The Brandenburg Gate: Architecture, Propaganda, and Division

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 its 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.

My 2026 senior cohort and the site as it appeared in a 1938 potscard.
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.

On November 9, 1918 revolutionary sailors, soldiers and civilians occupied Pariser Platz in front of the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin. The sailors belonged to the movement that had begun with the naval mutiny in Kiel on November 3 and then spread across northern Germany. In the capital they linked up with striking workers and units of the Berlin garrison that refused further orders. The demonstration formed part of the rapid collapse of imperial authority that day.  Two competing proclamations of a republic were issued within hours of each other. Philipp Scheidemann of the Majority Social Democratic Party announced a German Republic from a window of the Reichstag in order to forestall more radical demands. Later the same afternoon Karl Liebknecht of the Spartacus Group proclaimed a free socialist republic from the Berlin Palace. The Spartacists, soon to become the core of the Communist Party of Germany, demanded a system based on workers’ and soldiers’ councils. The Majority Social Democrats rejected that course and sought a parliamentary democracy. To prevent a further shift to the left, the new government under Friedrich Ebert concluded an agreement with the Supreme Army Command. Volunteer Freikorps units, composed largely of demobilised officers and soldiers hostile to the revolution, were deployed against the radical left. In January 1919 they crushed the Spartacist uprising in Berlin. Rosa Luxemburg and Liebknecht were arrested and murdered. Similar Freikorps actions followed in other parts of Germany throughout 1919 and 1920. These decisions had lasting consequences. The officer corps and the judiciary remained largely unreformed. Large sections of the nationalist right regarded the republic as the product of betrayal and disorder. The “stab-in-the-back” legend, the humiliation of the Versailles Treaty, and the memory of armed workers and sailors on the streets of 1918–19 became central elements of right-wing propaganda. Many former Freikorps members later found their way into the early Nazi Party and its paramilitary organisations. The events of November 9, 1918 therefore mark both the end of the monarchy and the opening of the political polarisation that the Nazis were able to exploit in the following decade. 

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 and with my BIS cohort. 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 and me at the spot 80 years later. Goebbels is shown addressing a gathering of 8,000 Volkssturm recruits that morning. Arriving in a Mercedes-Benz 770 limousine, he ascended the platform flanked by Gauleiter Ernst Schlange and Volkssturm inspector Oberstleutnant Hans von Herwarth, delivering a 32-minute speech broadcast live via the Großdeutscher Rundfunk to 12,000,000 listeners. He declared: “Here at the Brandenburg Gate, symbol of German greatness, the Volkssturm swears to hold Berlin street by street, house by house, until the last enemy is crushed.” The address outlined immediate defensive assignments, allocating 1,800 men to fortify the Tiergarten sector with 42 machine-gun nests constructed from 3,600 sandbags filled on-site between November 10, 1944, and November 11, 1944. He went on to declare how “[t]he enemy believes Berlin will fall like a ripe fruit; the Volkssturm will prove it is a fortress of iron and blood,” detailing specific assignments: “Battalion 1 will man the barricades from Potsdamer Platz to Leipziger Straße with 42 machine-gun positions, each supplied with 5,000 rounds from the Spandau arsenal... [e]very company commander receives 12 Panzerfaust launchers and 60 projectiles, sufficient to destroy 60 enemy tanks before they reach the Wilhelmstraße.” Goebbels also emphasised how the Hitlerjugend Pimpfe- aged fourteen to sixteen- would "serve as runners, carrying messages between 180 command posts established in school cellars across the city, each equipped with field telephones connected via 42 kilometres of cable laid by the Reichspost.”  The ceremony incorporated the swearing-in of 1,600 recruits from Aufgebot I, aged sixteen to fifty, who repeated the oath in unison at 11.25: “I pledge loyalty to Adolf Hitler and the German people, to fight with all means until victory or death,” their voices amplified by 18 loudspeakers mounted on the Gate’s columns. Each man received a certificate numbered sequentially from V-PP-0001 to V-PP-1600, stamped with the Reichsadler and Goebbels’ facsimile signature, distributed by 24 NSDAP functionaries in field-grey uniforms. Armaments displayed on the platform included 12 MG 42 machine guns on tripods and 48 Panzerfaust launchers arranged in pyramids, drawn from the Heereszeugamt Berlin-Spandau depot, where inventory records noted withdrawal of these items at 7.00 in the morning on November 12, 1944. The Reichspropagandaministerium filmed the event with four Debrie Parvo cameras positioned at 15-metre intervals along the Wilhelmstraße, capturing 1,800 metres of black-and-white stock for inclusion in Die Deutsche Wochenschau Nr. 739, released on November 15, 1944. The Völkischer Beobachter published photographs across pages 1 to 3 on November 13, 1944, showing Goebbels gesturing towards the Gate with the caption “Der Gauleiter von Berlin ruft den Volkssturm unter dem Brandenburger Tor”. The event solidified Pariser Platz as the ceremonial centre for Berlin’s Volkssturm activities, hosting 14 subsequent oath-takings totalling 42,000 men by April 1, 1945.

