). 

During the March 1920 Kapp putsch and the same site today, looking towards Unter der Linden. On March 13, 1920 Walther von Luettwitz personally activated a putsch, ordered Freikorps units into Berlin, and designated New York-born Dr. Wolfgang Kapp the new Chancellor. Kapp had been a member of the right-wing DNVP and, with like-minded individuals such as Erich Ludendorff, Colonel Max Bauer, and Waldemar Pabst, formed the Nationale Vereinigung (National Union) in October 1919. He was dedicated to the removal of the Republic and creation of a conservative dictatorship. At the start of the putsch, the legal government fled to Stuttgart. Because of insufficient preparations, the putschists failed to secure the support of Berlin’s bureaucracy, including the Reichsbank, and were greeted on March 14 by a general strike that doomed the action. Kapp resigned on March 17 and, with imprisonment threatening, fled to Sweden. When the 1922 trial of Traugott von Jagow, Kapp’s Interior Minister, fostered the view that the putschists had acted only as patriotic Germans, Kapp came home. Seriously ill with cancer, he surrendered to the Supreme Court and died before his case was decided. As aftermath to the foiled putsch, Germany’s internal politics were polarised: the Right became more adamant in its disapproval of the Republic, while the Left demanded resumption of the November Revolution. The uprising in the Ruhr of a so-called Red Army, a by-product of the putsch, compelled the hapless government to rely on the same Freikorps units that had just tried to displace it. German voters discerned the impairment of purpose. When elections were held in June 1920, the Weimar Coalition lost its majority; it would never regain it.

The site during the last stage of the Battle of Berlin. The "Altbau" from the IG-Farben building behind the T34/85 is now a Starbucks; it can be seen on the right when Goebbels had spoken in front only months earlier on the Tag des Deutschen Volkssturm of November 12, 1944. 

From the same spot at the other direction towards the Adlon with the Volkssturm marching and my students from our 2016 Bavarian International School trip. It was here at the Pariserplatz that 

the wounded were laid in the street wrapped in blankets. German Red Cross nurses and BdM girls continued to treat them. Just to the north, Soviet guns blasted into submission a group of doomed ϟϟ still holding out in a building on the Spree. In all directions, smoke from ruins continued to deform the sky. Red Army soldiers flushed out Wehrmacht, ϟϟ, Hitler Youth and Volkssturm. They emerged from houses, cellars and subway tunnels, their faces almost black with grime and stubble. Soviet soldiers shouted, `Hande hoch!' and their prisoners dumped their weapons and held their hands as high as possible. A number of German civilians sidled up to Soviet officers to denounce soldiers who continued to hide. Vasily Grossman accompanied General Berzarin to the centre of the city. He was staggered by the scale of destruction all around, wondering how much had been wrought by American and British bombers. A Jewish woman and her elderly husband approached him. They asked about the fate of Jews who had been deported. When he confirmed their worst fears, the old man burst into tears. Grossman was apparently accosted a little later by a smart German lady wearing an astrakhan coat. They conversed pleasantly. `But surely you aren't a Jewish commissar?' she suddenly said to him. 

Beevor (393) The Fall of Berlin 1945

Colour footage of the Nazis' triumphal procession January 30, 1933 upon Hitler's appointment as Chancellor. From dusk to midnight that day, tens of thousands of jack- booted, brown-shirted storm troopers, flaming torches held high, drums beating, bands playing, paraded through Berlin. The “river of fire,” as one observer described it, passed thunderously through the Brandenburg Gate, turning down Wilhelmstrasse, past the Presidential Palace and the Reich Chancellery. From a window in the Presidential Palace, the aged Reich president, Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, watched the seemingly endless procession in bewilderment as farther along, in front of the Reich Chancellery, the massed storm troopers raised their right arms and voices in salute to the slight figure in formal dress standing at a Chancellery window—their leader, newly appointed chancellor of Germany, Adolf Hitler.

On 30 January 1933, the night of Hitler’s appointment to the chancellorship, massed Nazi marchers, mostly stormtroopers, poured through Berlin streets to the Brandenburg gate, waving torches and singing. They moved on past the Reich Chancellery where Hitler and Hindenburg stood on a balcony. Now the exodus began in earnest. Playwright Bertold Brecht left quickly for Vienna. Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya, of “Three-Penny Opera” fame, fled to Paris. A number of conductors and composers fled to Switzerland or America. The unique, feverish, turbulent, and recklessly hedonistic Berlin of the twenties was gone.

Otis C. Mitchell (116): Hitler's Stormtroopers and the Attack on the German Republic

 

When Hitler had been appointed Chancellor January 30, 1933, SA troops marched through. This painting by Arthur Kampf depicting this march makes a number of appearances in the video game Return to Castle Wolfenstein.

 

From a 1938 postcard and exactly 80 years later

On August 1st 1936 Hitler opened the Summer Olympic Games held in Berlin (and my students during my 2013 Bavarian International School tour)

which afforded the Nazis a golden opportunity to impress the world with the achievements of the Third Reich, and they made the most of it. The signs ”Juden unerwuenscht” (Jews Not Welcome) were quietly hauled down from the shops, hotels, beer gardens and places of public entertainment, the persecution of the Jews and of the two Christian churches temporarily halted, and the country put on its best behaviour. No previous games had seen such a spectacular organisation nor such a lavish display of entertainment. Goering, Ribbentrop and Goebbels gave dazzling parties for the foreign visitors – the Propaganda Minister’s ”Italian Night” on the Pfaueninsel near Wannsee gathered more than a thousand guests at dinner in a scene that resembled the Arabian Nights. The visitors, especially those from England and America, were greatly impressed by what they saw: apparently a happy, healthy, friendly people united under Hitler – a far different picture, they said, than they had got from reading the newspaper dispatches from Berlin. And yet underneath the surface, hidden from the tourists during those splendid late-summer Olympic days in Berlin and indeed overlooked by most Germans or accepted by them with a startling passivity, there seemed to be – to a foreigner at least – a degrading transformation of German life.

Shirer 206-207

The Brandenburg Regiment, so-named as it had initially been based in the town of Brandenburg an der Havel. The Brandenburgers were members of the Brandenburg German Special forces unit during the war. Originally the unit was formed by and operated as an extension of the military's intelligence organ, the Abwehr. Members took part in seizing operationally important targets by way of sabotage and infiltration and, being foreign German nationals who were convinced Nazi volunteers, constituent members, had lived abroad and were proficient in foreign languages as well as being familiar with the way of life in the area of operations where they were deployed. The Brandenburg Division was generally subordinated to the army groups in individual commands and operated throughout Eastern Europe, in southern Africa, Afghanistan, the Middle East and in the Caucasus. In the later course of the war, parts of the special unit were used in the fight against partisans in Yugoslavia before the Division, in the last months of the war, was reclassified and merged into one of the Panzergrenadier Divisions. They committed various atrocities in the course of their operations including the Lviv massacre s well as other mass shootings. Shortly after German reunification a newly established reserve formation of the Bundeswehr was named the Heimatschutzbrigade Brandenburg which led in June 1991 to a debate in the Brandenburg parliament, calling on the state government to distance itself from this designation and to advocate a renaming, as it is "politically instinctive and human tasteless" to use the name of a Wehrmacht division of "fascist content and criminal character." The motion was finally rejected by 38 votes in favour agaonst ten with sixteen abstentions.

The  and My 2012 and 2018 Bavarian International School cohorts with the Aufziehen der Wache on the left and Hitlerjugend right.

During Hitler's 50th Birthday celebrations. On April 18, 1939, the German government declared Hitler's birthday, April 20, a national holiday. Kershaw describes the events that Goebbels organised in Berlin as "an astonishing and extravagant cult of the Führer. The effusiveness of adulation surpassed that of any previous anniversary." The festivities began the evening before the birthday. Hitler led a motorcade of fifty white limousines along the newly completed East-West Axis, designed by Speer to serve as the central boulevard of Welthauptstadt Germania , the proposed new capital. Hitler, who'd anticipated that Speer would make a speech, was amused when Speer briefly announced that the piece spoke volumes.  The next act was a torchlight procession from all over Germany, which Hitler watched from a balcony of the Reich Chancellery. Speer gave Hitler a scale model of the gigantic triumphal arch he had sketched for the rebuilding of Berlin. Of all the events that made up the celebrations, the great military parade that the Nazis deployed to show their military capacity was one of the most important. One of its objectives was to send a warning to the Allied forces and the parade, which lasted about five hours, was carried out by twelve companies of the Luftwaffe, twelve from the Army and another twelve from the Navy, as well as units of the ϟϟ. In total, between 40,000 and 50,000 soldiers participated as 162 warplanes flew over Berlin. Twenty thousand invited officers and several hundred thousand spectators witnessed the parade.  The long-range air artillery pieces stood out, and special attention was paid to motorised artillery and the development of air defence units. Other invited officers, representing a total of twenty-three countries, also took part in the celebrations. The papal envoy Cesare Orsenigo, the President of the Slovak Republic Jozef Tiso, the leaders of the different branches of the German armed forces, and the mayors of German cities sent their gifts to the chancellery. The British and American ambassadors weren't present at the parade, having withdrawn from the country following Hitler's march into Bohemia and Moravia in 1938 and chargé d'affaires Raymond H. Geist represented the United States at the troop parade. King George VI sent a message of congratulations to Hitler; however, given the tense relations between the two countries, his advisors had advised the king to skip his birthday.

