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I like an on-trend food court, with this one being located opposite Berlin Hauptbahnhof.

There are around six different food outlets here covering a range of cuisines, but the Thai option seemed the most exciting. The service was efficient and polite, with the prices being reasonable. There’s a buzzer set-up where you go up and collect the food when it’s ready and it only took them around eight minutes to have it cooked.

There were lots of seats available and it all felt modern and comfortable. The temperature and lighting were appropriate, with some light background music playing which wasn’t annoyingly loud.

I went for the Thai green curry which was served as a larger portion than might be evident from the photo. The chicken is tender, the rice was suitably sticky, the vegetables retained some bite and the sauce had a depth of flavour. The Tiger beer was the only option they had, but at least it was appropriate to the cuisine. I thought it was all rather pleasant and reasonably priced.

This is another photo that I hadn’t seen before and it’s an image of the Jewish prisoners at the Buchenwald Concentration Camp in late November 1938. They were arrested after Kristallnacht on 9/10 November 1938 and in this photo they were still waiting for their ‘uniforms’, but they had already had their heads forcibly shaved.

Buchenwald had been open for a year at this point, but this was its first major influx of people. There were tens of thousands of Jews who were imprisoned across the Reich, but 9,845 Jews were sent here and many had their financial assets and possessions taken away. Most of the Jews were male and wealthy, this was really a financial priority at the time for the Nazis, but it certainly wasn’t a safe place as the prison population grew to 11,028 by the end of the year and 771 people had already died. Then in February 1939 typhus broke out, with more deaths following that and the camp was put into quarantine. Some Jews were released in late 1938 and during 1939, particularly if they were teachers, they had sold their assets or they had confirmed plans to leave Germany.

It’s an interesting look at how the Nazi policies developed, as what they were hoping for at this stage were for plenty of Jews to emigrate whilst selling their houses, cars and belongings off cheap. The arrests were deliberately not of elderly or poorer Jews and they weren’t meant to be badly treated during the arrests, although many inevitably were given the anti-semitism which had been building up in Germany. It’s one of the locations that I’ve yet to visit and another that I would like to see at some point.

I can’t find any old photos of this angle of the building, but these are the remains of the piers that once lined the main driveway to the Gestapo headquarters. They’re now located at the Topography of Terror Museum and they were left here following the clearing of the site between 1957 and 1963. This was known as the ‘east gate’ and all the political prisoners would have passed through here. It’s an odd bit of archaeology as this area was all excavated in the 1980s and 1990s, so it wasn’t long demolished. I’m oddly interested in random bits of old buildings, especially when they had such a massive importance in a country’s history.

This is the building that they were guarding (photo copyright of the Bundesarchiv).

The Topography of Terror Museum is built on the site of what was the heart of Nazi power in Germany, the former HQ of the Gestapo and the SS. The buildings were badly damaged as Berlin fell, with the new East German Government demolishing just about everything that was left (or at surface level anyway). There were excavations in the 1980s of the buildings and the foundations and cellars of numerous buildings were rediscovered.

There is plenty left of these cellars which were constructed as the basement of the School of Industrial Arts and Crafts which was constructed between 1901 and 1905.

These were light shafts with the white glazed slotted bricks designed to improve the amount of light in the basement. They’re in such good condition that it felt almost possible to imagine them being constructed in a building that was being designed to promote art and culture before it fell into the hands of those who wanted rather more nefarious activities to take place.

The building was taken over by the Secret State Police Office, also known as the Gestapo, in May 1933. It’s not quite clear exactly how these rooms would have been used by the Gestapo, but it’s known that political prisoners were tortured and murdered in this building and that could well have included these cellars. The art school for who the building was constructed survived and is now part of the Berlin University of the Arts.

This museum was large in size and I didn’t get a chance to read everything, although I did my best to try in a way that my friend Susanna would have been proud of. This is a photo of the war criminal Josef “Sepp” Dietrich (1892-1966), who was an early member of the Nazi Party and he served as Hitler’s bodyguard before going on to command numerous SS units. He’s the one on the left and he was a war criminal who was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1946 for his crimes against humanity, but which was reduced to 25 years in 1951 and they then decided to just let him out in 1955. He never repented for his crimes and bands of people who meet up to reminiscence happily about ‘the good old days’ of the Nazis. He was arrested for more crimes in 1956 and then faced a further three years in prison, but he still had many supporters as 6,000 former SS men turned up to his funeral. There are rumours in places on-line that this man received a state funeral, but he absolutely didn’t as he was one of the worst war criminals the country had seen.

An organisation called HIAG (Mutual Aid Association of Former Waffen-SS Members) was established to try and advocate for former SS officers, suggesting that they had made military achievements and were soldiers and not war criminals. Meetings of former officers were common and the museum tackles this as one of the challenging realities in Germany. There’s an interesting page on Wikipedia about how the German authorities dealt with this situation in the post-war period.

The car belonging to the “Butcher of Prague”, Reinhard Heydrich. He was murdered just outside of Prague and I’d like to visit the scene of where his assassination took place, even though dark tourism doesn’t sound the most glamorous. There’s still pride in the bravery of the two men who killed him, so there’s a memorial to this at the site.