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

 

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 as 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 against ten with sixteen abstentions.

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, with the 8th Panzer Division leading the column at 10.00 under the command of Generalmajor Erich Brandenberger. The division, comprising 218 tanks including 32 Panzer IV models, entered the Pariser Platz from the Unter den Linden boulevard as Hitler, positioned on a reviewing platform erected on the eastern side of the Gate  saluted the passing troops, accompanied by Reichsmarschall Göring and Generalfeldmarschall Keitel. The parade route extended 2.4 kilometres from the Lustgarten through the Gate to the Siegessäule, with 14,500 soldiers marching in formation, including the Infanterie-Regiment Großdeutschland whose 1,200 men carried Mauser Karabiner 98k rifles slung over shoulders. Loudspeakers mounted on the Quadriga atop the Gate broadcast the Deutschlandlied at 10.45 followed by the Badenweiler March as the 1st Battalion of Artillerie-Regiment 59 passed with 36 105mm leFH 18 howitzers towed by Sd.Kfz. 7 half-tracks. Crowds numbering 450,000 lined the route, with 12,000 members of the Hitlerjugend organised in cordons along the Strasse des 17. Juni, waving paper flags distributed by the Reichspropagandaministerium whilst the 18th Infantry Division, commanded by Generalmajor Friedrich-Carl Cranz, saw its 3,200 troops executing goose-step marches with precision spacing of 75 centimetres between ranks, their steel helmets reflecting sunlight under clear skies with temperatures reaching 24 degrees Centigrade. On the right the Aufziehen der Wache with my 2012 Bavarian International School cohort. Motorised columns included 142 Opel Blitz trucks carrying elements of the Pionier-Bataillon 38, which had constructed pontoon bridges across the Somme River on June 8, 1940, each vehicle adorned with oak leaves gathered from French battlefields. Luftwaffe flypasts commenced at 11.45, with 120 Junkers Ju 87 Stuka dive-bombers from Sturzkampfgeschwader 2 forming a swastika pattern overhead at 500 metres altitude, their sirens wailing for 45 seconds as they passed the Gate. The Kriegsmarine contingent, represented by 800 sailors from the Marinesturmabteilung Berlin under Kapitän zur See Gustav Kleikamp, marched at 12.15, carrying naval ensigns captured from French destroyers at Boulogne on May 24, 1940, their white caps contrasting with army grey. Radio broadcasts via the Großdeutscher Rundfunk reached an estimated 18 million listeners, with commentator Hans Fritzsche describing the scene at 11.00: "Through the Brandenburg Gate, symbol of German unity, marches the invincible Wehrmacht, bearer of European peace under the Führer's leadership." Film crews from the Ufa-Wochenschau positioned 12 Arriflex cameras along the route, capturing 4,800 metres of 35mm film for newsreels screened in 3,200 cinemas nationwide by July 10, 1940. Logistical preparations began on July 1, 1940, when the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht issued Order 1940/7 directing troop concentrations at the Tempelhof parade grounds, where 28,000 rations were distributed daily by field kitchens of the Verpflegungsamt Berlin. Fuel depots at the Reichsbahn yards supplied 42,000 litres of diesel for the motorised columns, whilst 1,800 horses from the Kavallerie-Regiment 11 were stabled in the Tiergarten stables, consuming 9,000 kilograms of oats between July 4, 1940, and July 6, 1940. The Berliner Verkehrsbetriebe suspended tram services on 14 lines from 5.00. to 16.00, rerouting 180 vehicles to peripheral terminals, affecting 120,000 passenger journeys. Clean-up operations commenced at 15.00. with 650 street sweepers from the städtische Reinigungsdienst removing 18 tonnes of confetti and debris, completing restoration of the parade route by 20.00. The event's total cost, as recorded in the Reichshaushaltsplan 1940, amounted to 1,800,000 Reichsmarks, including 420,000 Reichsmarks for decorations and 280,000 Reichsmarks for transportation reimbursements to participating units.