 
July 6, 1940 as German troops return home victorious after quickly dispatching France.

Field Marshal Sir Bernard Montgomery joining Deputy Supreme Commander in Chief of the Red Army, Marshal Zhukov, the Commander of the 21st Army Group, Marshal Sokolovsky and General Rokossovsky of the Red Army as they leave the Brandenburg Gate after decorating them at the July 12, 1945 ceremony.

The Brandenburg Gate as seen from the British Zone and during my 2013 Bavarian International School class trip.

The two guardhouses flanking the Brandenburg Gate were piles of rubble. Soldiers from the four powers walked around adding a living aspect to the landscape of ruin. Around the Reichstag building a black market had grown up. There were Russian graves on the Ranke Platz and abandoned tanks on the pavements. The latter served as kiosks, announcing dance schools, new theatres and newspapers and toys for urchins reminiscent of the pictures by Heinrich Zille. The Franziskus Hospital was the only undamaged building, and the nuns looked timeless in their habits, as if they had emerged from somewhere on the Castilian Meseta. Near by, the Tiergarten was a blackened shambles, looking more like a battlefield than a landscaped garden. 

MacDonogh (120-121) After the Reich

From my 2018 Bavarian International School trip and from the same spot amidst the destruction in June, 1945. The truck in the foreground appears to be an American Chevrolet AFWX-354. The French ordered 150 of them by the fall of 1939 which the British inherited, later delivering most to Russia via lend-lease. The Germans ended up capturing them and deploying them in several fronts. A month earlier on May 2nd, at 6.55 a.m. Moscow time, the white and red Polish flag was hoisted atop the Brandenburg Gate above the ruins of the city, alongside the Soviet flag. 

Few areas of the capital were untouched by the ravages of war. Entire districts had been rendered uninhabitable; buildings standing like so many broken teeth, with empty, gaping window frames opening into blackened voids where once had been apartments, homes and businesses. The streets in between were pitted with craters and covered by vast fields of rubble, through which makeshift footpaths snaked. Over it all, a pall of smoke and dust hung in the air, covering everything, choking the survivors and twisting and eddying in the cool spring breeze.  

Moorhouse (382) Berlin at War  

 

Taken from the other side of the Gate

A T-34- the most-produced tank of the war, as well as the second most produced tank of all time- in front of the Brandenburg Gate after the battle. After 44,900 losses during the war, it is also recognised as having suffered the most tank losses of all time. When first encountered in 1941, German general Paul Ludwig Ewald von Kleist called it "the finest tank in the world" and Heinz Guderian affirmed the T-34's "vast superiority" over existing German armour of the period. Although its armour and armament were surpassed later in the war, it has often been credited as the most effective, efficient and influential tank design of the Second World War.

The Brandenburg Gate had become the main focus for barter and the black market at the beginning of May, when liberated prisoners of war and forced labourers traded their loot. Ursula von Kardorff found all sorts of women prostituting themselves for food or the alternative currency of cigarettes. `Willkommen in Shanghai,' remarked one cynic. Young women of thirty looked years older, she noticed. 

Beever (414) The Fall of Berlin: 1945

Dazed civilians receiving care from Red Cross personnel in front of the Brandenburg Gate and my 2016 cohort.

Once it had been decided that all Germans were guilty, the next job was to punish them. Despite the propaganda rations meted out by the Russians in Berlin, the Potsdam Conference decided that the Germans were not to be over-fed. Requests by the Red Cross to bring in provisions were waved aside, and in the winter of 1945 donations were returned with the recommendation that they be used in other war-torn parts of Europe – although the Irish and Swiss contributions had been specifically raised with Germany in mind. The first donations to be permitted reached the American Zone in March 1946, to some degree thanks to the intervention of British intellectuals such as Bertrand Russell and Victor Gollancz.
... Despite the great wrong perpetrated against his people, Gollancz could not sanction another crime: ‘The plain fact is . . . we are starving the Germans. And we are starving them, not deliberately in the sense that we definitely want them to die, but wilfully in the sense that we prefer their death to our own inconvenience.’ Over and over again in his letters to his wife, he is struck by the fact that these suffering infants might have been his own children.

MacDonogh (361-362) After the Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation

Russian poet Yevgeny Dolmatowski reading poetry to Red Army troops before the Brandenburg Gate on May 2, 1945 in a photo by Yevgeny Khaldei, and my 2021 class cohort. Dolmatowski is shown on the tank first from right, after the signing of the order to cease hostilities by General Weidling. During the war, he'd worked as a correspondent for the Red Army until August 1941 when he was wounded and taken prisoner by the Germans. He managed to escape and return to service, holding the rank of major. Another well-known picture by Khaldei shows the young poet on the same day with a bust of Hitler under his arm as a trophy, near the Reichstag building. His experiences found literary resonance even during the war years and in 1950 he received the Stalin Prize for Slovo о завтрашнем дне.

It is still possible to honour the Red Army's victory today (although an American tourist found reason to be offended in the contempt shown for her flag) provided one doesn't dwell on its "excesses"...

Does Djilas, who is himself a writer, not know what human suffering and the human heart are? Can't he understand it if a soldier who has crossed thousands of kilometres through blood and fire and death has fun with a woman or takes some trifle?

Stalin responding to complaints about the rapes and looting committed by the Red Army during the Second World War. Milovan Djilas, Conversations with Stalin, p. 95. Stalin would also suggest that "We lecture our soldiers too much; let them have their initiative."
Conservative estimates place the number of Berlin women raped at 20,000. It began in Neukölln at 18.00 on April 27. The worst cases involved very young children or elderly ladies, and the victims were often killed afterwards. It was rumoured that the severity of the rapine was caused by the fact the Russians had sent in units made up of criminals – such as the Nazis had used at the time of the Warsaw Uprising – but this was later revealed to have been untrue. Rapists were threatened with gruesome punishments, but the prospect of satisfying their lust proved stronger than the fear of chastisement. One officer reprimanded a soldier with the words ‘ukas Stalina’ (Stalin’s orders), but the man answered back, saying the Germans had raped his sister. 
Showing little has changed when it comes to Russians currently raping and torturing women and children in a Hitleresque war of extermination in Ukraine, a kind of gallows humour grew up that was encapsulated in the expression ‘Besser ein Iwan auf dem Bauch als ein Ami auf dem Kopf!’ (Better a Russki on the belly than a Yank on the head!), meaning that rape was preferable to being blown up by a bomb. In a frightful twist in the gallows humour of the time, Berlin children used to play the ‘Frau komm mit!’ game, with the boys taking the part of the soldiers and the girls their victims.  There was a trade in stars of David, which sold for up to 500 reichsmarks, but in the end the Russians couldn’t care less if the woman was Jewish or the house they plundered had a Jewish owner, not having gone to war to protect the Jews after all. The rapes continued throughout the time the Russians had Berlin to themselves, but they slackened off markedly after May 4. Even when Berlin women were not driven so far as to take their own lives, the rapes had inevitable consequences in the form of disease and babies. Some of these unwanted babies were placed in a home in Wilmersdorf. In 1946 it was estimated that one in six of the children born out of wedlock had been fathered by Russians. Coping with syphilis and gonorrhoea without antibiotics was part of a woman’s life at the time. Ten percent of those raped were infected, and antibiotics cost the equivalent of two pounds of coffee. Most of the unwanted Russian children were aborted, although there was the usual rumour that Stalin had forbidden the women to dispose of their children because he wanted to see an alteration in the racial mix. Abortion was a crude business, normally carried out without anaesthetic and costing about 1,000 reichsmarks. Many women performed the act on themselves, with inevitable consequences. Despite the massive incidence of abortion, it is estimated that between 150,000 and 200,000 ‘Russian babies’ survived infancy. The daily threat of rape petered out only when the Western Allies arrived in July, and when the Soviet authorities realised that it was damaging their chances of political success among the civilian population.

My 2020 Bavarian International School cohort and another group of students visiting the same spot in 1951. The denuded space behind the Gate in what is the Tiergarten is a result of its trees being felled to be used as firewood due to a coal shortage. The Quadriga statue on top was eventually returned to the gate in June 1958, replacing the Soviet flag that flew there for years after the closing off of East Berlin.

After Germany's surrender and the end of the war, the governments of East Berlin and West Berlin restored it in a joint effort. The holes were patched, but were visible for many years. The gate was located in the Soviet occupation zone, directly next to the border to the British occupation zone, which later became the border between East and West Berlin. Vehicles and pedestrians could travel freely through the gate until the day after construction began on the Berlin Wall on Barbed Wire Sunday, August 13, 1961. West Berliners gathered on the western side of the gate to demonstrate against the Berlin Wall, among them West Berlin's mayor, Willy Brandt, who had returned from a federal election campaign tour in West Germany earlier the same day. The wall passed directly by the western side of the gate, which was closed throughout the Berlin Wall period, which ended on December 22, 1989. Today the Gate is again closed to vehicles and much of Pariser Platz has been turned into a cobblestone pedestrian zone.  

