Brandenburger Tor and Holocaust Memorial

Today, we packed our bags and headed into central Berlin for one last time. We left our bags in storage at the Potsdamer Platz bahnhof, before walking over to Peter Eisenman’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. The memorial consists of 2,711 concrete slabs, in a uniform grid pattern, but of varying heights and the ground level also undulates across the memorial.

The memorial evokes both a sense of the bureaucratic efficiency of the Nazi killing machine much in evidence at Sachenhausen but at the same time a sense of disorder and chaos.

One of the streets next to the memorial is named for Cora Berliner, a German economist and pioneer of social work in the 1920s and early 1930s, and a victim of the Holocaust.

We wandered past the US embassy which stands opposite the memorial, and along to the Brandenburger Tor (Brandenburg Gate) which separates the Pariser Platz from Platz des 18 März (18 March Square) and the Tiergarten beyond.

18 March was both the date of the Prussian army’s attack against revolutionaries (1848) and the date of the only free elections in East German (1990).

The current structure was built in the late 18th century on the site of the former city gate at the start of the road to Brandenburg an der Havel.

We returned along Cora Berliner Straße towards the large Berliner Mall and passed the visually unremarkable car park on the site of the Führerbunker, where Hitler and his immediate cronies spent their last days in 1945. The bunker was blown up in the 1950s and only a sign by the car park reveals the history of this site.Read more