Climbing up to join the sandstone statue of Mars that occupies the southern niche of the Brandenburg Gate, designed by Johann Gottfried Schadow and executed by his pupil Carl Friedrich Wichmann. It was installed in July 1794 as part of the original sculptural programme of the gate, which Carl Gotthard Langhans had conceived as a Friedenstor, a gate of peace, rather than a triumphal arch of conquest. Here Mars is shown seated, almost naked except for a helmet and a loosely draped cloak, his muscular body relaxed rather than tensed for battle. Instead of brandishing his sword he is in the act of returning it to its sheath. The gesture is deliberate and unambiguous: the god of war is laying aside his weapon, signalling the end of hostilities and the restoration of peace. Opposite him, on the northern side of the gate, sits Minerva, goddess of wisdom and the arts, completing the complementary pair that framed the gateway. The statue therefore formed an integral part of the iconographic message that Frederick William II wished to project after the costly Silesian wars of his predecessor. Peace was to be understood not as the absence of strength but as the deliberate sheathing of the sword by a power that had already proved itself in arms. The same idea was originally expressed by the Quadriga above, which at first represented Eirene, the goddess of peace, rather than Victoria. Although the meaning of the Quadriga was later altered after the Napoleonic period, the seated Mars has retained his original gesture, continuing to sit as a permanent reminder that the structure was first intended to celebrate the cessation of war, another symbol the Nazis misappropriated and twisted.
The Gate when, from March 24-25, 1941, it was decorated with alternating swastika flags and the national flag of Japan. Tall flag pylons carrying the same combination of banners stood on the square itself. The display was ordered for the official visit of Japanese Foreign Minister Yōsuke Matsuoka who had left Moscow by train and reached Berlin on the evening of March 26, 1941. He was met at Anhalter Station by German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop. The station hall had been decorated with German, Japanese and Italian flags and a large floral Rising Sun motif. A public holiday had been declared so that crowds could line the route from the station through the government quarter. The next day Matsuoka was received by Hitler at the Reich Chancellery along with Ribbentrop where they discussed the coordination of the Tripartite Pact powers. Matsuoka also met Göring and other senior figures of the regime before laying a wreath at the war memorial at the Neue Wache on Unter den Linden in the presence of the Japanese ambassador Hiroshi Ōshima and the Berlin city commandant, Generalleutnant Paul von Hase. The visit lasted several days; Matsuoka left Berlin after the conclusion of the talks.