The site before and after the fall of the wall from the British zone from my 2018 Bavarian International School history class trip. The Brandenburg Gate’s role during the Cold War as part of the Berlin Wall, from its construction on August 12–13, 1961, to its fall on November 9, 1989, was defined by its integration into the DDR's border fortifications. Positioned in East Berlin’s Soviet sector, the Gate stood within the “death strip,” a heavily guarded no-man’s-land between the Wall’s inner and outer barriers, averaging 30–150 metres wide. This strip featured 302 watchtowers across the Wall’s 155-kilometre length, with twelve specifically monitoring the Brandenburg Gate area by 1965. The Gate itself was closed to all traffic—pedestrian and vehicular—from August 13, 1961, when barbed wire was first erected, until December 22, 1989, when it reopened.The Wall’s construction at the Gate involved 3.5-metre-high concrete slabs, reinforced with steel, and a secondary inner wall 2.5 metres high, installed by September 1961. By 1962, 14,000 border guards patrolled the Wall, with 1,200 assigned to the Gate’s sector. The death strip included 20,000 landmines and 116 automatic firing devices by 1970, though none were placed directly at the Gate due to its symbolic visibility. Instead, the area was illuminated by 1,800 floodlights, 200 of which were concentrated around the Gate, consuming 1.2 megawatts nightly, as per Berlin Senate energy reports from 1975.
The Gate’s five passageways were sealed with concrete and steel bars by October 15, 1961, and guarded by 24-hour shifts of 10–15 soldiers each, totalling 150 personnel daily by 1963.From 1961 to 1989, 5,043 successful escapes were recorded across the Wall, but only seventeen occurred at the Brandenburg Gate due to its heavy fortification, as reported by the Zentrale Erfassungsstelle der DDR. Of 140 confirmed deaths at the Wall, 8 occurred near the Gate, including Peter Fechter on August 17, 1962, shot 50 metres from the structure. Surveillance was intensified with 45 closed-circuit cameras installed by 1973, 10 of which focused on the Gate, transmitting to a Stasi command post 1.2 kilometres away. The Gate’s Pariser Platz was patrolled by 60–80 Volkspolizei officers daily, with two armoured vehicles stationed permanently from 1964.The Gate served as a backdrop for 27 major political events between 1961 and 1989, including John F. Kennedy’s visit on June 26, 1963, when he viewed it from a platform 100 metres west, and Ronald Reagan’s speech on June 12, 1987, addressing 20,000 spectators. The DDR staged 15 military parades at the Gate, involving 10,000 troops annually from 1965 to 1988, per Ministry of Defence archives. By 1989, the Gate’s sector saw 1.5 million annual visitors to its western viewing platforms, as recorded by West Berlin police.Construction costs for the Wall’s fortifications at the Gate reached 12 million Ostmarks by 1963, with maintenance costing 1.8 million Ostmarks yearly until 1989. Demolition of the Wall at the Gate began on December 22, 1989, with 2,500 workers removing 1,200 tonnes of concrete over 14 days. The Gate’s reopening saw 100,000 crossings on December 22–23, 1989, per Berlin border control data. Throughout its closure, the Gate’s quadriga was covered with tarpaulin from November 1961 to June 1987 to prevent symbolic defection gestures, costing 250,000 Ostmarks for maintenance.The Gate’s strategic importance was underscored by 3,200 documented escape attempts in its vicinity, with a 0.5% success rate, as per Stasi files. Its fortifications included 1,500 tonnes of barbed wire and 4,000 concrete slabs by 1975. The area saw 18 diplomatic incidents, including a 1971 standoff involving 50 Soviet and thirty U.S. tanks, lasting 48 hours. By November 1989, 70% of the Gate’s fortifications were dismantled, leaving 300 tonnes of debris, cleared by January 1990.

 Tourists posing in front of the Berlin Wall at the Brandenburg gate in the British sector on June 6, 1989 and my Bavarian International School students in 2013.

 

Soviet IS-2 heavy tanks going past the gate and the site during the Cold War and today, wall gone.

The American embassy after the war and after its official opening July 4, 2008.The night before he was murdered Rathenau spent at a dinner here given by Ambassador Alanson Houghton followed by a talk "that lasted until four o'clock in the morning with Hugo Stinnes, who disagreed often enough with him but at the same time admired many things he stood for." Davidson (179) The Making of Adolf Hitler

Since 1924 the Americans had been interested in having its own embassy building in Berlin and in 1930 signed a preliminary contract to buy Palais Blücher at Pariser Platz 2. On April 15, 1931, before the final purchase of the property, a fire destroyed the palace - but the contract was signed a short time later for $1.8 million. The reconstruction of the building was delayed by several years due to the onset of the Great Depression and, more importantly, the Nazi seizure of power and Roosevelt's antipathy towards them. In Ambassador William Edward Dodd, who'd studied at the University of Leipzig, Roosevelt chose an expert on Germany. Dodd didn't like Hitler, avoided dinners with him, and even refused to repair Palais Blücher, which was in such a prominent location, during the 1936 Olympic Games in order just to annoy Hitler. After Speer presented his plans to transform Berlin into the world capital Germania in 1938 and it became apparent that the embassy location on Bendlerstrasse would have to be abandoned, Dodd's successor Hugh Robert Wilson had the building renovated. From April 1, 1939, it was used as an embassy ​​​​but without an official ambassador, since on November 16, 1938, Wilson was recalled by Roosevelt in protest against Kristallnacht. In addition to the two charges d'affaires who succeeded Wilson, the important historian and diplomat George F. Kennan also worked as legation secretary in the embassy. With the beginning of the war in 1939, diplomatic relations between the United States and Germany remained as the Americans left it to Britain to fight on alone. The letters  'USA' were printed on the roof in an attempt to minimise damage from accidental aerial bombings which was impossible given its proximity to the Reichschancellery. This lasted until December 11, 1941, four days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour when Germany declared war on the United States. The embassy was closed and the embassy staff was interned for five and a half months in a former hotel in Bad Nauheim. During the war, the embassy of neutral Switzerland administered the embassy building.

Standing in front of Berlin's most famous hotel before the war, opened in 1907 when families of the high nobility sold their winter palaces in Berlin to reside in the suites of the hotel. Wilhelm II fled from the draughty rooms of his castle to its luxurious and well-heated rooms. The German Foreign Office also used the hotel as an "unofficial guest house" because there were no suitable accommodations for high visitors from abroad. Not only Europe's kings and emperors such as the Russian Czar and the Maharajah of Patiala, but also industrialists and politicians such as Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, John D. Rockefeller, Walther Rathenau, Gustav Stresemann and Aristide Briand were famous guests in the early years. However, where the emperor used to spend the night, after the Great War rich Americans arrived who were on vacation in Europe and soon took the name of the hotel across the Atlantic. In 1919, the American occupiers had their headquarters in the Adlon. Above the hotel, however, was not the American flag, but that of the Red Cross. The "Golden Twenties" also brought golden times for the Adlon. Charlie Chaplin lost his trouser's buttons on the way to the hotel in Berlin and Marlene Dietrich was discovered here. Between 1925 and 1930, the hotel had almost two million visitors making it a veritable Berlin landmark.  

A parade of the newly founded Volkssturm marches through Berlin on November 12, 1944 with the Hotel Adlon in the background, and during my 2016 class trip. Immediately after the Nazi seizure of power in April 1933, their foreign policy office was set up by Alfred Rosenberg for a short time in a wing of the building. The steady upswing of the hotel gradually came to an end with the beginning of the Nazi regime in the German Reich, mainly due to the declining number of American tourists. However, there were highlights, such as the 1936 Olympic Games when Louis Adlon, who had since taken over the management of the hotel with his wife Hedda, hoped that his house would become the new meeting place of ϟϟ generals and leading politicians and that the hotel could emerge as the main venue for festivities. Instead, the Nazis themselves preferred the Hotel Kaiserhof a few blocks south and directly across from the Propaganda Ministry and Hitler's Chancellery on Wilhelmplatz. Kaiserhof in Wilhelmstraße, possibly because the atmosphere of the Adlon was probably too conservative, too cosmopolitan, too international and so did not fit into the "fanaticism of Germanism." The Adlon continued to operate normally throughout the war, even constructing a luxurious bomb shelter for its guests and a huge brick wall around the lobby level to protect the function rooms from flying debris. Parts of the hotel were converted to a military field hospital during the final days of the Battle of Berlin. The hotel survived the war without any major damage, having avoided the bombs and shelling that had levelled the city. However, on the night of May 2, 1945 a fire, started in the hotel's wine cellar by drunken Russians, left the main building in ruins.

