Berlin Blog
Our arrival in Berlin was shrouded with sad news surrounding our beloved guide, Gabe. Due to pressing medical conditions he has been in a hospital for the past several days and had a surgery this morning. Our prayers are with him.
This being said we have an acquaintance of Gabe as our temporary guide. Alex (our new guide) brought us through a brief tour of an old Jewish section as well as stopping to show us what he referred to as Tripping stones, these are small brass plaques that commemorate Jewish victims of the holocaust. The planes had the names and occupations and some the other personal information. All the plaques are made by a singular german artist and the organization is completely not for profit. Our next stop was another more formal memorial commemorating the German Jews at the sight of Jewish cemmatary. I learned that in the Jewish faith it is customary to place rocks at a sight to commemorate the memory of the fallen. The rock symbolizes the dedication to the deceased memory. Although a snowfall the night before covers most. Many towers of rocks could be seen.
After our tour of the Jewish area we went the previous center of the Prussian empire on what we today know as museum island. Many museums now occupy the old churches, palaces and other historic buildings. It was wild to see all these old buildings whose facades were pock marked by bullet and shrapnel marks from the intense street fighting that took place between the Nazis and the Red Army. Museum island is an interesting mashup of old and new. Standing in the middle of the square. To my left I could see a church dating to the early 1900s. And then to my right I could see multiple cranes working on a several billion dollar project on a replica palace. It was wild, at one point I could count 11 cranes but that is largely due to the fact that Berlin has 3 billion euros invested in restoration and other projects all scheduled to be finished by 2025.
After lunch we made our way to the soviet war memorial. It was a very conflicting experience. The eastern front was much more vicious than the American western front that I grew up learning about. Oh both sides the Germans and the Russians commuted awful war crimes. On the German side they of course sentenced thousands of Jews to their deaths, enforced brutal marshal law upon the villager, rapped women. And both sides had steady streams of propaganda. Demonization the other side. Once the Russians reached Berlin they had revenge on their minds. For 2/3 of their POWs didn’t survive German imprisonment. It was a seen of hellish nature once they took Berlin. They rapped over 2 million women and killed many more citizens. So, seeing this memorial that razed the red army to a heroic standard did not sit right. However the memorial is very impressive. The large red marble structures constructed from Hitlers hallway outside his command building to the immense soviet soldier with a sword in one hand and a rescued child in the other with a swastika beneath his boots it was a conflicting but beautiful snow covered sight.
Our last stop of the day was a stop at one last museum in the very building where the official surrender of the third Reich was held. It focused primarily on the Soviet side of things and pandered to their cause. It shed light on only the horrors of the nazis. We focused on the brutality of the nazi prison camps. The way the eastern from came to be as well as the eb and flow of the war. From the original nazi push of the blitzkrieg and the eventual standoff of Stalingrad that lead to thousands of lives lost. The fighting was so intense and included so many small battles that one squad of Russian soldiers holed up in a house at a key intersection with no option of retreat. (Retreat in the red army led to execution) the fought so fiercely that no Germans could advance. Eventually the siege was broken and that led to a red tide that swept across Eastern Europe with its eyes set on Berlin. The brutal methods of the Russian army caused the largest mad refugee exodus in a wartime, just based on the stories 800,000 civilians packed up and fled the looming Red Army. The museum was very informative however our tourguide was only able to give us his version of a “crash course”.
It was an eventful and long first day in Berlin. We readily hope to hear good news in regards to Gabe’s health, however Alex has stepped up to the plate. Tomorrow i look forward to visiting the famous Riechstag