Soviet photo taken in the first days of May showing the Gate’s shattered quadriga and the smoke-blackened silhouette of the Reichstag rising behind it; German survivors later described Waffen-ϟϟ machine-gun teams still firing from the Gate’s northern wing and the adjacent ruins until the formal capitulation ordered by General Helmuth Weidling on the afternoon of May 2. In the final days of the Battle of Berlin the remnant formations of the 11th ϟϟ Volunteer Panzergrenadier Division Nordland and the assault battalion of the 33rd Waffen-Grenadier Division of the ϟϟ Charlemagne constituted the principal Waffen-ϟϟ presence in the government quarter. Under SS-Brigadeführer Gustav Krukenberg these mixed Scandinavian, French and German volunteers held positions that stretched from the Reich Chancellery complex across Königsplatz toward the Brandenburg Gate, with the heavily damaged Reichstag rising immediately behind the gate’s eastern façade. By the morning of May 1, 1945 the surviving companies of Regiments Norge and Danmark, reinforced by roughly 300 French volunteers of the Charlemagne Sturmbataillon, occupied cellars, shell-holes and improvised strongpoints in the immediate vicinity of the Gate whilst Soviet assault groups of the 3rd Shock Army and 79th Rifle Corps pressed from the north and east. Krukenberg’s command post shifted repeatedly between the Air Ministry on Leipziger Straße and positions closer to the Gate as Soviet armour advanced along Unter den Linden. On the night of May 1-2 elements of Nordland attempted a breakout northward through the Weidendammer Bridge while other groups remained pinned near the Brandenburg Gate itself, trading fire with Soviet infantry who had already reached the Pariser Platz. Of the approximately 1,000–1,200 men who had entered the central sector under Krukenberg’s command in late April, fewer than half remained combat-effective by the morning of May 2. Many were taken prisoner in the immediate vicinity of the Gate and the Reichstag steps; others slipped westward through the Tiergarten or were killed in the final street fighting. 

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 event unfolded on Hindenburg Platz, amidst the ruins of the city, with a large banner overhead proclaiming "Glory to the Soviet forces who planted the flag of victory over Berlin." Montgomery, as Commander of the British 21st Army Group, acted on behalf of King George VI to bestow British orders upon the Soviet commanders. The ceremony symbolised the fragile postwar alliance between the Western Allies and the Soviet Union, occurring just weeks after Germany's unconditional surrender on May 8, 1945. The principal recipients included Marshal Georgy Zhukov, Deputy Supreme Commander in Chief of the Red Army and commander of the 1st Belorussian Front, who received the Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath (G.C.B.). Standing to Montgomery's right was Marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky, commander of the 2nd Belorussian Front, awarded the Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath (K.C.B.). Marshal Vasily Sokolovsky, Zhukov's deputy in the 1st Belorussian Front, positioned between Montgomery and Rokossovsky, was invested as a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire (K.B.E.). Additionally, Colonel General Mikhail Malinin, standing behind Rokossovsky, also received the K.B.E. Major General Lewis Lyne, commander of the British 7th Armoured Division, stood to the left, assisting in the proceedings. The ceremony commenced on a saluting base, where Montgomery personally invested Zhukov with the sash of the G.C.B. and shook hands with him, followed by the presentations to the others. No formal speeches were recorded, but the atmosphere reflected mutual respect amid underlying tensions; Zhukov reportedly maintained cordial relations with American General Dwight D. Eisenhower but experienced friction with Montgomery over strategic assessments, such as equating the Battle of El Alamein to Stalingrad. Montgomery, notably wearing two cap badges- a personal eccentricity permitted by his rank- oversaw the event with characteristic precision. A Guard of Honour from the King's Company of the Grenadier Guards, supported by tanks from the King's 8th Royal Irish Hussars flanking the site, added military pomp. Following the decorations, the guards marched past the saluting base in a precise parade, marking the formal conclusion. The location was one of the few cleared streets in devastated Berlin, emphasising the city's postwar desolation. As the ceremony ended, Montgomery joined Zhukov, Sokolovsky, Rokossovsky, and the other officers in departing the Brandenburg Gate. The group walked away together, symbolising Allied unity in victory, though this camaraderie would soon fade with the onset of the Cold War.