The Stalin portrait beside the Adlon and the view today down Unter den Linden- completely rebuilt.  After Keitel had handed over document signed by Dönitz confirming the unconditional surrender arranged in Rheims the day before ending the war,

[t]here were four full hours of toasts and many of the soldiers were literally under the table. When the festivities came to an end there was a massive cannonade, which some Berliners misinterpreted, imagining the war had started up all over again. The Soviets had known where to find the wine: 65,000 bottles of claret had been located to this end, and others beside. They had taken it from a walled-up section of the cellars of Berlin’s best hotel, the Adlon. The fate of the hotel was sealed by the discovery of the wine cellar. Russian lorries came to take away the contents, and very soon a fire broke out that was to destroy one of the few buildings in the street that had survived the conflict.

MacDonogh (104) After the Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation

Louis Adlon himself was arrested in his home near Potsdam by Soviet troops on April 25 after they mistook him for a general due to his title of "Generaldirektor". He died on a street in Falkensee on May 7, 1945, of cardiac arrest according to the death certificate. The Adlon, which was also used as a military hospital , stood undamaged on the otherwise destroyed Pariser Platz until Berlin's capitulation on May 2, 1945. In the first few days afterwards, the building, occupied by partying and looting Red Army soldiers, burned down for unknown reasons part from this side wing shown at the time and during my 2022 class visit. The walls remained standing for the time being and weren't removed until 1952. The remaining side wing served as an hotel and restaurant for the HO trading organisation until the early 1980s, with the west windows bricked up after the Wall was built in 1961. The square was left as an abandoned, grassed-over buffer with the West, with the Brandenburg Gate sitting alone by the Berlin Wall. In 1964, the remaining part of the building was renovated and the façade was redone. It finally served as a boarding school for vocational students until it was blown up in 1984. Following the war, the East German government reopened the building's surviving rear service wing under the Hotel Adlon name. Since the 1990s, the Adlon family has been fighting for compensation for the expropriation of their property without success. Louis and Hedwig Adlon had been members of the Nazi Party since 1941 with the latter arguing that she and her late husband had only joined the Nazi Party because they didn't want to lose the family business. In fact, she and her husband had always belonged to the resistance movement and were particularly close to the members of the assassination group of July 20, 1944, submitting various affidavits and naming twelve witnesses to their anti-Nazi sentiments. 

The Adlon was the hotel where Michael Jackson infamously dangled his baby out of the window of his room on the third floor, holding it with one arm under its shoulders in November, 2002:

Standing in front of the site of the former Central Office of the Inspector General for Construction in the Reich Capital at Pariser Platz 4. Originally Palais Arnim, from 1907 to 1938 it was the seat of the Prussian Academy of Arts. After the July 1937 campaign against the Degenerate Art had led to the closure of the New Department of the National Gallery, Albert Speer used these premises as a workplace in his capacity as general construction inspector for the imperial capital given him by Hitler on January 30, 1937.  In February 1937, Speer described its use as allowing for "the Führer to come through the ministerial gardens into the rooms of the new office, the only building in the immediate vicinity of the Reich Chancellery, whose corporation no longer fulfils any worthwhile purpose." Speer divided the rooms of the Arnim Palace into offices and studios, taking up quarters in the great hall. In his exhibition building, he had a large model of Berlin set up in the middle hall escape, which only partially retained its skylight. All eight remaining halls were replaced by skylights, rebuilt into studios and workshops, and overbuilt by two storeys with new stairwells. Often Hitler visited the building to visit the models and plans for the planned rebuilding of Berlin and to discuss it with Speer and his coworkers. Speer moved into the building in 1942 after Hitler had appointed him to succeed Fritz Todt in the Office of the Minister of Armaments and Munitions. From 1943 Speer and his staff,  headed by Rudolf Wolters, used the site and working staff for the reconstruction of bombed cities. 

Standing beside the original model of the proposed Great Hall of the People (Große Halle, Halle des Volkes) designed by Albert Speer, who enjoyed a meteoric rise to power and prominence as Hitler's favourite architect. In 1925, Speer began to study architecture in Berlin. In 1931, after hearing Hitler speak, he joined the Nazi Party. When the Nazis came to power, Speer was given the job of redesigning the ministerial residence of Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's chief of propaganda. The work Speer did on this job brought him to the attention of Hitler, who gave Speer the commission for the new Chancellery building. Together Hitler and Speer then began work on monumental plans to reconstruct Berlin and make it the capital (now to be called Germania) of the new Nazi Empire, with enormous public buildings that would dwarf all existing structures. The Great Hall was intended to be several times the size of St. Peter's Cathedral in Rome, which was then the largest single building in Europe. Speer managed to complete part of his plan before the war. Part of Berlin was torn down and to house Aryan Berliners living in this neighbourhood, Speer forcibly evicted Jews from almost six thousand apartments. As armaments minister during the war, Speer worked slave labourers to death to keep the German war machine going. When Germany was defeated, Speer did not think the victorious Allies would prosecute him for war crimes because he had, after all, been only an architect for Hitler. The Allies disagreed, putting Speer on trial in 1945 and sentencing him to twenty years in prison whilst his subordinate was hanged. For Speer's knowledge of the Holocaust despite his denials, see examples of my students' research projects  for the IBDP History course.

In this short trailer, Speer's work has been recreated in a detailed virtual 3D model, from his first commission for the Nazi Party in 1932, to the "Great Hall" that Hitler wished him to complete before 1950. This makes it possible to draw a direct comparison between the historic architecture of the old Berlin, and the buildings that were constructed and planned by the Nazis. Some of these buildings, which were originally erected under Albert Speer, still dominate the cityscape of modern Berlin, although their origin is largely unknown today.
Focusing on the time period between 1932 and 1940, the historic buildings of Voss Street were digitally recreated for this film. Aside from the architectural highlights on the street, such as the Ministry of Justice, the Bavarian legation and Palais Mosse, the film also discusses the building where Albert Speer executed his first contract for the Nazi Party in 1932. The way in which the construction of the New Reich's Chancellery influenced the character of the street is demonstrated, as well as the expansion of Voss Street that would have taken place by 1950. This expansion was never carried out, and formed part of the plans for the new Reich's Capital -- "Germania".

According to Hitler, Berlin could now finally become a 'truly’ German capital city: it was to be totally rebuilt and renamed Germania. Historians have devoted considerable attention to Hitler’s plans for the rebuilding of Berlin, but they have rarely acknowledged their effect on both the face of tourist Berlin and the meaning of a visit to the capital between 1933 and 1945. Yet it is impossible to overestimate the degree to which Berlin’s new buildings – among them, the Reich Chancellery, the Reich Sport Field, the Reich Ministry of Transportation and the Reich Aviation Ministry – became key sights for visitors to the city.

Semmens (46)Seeing Hitler's Germany: Tourism in the Third Reich

 At the rear of the building leading between Pariser Platz and Behrenstraße behind can be found Reinhold Begas's Der Prometheus in Fesseln. Based on the image of the famous wrestler Hackenschmidt, it was one of Begas's last works before his death when it remained in his widow's basement of her Berlin town house, until 1941 when the enthusiasm of the Nazi General Inspector Albert Speer acquired the sculpture in 1942 for the Central Office of the Inspector General for Construction in the Reich Capital and two years later walled it off for ,protection against bombing on the west side of the Ihneturm. It was finally unearthed in 1995 as shown here in time for the 300th anniversary of the Academy. However, in trying to chisel it out of its confines its penis was chipped off; it appears to have been restored today. This was only the most egregious indignity it suffered; the Nazis, before imprisoning it, had tried to clean the statue with sulfuric acid- possibly the worst thing one can do to Carrara marble. Among Begas's most important works include the Schiller Monument, the Neptune Fountain, the Kaiser Wilhelm National Monument and the Bismarck National Monument in Berlin.
After a 56 million Euro restoration, Berlin's Academy of the Arts re-opened at its historic location at Pariser Platz 4 between the Adlon Hotel and Brandenburg Gate. Founded in 1696, the Academy of the Arts offers a look back at a turbulent history that includes Nazi domination, destruction during the war, and the takeover by the East German Border Patrol after the division of Berlin. Designed by architects Behnisch & Partner and Werner Durth, the new glass and steel building is meant to reflect the dimensions of its original structure. Remnants of the former Academy have also been incorporated in the design, mirroring the building's history and destruction. 

The Reichstag

 

Three seminal photographs of 20th century Germany with the Reichstag as a backdrop all have one other thing in common- they have all been manipulated. The first photo shows Philipp Scheidemann proclaiming the end of the monarchy and birth of the Republic on November 9, 1918 by a window of the Reichstag. In reality, no-one would have been in a position to have heard anything he said. Later that afternoon Karl Liebknecht from the communist Spartakusbund called out the socialist Soviet republic from the palace. The centre photo of the Reichstag fire was manipulated to appear that the fire had been more widespread and devastating than it actually was, limited mainly to the central council chamber. The third shows the iconic raising of the Soviet flag which had been altered to remove the extra watch worn by the soldier as it appeared to confirm the systematic stealing of watches from Berliners. The original photo (top) was altered (bottom) by editing the watch on the soldier's right wrist.