The report into the assassination was written by Heinz Pannwitz (1911-1975) and was split into two sections. The first, which is in the below images, told of what happened on the day. He then merrily spent some of the second section talking about all the reasons that people would have to kill him, which didn’t exactly go down well with Heydrich’s friends and cause quite a scene in Berlin.

And photographs from the report itself. As mentioned in my last post, there’s currently an entire exhibition of Heydrich at the museum, it’s all very well laid out.

“Everyone was afraid, even physically afraid, of Heydrich. Because they knew: in terms of consequence, this man with his primitive, simplistic intellectual faculties was superior to them, to Ohlendorf, Schellenberg and Six. He possessed two seemingly contradictory qualities to the final consequence: he felt hatred out of personal resentment and he was a utilitarian fanatic, unencumbered by any non-personal resentment.”

This line was written by Bernhard Wehner (1909-1995) who studied law and then joined the Nazi Party in 1931, later on becoming an SS officer. He was held in an American internment camp after the end of the Second World War and he then reinvented himself into a criminologist and journalist, writing about his experiences during the war. The whole line about someone in a position of such power being intellectually challenged seems so often why civilisations seem to go wrong, when the talented people aren’t making their way to the top. Heydrich must have had some political and organisational talents to get where he did, although perhaps his ability to get things done regardless of the morality behind them is why he got so far so quickly. Biographers seem to suggest that Heydrich was arrogant but saw himself as a competent man of action rather than as a visionary, eager to please senior members of the Nazis.

I hadn’t realised at the time that the museum has a special exhibition on Heydrich, but it’s really very good and it’s free of charge and at the museum until 10 June 2025.

I mentioned about the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich and how that killing is still celebrated today. But it’s what happened in Lidice, then located in Czechoslovakia, that remains truly shocking. The Nazis wanted revenge for the killing of one of the architects of the Holocaust and a mistaken connection to the assassins meant that Lidice was targeted. The Nazi regime, under the orders of Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler, implemented a plan to completely eradicate the village. On 10 June 1942, all men over the age of 16 were rounded up and shot. The women were sent to concentration camps, and the children were either deemed “racially suitable” and sent to German families or deported to the Chełmno extermination camp. The village itself was systematically destroyed, every building was demolished, the cemetery was flattened and a river was even rerouted to remove any trace of Lidice. It was all designed to make the village an example of what would happen to anyone who questioned the Nazi regime. As is evident from the image above, the Germans wanted it literally removed from the map but they wanted the fear of what happened there to be remembered. After the war, the village was rebuilt near its original site as a memorial to the victims. It’s a location that I’d like to visit, it’s relatively near to Prague and so next time I’m in the city I’m hoping that I’ll find a way to get there.

There’s more about this at https://www.lidice-memorial.cz/en/memorial/memorial-and-reverent-area/history-of-the-village-lidice/.

Another one of my etymological posts as I’m fascinated by the development of language. I was intrigued to read that Spittelmarkt is a reference to the Saint Gertrude Hospital which once stood at this location and that in itself is the same derivative as Spitalfields in the UK, a contraction of the word ‘hospital’. The Latin word was ‘hospitale’ and it was the Germans who contracted it, which then was imported to the UK, although we still use the original Latin word of course. Although most references in the UK are to the Spitalfields in London, there is also one in Norwich.

Anyway, I digress, but I thought it was intriguing…

I’ve done the tour of the Reichstag before, but I feel the need to do it again and thought I’d go for an evening slot this time. It’s free of charge, but visitors have to submit their details in advance and then provide a number of options for what time they want.

I got there a bit early, but they said it was fine and so I went through the security process. The security guard mentioned to me that I might want to put my coat back on as I had to walk back outside to get into the building. I said that I was already wearing my coat and he commented on my bravery, which I agreed with. But, I digress. The process is a bit confused as they managed to put me and some others in a German group, although it makes little difference other than I didn’t understand the introduction they gave. But, after that, you’re on your own anyway. Actually, the management of the whole arrangement was in places hopeless, they were barking at some visitors for not standing in the right place and the toilet facilities are chaotic. However, it’s a high turnover venue and the staff probably get fed up with idiots, and since they were nice to me, I was happy.

The bit at the base contains a history of the building which was comprehensive and interesting, as it’s certainly had a fair few difficult decades during the twentieth century.

It’s a clever design where you can walk up a slope and gain some considerable height and then look down onto the building, with another slope taking you back down again.

There’s the top with extensive views over Berlin.

Once back down again from the slope, it’s then possible to go out on a viewing platform.

Looking inside the building.

Beautiful.

The Brandenburg Gate.

And when back down to ground, a final photo of the Reichstag. There was a period where it looked like the Parliament building would be in Bonn, which had been where the capital of West Germany was located, but a decision was made to bring it back to Berlin. That was surprisingly close in terms of the vote, 338 votes to 320 votes for the move. The building’s redesign into a Parliament was overseen by Norman Foster between 1995 and 1999, with the keys formally being handed over on 19 April 1999. It’s certainly worth a visit for anyone visiting Berlin, as long as they remember to book tickets in advance as they don’t allow walk-ups and I note a number of angry negative reviews about that situation.