The Brandenburg Gate as seen from the British Zone and during my 2024 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  

Looking at the Gate from the other side from the Tiergarten with an abandoned Tiger tank from the Panzerabteilung Muncheberg around May 2, 1945 as the Battle of Berlin concluded and during another class trip. The last operational Tiger I tank in the absolute centre of Berlin between April 28, 1945 and May 1, 1945 was a vehicle of Panzerabteilung Müncheberg (formed in February 1945 from remnants of Panzer-Lehr-Division and the Kummersdorf test unit), turret number almost certainly 323, positioned amongst the trees on the north-eastern corner of the Königsplatz directly to the right of the Reichstag when looking from the east. It covered the open square in front of the Reichstag and the Moltke Bridge across which the Soviet 79th Rifle Corps advanced after midnight on April 29, 1945. The Königsplatz defences consisted of flooded zones created by blown bridges, deep antitank ditches, trenches, several 88 mm guns still on wheeled carriages, and this single Tiger I. On the morning of April 29, 1945 the Germans launched a brief counter-attack from the Königsplatz area that temporarily halted the Soviet advance; the Tiger engaged T-34-85s and SU units attempting to cross the bridge and square. Throughout April 29, 1945 and April 30, 1945 the tank continued to fire support until it ran out of fuel and ammunition sometime during the night of April 30/May 1, 1945. The crew abandoned the vehicle approximately one hundred metres north-west of the Brandenburg Gate at the end of Charlottenburger Chaussee (today’s Straße des 17. Juni) near the Tiergarten, where Soviet photographs taken on May 2, 1945 show the knocked-out or abandoned Tiger I with its turret turned backwards, the last Tiger I to have fought in the very heart of the city.
This frequently reproduced image, credited to the TASS photographer Viktor Temin and dated May 2, 1945, records IS-2s of the 7th Separate Guards Heavy Tank Brigade moving past the Brandenburg Gate after the fighting for the centre of Berlin had ended and my 2026 cohort at the same spot. Berlin’s garrison capitulated on May 2, 1945; by that date units of the 1st Belorussian Front had already secured the area around the Gate, the Reichstag and the nearby government quarter. Among the formations present were elements of the 7th Separate Guards Heavy Tank Brigade and other Guards heavy tank units equipped with the IS-2, the 46-tonne vehicle armed with the 122 mm D-25 T gun that had been introduced in large numbers during 1944 for breakthrough and urban combat operations. The IS-2 had entered service with Guards heavy tank regiments from early 1944; by the Berlin operation more than three thousand had been produced. Its thick frontal armour and heavy high-explosive shell made it particularly suited to reducing strongpoints in built-up areas, and it was employed in the final assault on the government district alongside T-34/85 medium tanks and self-propelled guns. After the formal surrender of the Berlin garrison on May 2, 1945, these same vehicles remained in the central districts whilst Soviet forces consolidated control, disarmed remaining German units and began the process of occupation.

 