My 2016 class in front of the Reichstag, Germany's parliament in Berlin. The name together with its monumental size make most people associate Germany's neoclassical parliamentary building with the Nazis, but Hitler and his party have little history here. After hosting parliamentary sessions since 1894, one month after Hitler was appointed chancellor in January 1933, it was set on fire by Dutch communist Marinus van der Lubbe. In the years during which it abutted the Wall as a conference centre, West Berliners played football on its lawn, whilst later artist Christo famously wrapped it in cloth. It did not serve as parliament again until a reunited German government returned to Berlin in 1999. Renovated by Sir Norman Foster, this building is perhaps the most public federal building in the world through its glass-dome tourist attraction. On the rooftop, photographs documenting the building's history circle the rim above the parliament chamber. Two ramps spiral up the side of the dome, an engineering feat even more fascinating than the panoramic view from the top.

On February 27 1933 the Reichstag was set ablaze whilst Hitler attended a dinner at Goebbels’s residence, from where “an underground passage” connected to the Reichstag was built. Their meal was interrupted by an important telephone call from Dr. Hanfstaengel stating that the Reichstag was on fire. Following this message Hitler and Goebbels immediately made their way to the crime scene, giving orders that all leaders of the German Communist Party should "be hanged that very night." Paul von Hindenburg vetoed this decision but did agree that Hitler should take "dictatorial powers". KPD candidates in the election were arrested and Hermann Goering announced that the Nazi Party planned "to exterminate" German communists. President Hindenburg and the vice-chancellor Von Papen also raced to the burning of the Reichstag straight away. The “night watchman Rudolf Scholz had started his customary round of inspection” after the last meeting had taken place in the Reichstag. “At 20:30 he passed the Session Chamber” reassuring himself “that everything was in order”. Additionally the Reichstag Postman, Willi Ott, who was also in the building around that time “hadn't noticed anything suspicious” either.

He was the last person to leave the Reichstag at about 20:55. Shortly after 21:00, the theology student Hans Flöter passed by the southwestern side of the Reichstag on his way home from the State Library. A sound of breaking glass, which came from the Reichstag building, startled him. He immediately alerted the main staff sergeant Karl Buwert, claiming that he saw a figure holding a burning object. At 21:10 another Student, who also claimed to have seen someone, perhaps even more than one person, notified the Brandenburg Gate Guard Station about the fire. At 21.14 the first fire truck arrived. Right after Lieutenant Lateit peeked into the Chamber of the Reichstag, he was convinced that only one person could not have started so many individual fires. The right-wing political leaders where confident that the arsonist was a Communist. This accusation was confirmed initially when  “the police arrested a young Dutch Communist, van der Lubbe, who was found in the deserted building in circumstances which left little doubt that he was responsible.” It was 21:27. During van der Lubbe’s interrogation, the young man confessed that: “something absolutely had to be done in protest against this system. I considered arson a suitable method.” Although Lubbe was blamed for the arson, some believe the Nazis exploited the fire to their advantage as they introduced an Emergency decree to suspend civil rights. Despite this decree the Nazis failed to get a majority in the March Election. The Enabling act of March 5 in 1933 was introduced, to effectively dissolve the Reichstag and ban all Communist parties.
The burning of the Reichstag led to the so-called Reichstag Fire Decree, the Enabling Act and ultimately Hitler’s rise to power, giving rise to the question of who was responsible for this crime. On March 23, 1933, the German Reichstag passed the Enabling Bill banning the German Communist Party and the Social Democratic Party from taking part in future election campaigns. This was followed by Nazi officials being put in charge of all local government in the provinces (7th April), trades unions being abolished, their funds taken and their leaders put in prison (2nd May), and a law passed making the Nazi Party the only legal political party in Germany (14th July). There are three main arguments, which are debated until today; these include the involvement of the Nazis, the sole guilt of Marinus van der Lubbe and whether or whether not the crime had been a communist plot.  
Nazi involvement in the Reichstag Fire is supported by the fact that the Nazis built an underground passage to the Reichstag in which storm troopers dispersed “gasoline and self-igniting chemicals” on the night of the arson under the order of the S.A leader Karl Ernst. Even though the locksmith Wingurth declared that the tunnel into the Reichstag had many locked doors, which where found to be closed after the fire, one must know that the Nazis have asked him to advocate their innocence at the Nuremberg Trials. Even the official of the Prussian Ministry testified at the Nuremberg trials that Goebbels had the initial idea of burning down the Reichstag. Additionally General Franz Halder witnessed Goering shouting "The only one who really knows about the Reichstag is I, because I set it on fire!" However Goering denied his participation in the Fire at the Nuremberg Trials. It seems most reasonable blaming the Nazis for the burning of the Reichstag as according to Seftan Delmer “the fire was started by the Nazis, who used the incident as a pretext to outlaw political opposition and impose dictatorship.” 

Standing inside the preserved section of tunnel that connected the Reichstag to Goering's office across the street and on October 18, 1933 when a delegation inspected the Reichstag's tunnel to piece together the conditions of its burning. According to Shirer, who worked as a reporter during the Third Reich in Germany and had access to firsthand information (since pretty much discredited), 

From Goering’s Reichstag President’s Palace an underground passage, built to carry the central heating system, ran to the Reichstag building. Through this tunnel Karl Ernst, a former hotel bellhop who had become the Berlin S.A. leader, led a small detachment of storm troopers on the night of February 27 to the Reichstag, where they scattered gasoline and self-igniting chemicals and then made their way quickly back to the palace the way they had come. At the same time a half-witted Dutch Communist with a passion for arson, Marinus van der Lubbe, had made his way into the huge, darkened and to him unfamiliar building and set some small fires of his own.
 (171) Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich

At the trial at Leipzig enough evidence suggested that van der Lubbe “did not possess the means to set so vast a building on fire so quickly.” The testimony of experts at the trial shows that more than one person must have set the fire, as such a widespread fire would have required large quantities of chemicals and gasoline. It was therefore obvious “that one man could not have carried them into the building alone.” However  van der Lubbe, who already had a criminal record, had attempted several times earlier to arson different buildings in order to protest against the German government.  These failures could have encouraged the 24-year old Communist to aim other sites such as in this case the Reichstag. Additionally van der Lubbe was caught with “flammable materials”, “sweating” and “breathing heavily” during his interrogation as if he just came from the crime scene. Lubbe’s behaviour during his interrogation and his items he was carrying with him clearly show that he had to do something with the fire. Why otherwise would he have carried around flammable materials on that particular day? Furthermore Kellerhof supports the theory of van der Lubbe being solely responsible for the fire as an own initiative to protest against the German system. He claims that a few flammable materials would have been enough to conduct the fire in the Reichstag alone, as the breaking of the glass of the dome of the Reichstag encouraged the contact between fire and oxygen, spreading the fire even more. This is also supported by  Dr. Walter Zirpnis claiming at the Nuremberg trials that van der Lubbe acted by himself, even though Ernst Togler, Dimitroff, Popov and Tanev gave themselves up to the police. They only did this as a trigger to the police’s announcement to hang Marinus van der Lubbe. 
Standing within the Reichstag with Göring's former office shown behind across the street; the view would have been blocked by the Berlin wall during the Cold War. In his book published 1963 Tobias described the use of the famous tunnel from this building to the Reichstag was just an “ingenious communist speculation”. However, Tobias has been accused of dismissing “forensic evidence such as the testimony of fire experts who claimed the necessity of multiple arsonists to set the fire” whilst Richard Evans writes how “numerous forgeries and falsifications have been found among the documentary evidence purporting to prove Nazi involvement”. Indeed, Benjamin Carter claims that Tobias was a "senior official of Germany’s domestic intelligence services” who benefited from his personal ties to Gestapo officers. Nevertheless, in the so-called Brown Book published by the Communist activist Willi Münzenberg, there was enough evidence presented arguing that SA officers had accessed the Reichstag via the tunnel connected to Göering’s basement and started the fire. On the night of the fire Göering and Hitler were having dinner together at Göering’s apartment. In his book, Carter states ‘[t]he following day, a new draft now called Decree for the protection of the German people was set. This draft allowed the banning (..) of political meetings and political associations if they posed a threat to public security. But here again, Hitler demonstrated his sense of timing and political calculations”. For Hett, the fire happened so near the federal election that it could not have been just a mere coincidence; it was clearly done by the Nazis, who wanted to benefit politically from the event by pointing their fingers to both the Communists and Social Democrats. “Now the Red pest is being thoroughly rooted out.” (Goebbels) after communists were arrested by the SA. However, as Tobias explains in his book, the Nazis could not have been involved in the fire as by allowing Van der Lubbe to stand trial the Nazis already proved their innocence; if the Dutch communist had been in fact associated with  them, the Nazis would have gotten rid of him before the police could have had the chance to question the suspect.  

