September 16, 2024

September 16, 2024

A few days ago we heard the weather report worsened south of here. Dresden was pummeled with rain and the Dolomites were getting an early snowfall. This is a recent photo of the Seceda Ridge we hiked on our first day. What a difference two weeks make.

Mondays in Berlin are tough. Almost everything is shut down. So we are going to concentrate on outdoor sites today. We stepped out of our hotel into the subway. A few stops south we visited the Berlin Airlift Memorial. It is rather stark and missing the DC6 airplane I have seen in photos. A passerby told me it was removed to the Tempelhof Airport across the street. There we found an entire museum.

During the Cold War, West Berlin was an island of freedom inside East Germany. In 1948, the Soviets closed the land border hoping to wrest control of the entire city. Truman, to his credit, responded with Operation Vittles airlifting vital supplies. Cargo planes landed here every three minutes. Incredibly the biggest cargo was coal. The Soviets relented a year later.

Humorously the airport once had a huge Nazi eagle atop it. The statue was sent to the West Point Museum. In 1985, it was returned, minus the body. We thought about walking around to the rear to see the old DC-6 Transport but the terminal is way bigger than we could have imagined.

We returned north and then walked west to visit the Topography of Terror exhibits. This Documentation Center has a block-long preserved section of the Berlin Wall. On one side is a long line of interpretative boards covering German history from the rise of Hitler to the fall of the Wall. It is called the Topography of Terror because this area was the center of the Nazi regime. In the background of the Wall is the only remaining building, the Luftwaffe HQ, which later housed the East German government.

We walked to Potsdamer Platz to find lunch. On the way we stopped to find an old Guard Tower left standing from the Wall. It was completely covered and hidden inside a construction zone. The guard was not happy with me snapping a photo.

After lunch we took the subway west of town to see the 1936 Olympic stadium. It was here Jesse Owens outran the Germans to collect the gold medal.

Returning east we stopped to visit the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church. Built in 1890, it was destroyed by bombs in 1943. After the war the rubble was removed and open-air services continued. Against the wishes of the local population, instead of demolishing, it was left as a memorial to war and replaced with an ultra-modern stained-glass chapel. In 2016 a truck was deliberately driven into an adjoining Christmas Market. A brass memorial crack is inlaid in the concrete outside.

Our next stop is at a major intersection inside Tiergarten Park. This Victory Column was built in 1873 initially to celebrate a Prussian victory. By the time it was dedicated it became a symbol of a united Germany. France didn’t like the part that included victory over them, so after WWII they took part of the decorative frieze and refused to return it for decades.

Across the street is a large memorial to Otto von Bismarck, the Prussian politician who was the architect of German unification and the first Chancellor of Germany. Both these memorials once stood outside the German Reichstag building. They were moved here out of the way by Hitler.

For dinner we ate again at the Bavarian brewhouse by our hotel. This time delicious BBQ Ribs with Apple Strudel a la mode for dessert.