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 and now. 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 2018 cohort and when visited by Hitler Youth. Schirach utilised the Pariser Platz as a ceremonial site for the induction of thousands of boys into the Deutsches Jungvolk, a process intended to align the younger generation with the military heritage of the Prussian state. On May 1, 1934, during the National Day of Labour, significant contingents of the Hitler Youth marched through the central passage of the gate, which had previously been reserved for the monarchy, to signal a new social order. For the Olympic Games which commenced on August 1, 1936, the gate was decorated with massive flags and served as the primary ceremonial entry point for the international youth participants of the Olympic youth camp. Annual ceremonies on April 20, coinciding with the birthday of Hitler, involved the transfer of fourteen-year-olds into the senior ranks of the Hitler Youth before the twenty-six metre high columns. Demps has analysed how the gate provided a sense of historical continuity and legitimacy to the regime’s youth organisations. During Mussolini's state visit on September 25, 1937, the Hitler Youth formed an extensive honour guard through the Pariser Platz. As the conflict intensified, Hitler Youth members were deployed in the Tiergarten to man anti-aircraft batteries and searchlights. In the final battle for the city in April 20, 1945, youth members, including those integrated into the ϟϟ or the Volkssturm, were involved in combat operations within the ruins of the nearby Adlon Hotel. By May 2, 1945, the gate was heavily scarred by over three hundred artillery impacts, and the destruction of the Quadriga symbolised the collapse of the regime that had used the youth as its ideological foundation. This period of use concluded with the gate standing as a damaged remnant of the Nazi Party’s urban propaganda efforts whilst the city transitioned to Allied control.
My 2020 Bavarian International School cohort on the right and another group of East German youth 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.
With the establishment of the DDR, the Freie Deutsche Jugend assumed the responsibility for conducting political rituals at the Brandenburg Gate. On May 1, 1950, a major FDJ rally occurred, involving half a million participants who gathered to support the socialist administration. The FDJ utilised the gate as the primary location for the Deutschlandtreffen der Jugend on May 28, 1950, where youth from the eastern and western sectors were brought together to advocate for a socialist unification. In August 5, 1951, the Third World Festival of Youth and Students utilised the gate as a backdrop for cultural and sporting events designed to showcase the achievements of the socialist youth. During the restoration of the Quadriga on September 3, 1958, the FDJ and the state leadership ensured the removal of Prussian militaristic symbols, such as the iron cross, which were replaced with symbols of the socialist state. Following the construction of the Berlin Wall members were regularly brought to the gate for inductions into the Border Troops, where they swore oaths of allegiance to the socialist fatherland. My Bavarian International School students in 2013 on the left and as the wall appeared from the British zone. In July 28, 1973, during the Tenth World Festival of Youth and Students, the area around the gate became a central festival ground for millions of attendees, with the FDJ acting as organisers. On October 6, 1989, the FDJ participated in a final torchlight procession past the gate to mark the fortieth anniversary of the state. This event took place whilst significant civil unrest was growing, and the scripted columns of FDJ members provided a contrast to the protests elsewhere.

June 6, 1989 and today

The opening of the border on November 9, 1989, effectively ended the FDJ’s ideological monopoly over the gate, as the site was reclaimed by the general public for spontaneous celebrations. 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, both 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 Kennedy’s visit on June 26, 1963, when he viewed it from a platform 100 metres west, and Reagan’s speech on June 12, 1987, addressing 20,000 spectators. The DDR staged 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 a fortnight. The Gate’s reopening saw 100,000 crossings on December 22–23, 1989, per Berlin border control data. 
Roger Moore with a Walther PPK  during the Berlin location filming for the James Bond film Octopussy on August 11, 1982 with the Brandenburg Gate behind. Principal photography in the city began on August 10, 1982, with the main narrative sequence shot at Checkpoint Charlie. It was arranged to secure recognisable Cold War imagery of Bond against the Gate for press and marketing use. No dialogue or action from the film was recorded at the location; the photographs were purely promotional. In addition to the working unit, the production arranged separate publicity photography at the Gate, then standing directly against the Berlin Wall on the western side of the border here in the British zone. These images were taken in daylight and were intended solely for press and marketing distribution rather than as frames from the finished film. They provided an immediately recognisable Cold War landmark for international promotion of the picture. 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 eighteen diplomatic incidents, including a 1971 standoff involving fifty Soviet and thirty American tanks, lasting 48 hours. By November 1989, 70% of the Gate’s fortifications were dismantled, leaving 300 tonnes of debris, cleared by January 1990. 