Nazis entering the Reichstag and the council chamber on August 30, 1932, the day Hermann Göring was elected President of the Reichstag. On that day KPD member Clara Zetkin, socialist-communist politician, peace activist and women's rights activist, had travelled to Berlin especially for this purpose, opened the inaugural session as the oldest member of the Reichstag. She had recently recovered from a severe bout of malaria and was still very weak but devoted her opening speech to the fight against fascism. She accused the SPD of having been the pacesetter of the presidential cabinets, which she described as reactionary and pro-fascist. In accordance with the duties of a senior member of the Reichstag, she presided over the election of Göring as President of the Reichstag and then handed over the chair of the session to him. The Nazis had listened to Zetkin's speech without heckling or other disruptions, and this session is the only surviving audio recording from the Reichstag in which Zetkin can be heard. As a result of the Reichstag Fire Decree, Zetkin moved to the Soviet Union dying shortly after on June 20, 1933 at the age of almost 76. Stalin himself carried the urn to the burial where she is one of the few Germans to be buried at the Kremlin wall. Her brain, like that of Lenin and Mayakovsky, was kept in the Moscow Institute for Brain Research.

Inside the chamber during my 2013 Bavarian International School trip and as it appeared during the era of the Weimar Republic. Hitler would utilise the Reichstag Fire to set the tone of his political trajectory. His speech on March 23, 1933, aimed at securing approval for the Enabling Act, underscores this. He declared, "The Reichstag fire was the work of the enemies of the German people. It was a terrorist act aimed at our new government's efforts to restore order." The narrative that the Nazi Party was Germany's guardian against threats of communism and internal chaos emerged through his words, leveraging the Reichstag fire as a political instrument. The 1935 Nuremberg Rally, officially known as the "Rally of Freedom", commemorated the Enabling Act. Goebbels, delivering the opening speech, underlined the Reichstag Fire's significance, stating, "Two years ago, Germany was still under the crushing yoke of the Treaty of Versailles... The Reichstag fire was a signal to rise up and fight this oppression." The fire was metaphorically represented as the impetus that propelled their struggle against the oppressive Versailles Treaty. Speer's ambitious architectural project also demonstrated the Reichstag's symbolic role. His memoirs reveal Hitler's vision for the new Reichstag: "It was to be crowned with a huge dome, inside of which there would be an assembly room for party leaders, a symbol of their dominance over the Reichstag, which Hitler regarded as synonymous with the weak and despised Weimar democracy."

Dieter Appett's memorial directly in front of the Reichstag commemorating the 96 Social Democratic and Communist Reichstag delegates murdered under the Third Reich.

Memorial room inside the Reichstag dedicated to those members killed or victimised during the Nazi regime.

From our 2011 and 2013 class trips, showing on the right the site on May 15, 1919, amidst a protest against the Versailles treaty.  

A total of 89 heavy artillery guns and Katyusha rocket launchers were trained on the Reichstag for a thunderous barrage before the infantry stormed it, turning the structure into a ruin. I'm sitting on the steps on the right, providing a comparison to its ruined state immediately after the war.
The GIF on the left shows the area around the Reichstag being cleared of rubble and the site today soon after my class of 2023 detrained and began their walk to our hostel. Immediately after the end of the war, the Reichstag building, which had been heavily contested for the last time, stood as a partial ruin in an environment characterised by rubble. The surrounding open spaces were used by the starving population to grow potatoes and vegetables. The city  encouraged participation in clearing the rubble and helping rebuild by making the second-highest category of food ration cards available to the so-called 'Rubble Women', or Trümmerfrauen. The myth is one of smiling women cheerfully lugging stones and bricks which has now become ingrained in the German collective consciousness; her statue now erected all over the country in her honour. However, this campaign originally only worked in the eastern sector where the Trümmerfrau ideal became the role model for women seeking traditional male work and not in the area here within the British sector which maintained the traditional view of a woman’s role. In fact, Leonie Treber calls the story of the Trümmerfrau a myth given that not only was there not a particularly large number of women involved in the clearing of the rubble, those who did help did so involuntarily. Treber's doctorate at Duisburg-Essen University about them. Before that, the subject had not been studied academically. She has recently published a book based on her research called “The Myth of the Trümmerfrauen.” According to Treber, the role that women played in clearing out all of that rubble was minor; whilst in Berlin 60,000 women are documented as having worked to clear rubble, this constituted but 5% of the female population of the city.

The battle-strewn area around the Reichstag and my 2021 senior class. The same area today is parkland but at the time the open spaces around the starving population served to cultivate potatoes and vegetables. The dome itself was controversially blown up on November 1, 1954, due to alleged static uncertainty and to relieve the damaged building. In the following years, the newly founded Federal Building Administration was limited to securing the building. In 1961 the architect Paul Baumgarten was awarded as the winner of a restricted admission competition for planning and leading the reconstruction, which was completed in 1973. Numerous decorative elements of the façade fell away, the corner towers were reduced in height, and a new dome was dispensed with. The damaged, but largely preserved, elaborate interior design was almost completely removed.  

Me sitting on the steps leading to the entrance of the Reichstag and the original iconic image of a demoralised German soldier amidst the ruins. The remains disappeared behind covering panels; new mezzanines increased the useful area and largely changed the original spatial structure. The Chamber was now twice as large and could have accommodated all the members of a reunited Germany although ever since the four-power agreement of 1971, no plenary sessions of the Bundestag were allowed to be held in Berlin. Instead, only committee or group meetings were possible in the newly established rooms.  Baumgarten's interventions (which cost 110 million marks reflect the lack of taste and sensitivity seen in postwar architechture everywhere. Thus and decorative design was taboo and straight lines and smooth surfaces dominated. Historic preservation aspects had little weight. In addition, in the case of the Reichstag building, there was a special motif, beyond aesthetic considerations: the building was originally, despite its parliamentary destiny, the symbol of a pre-democratic form of state. This was followed by a weak democracy and a brutal dictatorship. The Germans had just found their way back to a still young democracy and so it therefore only seemed logical to distance themselves from the past with clear cuts, and with a strictly contemporary aesthetic. During the partition of Berlin, the Reichstag building was located in the British sector, but the Berlin Wall ran directly on the east side of the building. The “lonely, shot up Reichstag” became a symbol – as “sandstone cutolos in no-man’s-to-hearland between the enemy world systems.” In the building was a museum about the Bundestag and the history of the Reichstag building. For foreign state guests, the visit to the outdoor terraces with a view of the Berlin Wall was part of the usual programme. Here on the left is the scene the day after the breaching of the wall and today. Since 1971, the building has shown the exhibition “Questions to German History” and visited by several million interested parties. On the initiative of Federal Chancellor Helmut Kohl and his Federal Minister of State, Oscar Schneider, an expert report was obtained from Gottfried Böhm from RWTH Aachen in 1985 on how the building could be used in the future – especially in the case of reunification – and what modifications would be required. The report was treated confidentially. Until 1988, Böhm designed a glass dome that went to visitors and should symbolise openness and democratic participation. After German reunification the first session of the Bundestag in the reunified Germany took place in the Reichstag; for the first time with the 144 members, who were sent to the Bundestag by the freely elected Volkskammer for the period until the first all-German election. The meeting was sworn in to the meeting and Federal Chancellor Helmut Kohl made his government statement. Nevertheless the use of the Reichstag building was only determined by the Bundestag after an intensive and controversial debate in the Capital Decree on June 20, 1991 in Bonn by a narrow majority of 338 to 320 votes. 

On the left Soviet soldier private Mikhail Makarov looks at the destroyed Reichstag and my 2017 cohort. A competition was announced for the conversion of the Reichstag building in 1993, its main planning criteria being transparency, clarity and exemplary energy technology. Norman Foster had planned a freestanding, transparent roof over the actual building and parts of the surrounding area – a proposal that was not subject to sufficient public approval for aesthetic reasons (it was dubbed “Germany’s largest petrol station”), but also because of the expected costs of 1.3 billion marks. In a completely new draft, Foster had not planned a dome for the roof of the Reichstag, expressly distancing himself from any elevation on the roof that would be built "for purely symbolic reasons". On May 8, 1995, Foster's final design for a glass, walk-in dome was presented which architect Calatrava claimed  was a plagiarism of his own competition entry, which provided for a transparent dome of similar form. Regardless, the order to Foster for the reconstruction of the parliament seat was subject to the strict requirement that the total costs were not allowed to exceed 600 million marks, including all expenses for the dome, as well as the incidental costs and fees. Foster today has now been appointed to redesign Old Trafford for Manchester United. Meanwhile numerous original components were recovered and later included within the finished interior. Respect for the historic building fabric was one of the demands made to the architects in which traces of history should remain visible even after the renovation. This includes graffiti of Soviet soldiers in Cyrillic script from the May days of 1945. Initially, the surroundings and installations of Baumgarten from the 1960s were removed; 45,000 tonnes of debris had to be removed. In order to guarantee the stability of the modified building, ninety new ones were added to the 2300 support piles that Paul Wallot had once sunk underground of the building.  The shell was started in June 1996 as within the centre of the building, a new building in the old building was built. It mainly includes the Chamber, which extends over all three main floors and was changed so that the Presidium is now placed on the east side, as in the early days of the building. The plenary hall is also illuminated by a mirror system that didicates daylight from the dome to the hall. On the second floor are offices and reception rooms of the parliament president and the meeting room of the council of elders; on the third floor, the offices of the members of parliament and the parliamentary groups as well as the central press lobby are housed. A roof terrace with a restaurant for MEPs is also open to the public after prior security check. The north and south wing, about two thirds of the building, remained as a historic existence and were merely renovated.  Contemporary materials such as exposed concrete, glass and steel were used in the new building, predominantly limestone and sandstone in bright, warm colours in the old building sector. A newly developed colour concept is to contribute to the clarity in the building. A total of nine, sometimes very strong colours characterise different areas. The rooms were given round-coloured wooden panels – some of which was perceived as problematic in relation to the works of art shown there. 

More Soviet soldiers died getting from where my Bavarian International School cohort of 2023 is standing to get the picture of the Soviet standard on the roof for Stalin than the British, Canadians and Americans who died storming the beaches at Normandy. The Reichstag had been seen as symbolic of, and at the heart of, the "fascist beast." It was arguably the most symbolic target in Berlin.  On April 30 there had been tremendous pressure from Stalin to take the building in time for the International Workers' Day, May 1.

 At 1300 hours, a thundering barrage from 152mm and 203mm howitzers, tank guns, SPGs, and Katyusha rocket launchers - in all, 89 guns - was loosed against the Reichstag. A number of infantrymen joined in with captured Panzerfausts. Smoke and debris almost completely obscured the bright, sunny day. Captain Neustroyev's battalion was the first to move. Crouching next to the captain, Sergeant Ishchanov requested and was granted permission to be the first to break into the building with his section. Slipping out of a window on the first floor of the Interior Ministry building, Ishchanov's men began crawling across the open, broken ground towards the Reichstag, and rapidly secured entrances at several doorways and holes in the outer wall. Captain Neustroyev took the rest of the forward company, with their Red Banner, and raced across the space, bounding up the central staircase and through the doors and breaches in the wall. The company cleared the first floor easily, but quickly discovered that the massive building's upper floors and extensive underground labyrinth were occupied by a substantial garrison of German soldiers. One floor at a time, they began attempting to reduce the German force. The task uppermost in everyone's mind was to make their way to the top and raise the banner; the soldiers who succeeded in this symbolic act, it had been promised, would be made Heroes of the Soviet Union. Fighting their way up the staircase to the second floor with grenades, Sergeants Yegorov and Kantariya managed to hang their battalion's banner from a second-floor window, but their efforts to take the third floor were repeatedly thrown back. It was 1425 hours. 

Bahm (155-156) Berlin 1945: The Final Reckoning

Standing at the site of the most costly photograph ever taken showing Mikhail Yegorov and Meliton Kantaria of the 756th Rifle Regiment raising a handmade Soviet flag over the Reichstag.  Initially, two planes dropped several large red banners on the roof that appeared to have caught on the bombed-out dome. Additionally, a number of reports had reached headquarters that two parties, M. M. Bondar from the 380th Rifle Regiment and Captain V. N. Makov of the 756th might have been able to hoist a flag during the day of April 30. These reports were received by Marshal Zhukov, who issued an announcement stating that his troops had captured the Reichstag and hoisted a flag. However, when correspondents arrived, they found no Soviets in the building, but rather they were pinned down outside by German fire. After fierce fighting both outside and inside the building, a flag was raised at 22.40 on April 30, when 23-year-old Rakhimzhan Qoshqarbaev climbed the building and inserted a flag into the crown of the mounted female statue of "Germania", symbolising Germany. As this happened at night, it was too dark to take a photograph. The next day the flag was taken down by the Germans. The Red Army finally gained control of the entire building on May 2. When Khaldei scaled the now pacified Reichstag to take his picture, he was carrying with him a large flag, sewn from three tablecloths for this very purpose, by his uncle. The official story would later be that two hand-picked soldiers, Meliton Kantaria (Georgian) and Mikhail Yegorov (Russian), raised the Soviet flag over the Reichstag, and the photograph would often be used as depicting the event. Some authors state that for political reasons the subjects of the photograph were changed and the actual man to hoist the flag was Alyosha Kovalyov, a Ukrainian, who was told by the NKVD to keep quiet about it. However, according to Khaldei himself, when he arrived at the Reichstag, he simply asked the soldiers who happened to be passing by to help with the staging of the photoshoot; there were only four of them, including Khaldei, on the roof- the one who was attaching the flag was 18-year-old Private Alexei Kovalyov from Kiev, the two others were Abdulkhakim Ismailov from Dagestan and Leonid Gorychev (also mentioned as Aleksei Goryachev) from Minsk.

 While the loose scrum fought in chaos, two men of the banner group tried to slip past to race for the roof with their red flag. They managed to reach the second floor before they were pinned down by machine-gun fire. The regiment claimed that a second attempt at 10.50 p.m. succeeded and the red flag flew from the cupola of the Reichstag. This version must be treated with extreme caution, since Soviet propaganda was fixated with the idea of the Reichstag being captured by 1 May. Whatever the exact time, the `hoisting of the Red Flag of Victory' was a superficial gesture at that stage, since even the official accounts acknowledge the ferocity of the fighting, which continued all night. As the Soviet troops fought their way upstairs, the Germans from the cellars attacked them from behind. At one point Lieutenant Klochkov saw a group of his soldiers crouched in a circle as if examining something on the floor. They all suddenly leaped back together and he saw that it was a hole. The group had just dropped grenades in unison on to the heads of unsuspecting Germans on the floor below.  

Beevor (365-6) Berlin: The Downfall 1945

My 2017 cohort surreptitiously holding the Bavarian International School banner above the Reichstag. When the fighting was over, Marshal Zhukov found over twenty reports and recommendations for the title of Hero of the Soviet Union on his desk. The documents showed different and contradictory accounts of the time and location of hoisting the Banner of Victor)'. Zhukov announced that no one was to receive the HSU title until the confusion was sorted out. For the time being, the men would receive the lesser award of the Order of the Red Banner. Col. Fyodor Zinchenko, commander of the 756th Rifle Regiment, which stormed the Reichstag, was awarded the title of HSU on May 31, 1945, as was Lt. Col. Naum Peysakhovski of the 164th. However, the other men connected with the banner raising did not receive the HSU title until a year later, on the first anniversary of the end of the Great Patriotic War. On May 8, 1946, Capt. Stepan Neustroyev, Sgt. Mikhail Yegorov, and Jr. Sgt. Meliton Kantaria became Heroes of the Soviet Union, followed by Sgt. Maj. Ilya Syanov a week later. Lt. Alexei Berest, who surely deserved the award, was ignored. In 2002, veterans of Rostov sent a petition to President Putin to recognise Berest with the title of Hero of Russia. Berest had died long before, killed in 1970 whilst saving a girl from under the wheels of a train.

Inside the dome, which is has now developed into a much-visited attraction and a landmark of Berlin. Registered visitors can enter the building through the west portal. After a security check, one can first access the 24-metre-high accessible roof by means of an elevator; one of my students had been detained after attempting to bring a crude Chinese star into the building with unfortunate results.  The dome has the shape of a half rotational ellipsoid with a diameter of 38 metres and a height of 23.5 metres, and its steel skeleton consists of 24 vertical ribs at intervals of 15°. The peak height of the dome is 47 m above the ground – significantly lower than that of Paul Wallot. By November 2010, as long as the dome was freely accessible, an average of 8,000 visitors were counted every day. The number fell sharply when access was limited for security reasons, and today about three million visitors per year are admitted. Due to the threat of Islamist terror attacks, the dome was briefly closed in November and December 2010 but today has reopened for individuals and groups, but only after previous online registration. In the first week of March, 2011, a 30-year old Canadian tourist was arrested on Saturday for posing for a photograph whilst giving the Nazi salute outside the Reichstag according to the Telegraph. Berlin police arrived on the scene within seconds, handcuffed him and took his camera's memory card. The pose is a chargeable offence of up to six months in prison, yet the man was freed after being held in custody for several hours.

Zhukov, Marshal of the Soviet Union and commander of the 1st Belorussian Front during the Battle of Berlin, visiting the Reichstag the day after it fell on May 3, 1945 with Red Army General Nikolai Berzarin, commander of the 5th Shock Army during the battle, the first unit to enter Berlin,  and my Bavarian International School cohort in 2018, and my cohort five years later on the left in 2023. Tsarist military tradition awarded command of a successfully besieged city to the first general to enter it and so Berzarin was made commander of the Berlin Occupation Forces. He would die in a mysterious truck accident a few weeks later which bore all the hallmarks of the NKVD. Acting as their guide on the left with a sling holster is Arthur Pieck, son of Wilhelm Pieck who would later serve as the first President of East Germany. This younger Pieck served as an interpreter for Berzarin's 5th Shock Army. Also with Zhukov is Lieutenant General Konstantin Telegin, Zhukov's deputy and political Commissar. Already the building is completely covered in Cyrillic graffiti with some of the words on the pillar behind Zhukov reading "Misha" "Antokhin" and "cousins".  Zhukov added his name to the graffiti before touring the ruins of the Chancellery and Fuhrerbunker, not knowing that his own 3rd Shock Army had found the bodies of Adolf and Eva Hitler. 