My 2024 cohort and the same spot on the morning of November 10, 1989 after the night that saw the wall fall. The immediate catalyst was Günter Schabowski’s announcement of revised travel regulations on the day before with his assertion that these applied immediately transformed an administrative measure into an uncontrollable political event. Crowds subsequently converged on border crossings, where inadequately instructed personnel ultimately permitted passage. The opening therefore emerged through the interaction of official miscommunication, accumulated popular pressure and the breakdown of effective command, rather than through a coordinated decision to dismantle the frontier. Its deeper causes lay in the regime’s deteriorating legitimacy: sustained emigration, expanding demonstrations, economic discontent and the diminishing credibility of repression. Soviet non-intervention under Gorbachev fundamentally altered the conditions within which East German authority operated. Although the crossing there remained closed until December 22, the presence of Berliners atop the Wall challenged the distinction between regulated movement and collective appropriation of forbidden space. Satellite broadcasting extended this rupture beyond Berlin, making the erosion of state authority internationally visible before its institutional consequences had been determined even though these celebrations shouldn't be mistaken for an already settled outcome. Four-Power rights remained operative, two German states continued to exist, and reunification was neither legally accomplished nor politically assured. The morning marked a decisive collapse of enforceable separation, not the completion of Germany’s subsequent transformation. 

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, historian and diplomat George Kennan, the father of Containment, 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. 

Standing in front of the hotel and how it appeared in ruins shortly after the war. The hotel had survived the war itself without any major damage, having avoided the bombs and shelling that had levelled the city. Whilst neighbouring structures on Unter den Linden and Wilhelmstraße were reduced to rubble, the Adlon’s reinforced concrete frame, its ground-floor protective brick wall and the underground bunker system constructed in 1943-44 allowed it to continue functioning until the final days of the Battle of Berlin. In late April portions of the hotel were converted into a field hospital; patients and staff still occupied the building when the first Soviet tanks passed through the Brandenburg Gate. 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. According to the later testimony of Hedda Adlon and surviving staff, a group of Red Army men forced their way into the extensive wine cellars. There they found not only bottles but large quantities of wood-wool packing material used for storing and shipping. In the early hours of May 3 a fire broke out in the cellar. The most commonly accepted explanation is that a discarded cigarette or an open flame ignited the highly flammable packing material. The fire spread rapidly through the lift shafts and wooden interiors of the main wing facing Pariser Platz. Patients from the improvised hospital were evacuated; the blaze itself could not be controlled. By daylight the representative front of the hotel was a burned-out shell. Only the rear economic wing along Wilhelmstraße, which contained kitchens, staff quarters and service areas, remained structurally intact. The stalled side wing was used as an hotel and restaurant until the early 1980s with bricked west windows after the Wall in 1961 as seen here.

The Stalin portrait beside the Adlon and the view today down Unter den Linden- completely rebuilt and me at the site. 
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 as seen on the right.

 

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, 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.

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. 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. 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 it attracted the attention of Albert Speer, then holding the post of Inspector General of Building for the Reich Capital. The purchase from the Begas heirs was effected through the architect Fritz Beyer acting as Speer’s authorised representative and the the sculpture was transferred to the former Prussian Academy of Arts building, known as Palais Arnim, at Pariser Platz 4, which Speer’s office had occupied since the spring of 1938. During the war in order to protect it from the expected effects of aerial bombardment, the marble was wrapped and then completely walled in within the structure for two years as protection against bombing on the west side of the Ihneturm. The building itself sustained heavy damage from Allied bombing raids although the sealed enclosure preserved the sculpture intact throughout the remainder of the war and the subsequent decades of division. The walled-up figure was first opened and photographed by Roman März in 1990 during preparatory work for the reconstruction of the Akademie der Künste on the same site. Full liberation from the wartime casing took place 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 wasn't the most egregious indignity it suffered though; the Nazis, before imprisoning it, had tried to clean the statue with sulfuric acid- possibly the worst thing one can do to Carrara marble.