Standing in one of the rooms that keeps the preserved graffiti displayed. In 1999, there was still discussion about the preservation of Russian graffiti given it recorded a triumph of the victors over defeated Germany with an appeal to remove the writings completely. Although their appeal fell on deaf ears, it is important to note that with the interference and the request of the Russian Embassy, some graffiti messages due to their vulgarity were removed, mostly those which contained abuse or politically motivated remarks, and the surviving graffiti cleaned and preserved under the supervision of Berlin’s Head of Conservation. This censorship is a real shame which prevents one fom being able to form a comprehensive picture of the Soviet liberators, with all the simplicity and pure, rough emotional expression of Soviet-subjected peoples, a somewhat sanitised version of history is oresented, further alienating us from the events. That said, the vast majority of the graffiti consisted of the formula ‘... was here’ (‘здесь был’), followed by the date or the name of the soldier’s hometown or region, his rank, the route taken by his troops or the military unit to which he belonged. A few contained abuse or such innocuous politically-motivated remarks, such as "Gornin was here and spat" and "They’ve paid the price for Leningrad". Others indicate that the writers had confused the Reichstag building with the Reich Chancellery such as that which reads "[w]e were in the Reichstag, in Hitler’s den! Captain Koklyushkin, Senior Lieutenant Krasnikov, J. 15/V 45". Some soldiers recorded pride in their military prowess: ‘Glory to the pontoon builders, who conquered the Spree and its canals. We were in the Reichstag 6.5.45 , Ivanov and Tchikhlin’. One graffito shows an heart pierced by an arrow accompanied by the words ‘Anatoli and Galina’. The hometowns and regions reflect the ethnic and political diversity of the peoples from the Soviet Union who made up the Red Army. ‘Todorov V.I.’ and ‘Todovrov V.’, for example, state that they came from the Donbass, whilst ‘Shevchenko’ is ‘from Ukraine’. Others reveal ‘Marched Teheran – Baku – Berlin’ or name their home as the Caucasus, Yerevan or Novosibirsk. In view of the large number of graffiti it's hardly surprising that some of their originators can still be identified decades later. Anar Nayafov, a student from Azerbaijan on an internship with a member of the Bundestag, discovered a graffito written by his grandfather Mamed Nayafov. Veterans Pavel Zolotaryov and Professor Boris Sapunov, both from St Petersburg, actually found the graffiti they had written over half a century earlier. One tour guide spoke of how "[a] group of veterans’ wives from what was then Stalingrad examined the graffiti. After the tour an elderly woman from the group came up to me and told me that her deceased husband said he’d been here and had also immortalised himself. Tears flowed when the old woman eventually stood in front of her husband’s written testimony." The Cyrillic graffiti are thus more than pieces of historical evidence but serve to bring history to life and deliver the recording of major events into the hands of those who experienced them at first hand and who often enough were forced to suffer from them. One remaining bit of vulgarity has been allowed to remain however, barely legible in the building’s southeastern corner: “I fuck Hitler in the arse.”

Hidden for fifty years, the graffiti was rediscovered by architect Lord Norman Foster and his team when they began work on the building in 1995 and preserved as part of the concept of the Reichstag as a "living museum" of German history. When  at the Reichstag a student alerted me to these ϟϟ runes scrawled onto the wall. They're of a different colour and, given they are an illegal symbol and other graffito had been removed by the authorities, I assumed they are a recent addition. However, when I directed my guide in 2022 to this, he remarked that they were probably made by an officer given the use of the colour. In his preface to Berlin, Beevor wrote 

The Nazis' enemies had first been able to visualise their moment of vengeance just over two years before. On 1 February 1943, an angry Soviet colonel collared a group of emaciated German prisoners in the rubble of Stalingrad. "That's how Berlin is going to look!" he yelled, pointing to the ruined buildings all around. When I read those words some six years ago, I sensed immediately what my next book had to be. Among the graffiti preserved on the Reichstag's walls in Berlin, one can still see the two cities linked by Russians exulting in their revenge, forcing the invaders from their furthest point of eastward advance right back to the heart of the Reich.

Marija Filippowna Limanskaja directing traffic by the Brandenburg Gate with the Reichstag behind on May 5, 1945 and students from my 2024 cohort at the site today. Known as Masha, she'd voluntarily joined the Red Army as a military policewoman in 1942. Not much is known about her early days in the military other than that she'd served as a soldier in places such as Sevastopol and Rostov-on-Don and narrowly escaped with her life several times. It so happened that shortly after she left a shelter, the house was destroyed by an aerial bomb. She was just as lucky when she was almost run over by a passing truck. She became famous when she was filmed and photographed by the Soviet photographer and war correspondent Yevgeny Khaldei whose photos he took were published in numerous newspapers around the world. After her time in front of the Brandenburg Gate, she was deployed as a traffic police officer at the Potsdam Conferences in July 1945 where she had the great honour of meeting Churchill himself who asked her whether the English soldiers had kept their manners towards her and her colleagues, to which she replied "[i]f they don't, our soldiers will defend us." Churchill walked away smiling. Limanskaya later recalled that "[he] looked precisely the way I imagined him, puffing on a cigar". After the war, Limanskaya married and had two daughters, but they separated relatively quickly. After a long period alone, she married the war veteran Viktor and was married to him for 23 years until his death. Limanskaya turned 100 on April 12, 2024.

The Red Army marching past the Reichstag on the left on what is now Friedrich-Ebert-Platz. This square, separated from the northern section of Ebertstraße, lies between Reichstagufer and Dorotheenstraße on the border of the district of Tiergarten. The rear of the Reichstag building and the listed Reichstag President's Palace, completed in 1904, with a garden and tunnel to the Reichstag building are located here. In the area of ​​the square is the White Crosses memorial site, which symbolically commemorates the victims of the Wall. Only the building in the background survives from the time. Behind me can be seen, across the Spree, the Library of the German Bundestag. Completed in 2024, as a library it leaves much to be desired; its five levels make the routes long and time-consuming and the noise pollution between the open levels is exacerbated by the concrete surfaces. The facade, which is completely glazed to the south and west has the disadvantage that light and sunlight have a negative effect on the lighting and air conditioning of the room.

The Swiss Embassy near the Reichstag during the Battle for Berlin and my 2022 cohort in front. The building was used as the Soviet Red Army headquarters during the battle for Berlin. This building is in fact the only one to emerge intact after the war. It was completed by the architect Friedrich Hitzig in 1871 as a private city palace. The Swiss Confederation acquired the building in 1919 when, after renovations, it served as the chancellery of the Swiss legation from 1920.  It survived both Hitler's demolition work for his "world capital Germania" and the war to end up as the only building in the Spreebogen without serious damage. In the final phase of the struggle for Berlin in late April 1945, the embassy was temporarily occupied by Soviet troops and served as a base for the conquest of the Reichstag. During the bombing raids, the embassy was housed in Rauschendorf Castle near Sonnenberg. When in October 1992 after the final decision had been made in favour of Berlin as the federal capital, the building became the seat of a branch office of the Swiss Embassy in Bonn.  The embassy building was renovated and received a controversial extension on the east side by the architects Diener & Diener as shown in the then-and-now GIF above. 

Past the embassy towards the central railway station across the river is the Moltke bridge which saw heavy fighting during the Battle of Berlin in April 1945 at the end of the war. A damaged griffin is left on the bank beside the bridge as a reminder, shown inset and circled as it appeared during the fighting. Though damaged, the bridge itself was one of the few to survive the war and looks similar to the original construction, though it was repaired and strengthened to take the weight of modern traffic. 

The bridge before the battle when German defenders, about five thousand members of the ϟϟ and Volksturm, barricaded the bridge at both ends and wired it for demolition, and my Bavarian International School seniors at the same spot in 2020. Beevor describes the action in Berlin: The Downfall 1945 (340, 347–349) when, on April 28, units of the Soviet 3rd Shock Army, commanded by Major-General S.N. Perevertkin, fought their way down Alt-Moabit towards the bridge:

 Another 6oo metres beyond stood the Reichstag, which from time to time became visible when the smoke cleared. For the 15oth and the 171st Rifle Divisions, it seemed so close now, and yet they had no illusions about the dangers ahead. They knew that many of them would die before they could raise their red banners over the building chosen by Stalin as the symbol of Berlin. Their commanders, to please Comrade Stalin, wanted the building captured in time for it to be announced at the May Day celebrations in Moscow.The advance down to the Moltke bridge began on the afternoon of 28 April. The lead battalions from the two divisions left from the same start-line, further emphasising the race. The bridge ahead was barricaded on both sides. It was mined and protected with barbed wire and covered by machine-gun and artillery fire from both flanks. Shortly before 6 p.m., there was a deafening detonation as the Germans blew the Moltke bridge. When the smoke and dust settled, it became clear that the demolition had not been entirely successful. The bridge sagged, but was certainly passable by infantry. 

From the same spot, showing the bridge a month later with the griffin completely destroyed. By midnight, the Soviet 150th and 171st rifle divisions had secured the bridgehead against any counterattack the Germans could muster. From here they moved on the Reichstag, which they captured on May Day.