Berlin: Day 2

Berlin day 2 was even better than day 1! For starters, it was much warmer today than it was yesterday.  Yesterday it was chilly, windy with scattered rain.  Today was sunny, clear and 70 degrees.  A beautiful day to sight see!  We started our day strolling to northern Berlin to do a “Berlin Underground” tour.  The tour took us underground beneath the city of Berlin to see bomb air raid bunkers.  Since Berlin was the center of Nazi Germany, it saw a TON of bomb raids.  This particular bunker was beneath a subway station.  It was a convoluted string of tunnels, which could hold 1,300 people.  The walls of the bunkers were painted with a special paint that glowed in the dark.  This paint served a good purpose because often during the bombings the power went out, and the paint provided an extra 5-10 minutes of glowing light before it went pitch black. It was crazy to think that the very bunkers we casually walked through, provided shelter and safety for panicked German’s only 60 years ago!  

Somethings we learned today:

• At the end of the war, the allied forces defeated the Nazis and decided to take over Berlin.  This is when Berlin split to east and west with a wall dividing.... The Americans and the allies occupied the west and the Soviet Union occupied the east.  The allies agreed to de-militarize the west and attempted to destroy all the bomb shelters made by the Nazis... this was not very successful as the bomb bunkers made by the Nazi’s were very hardy.
• There are still a TON of undetonated bombs in Berlin.  Bombs are found regularly and a bomb squad is called in to detonate them..... The most recent bomb went off in 1994 and destroyed a whole city block. 

Next we walked to Volkspark, a very green and beautiful city park, and walked up a huge hill that over looked the city of Berlin.  The hill was actually a destroyed bunker, filled in with rubble after the war ended.  The city of Berlin filled in all the old bunkers with rubble and made most of them into parks.  

We then went to the Berlin Wall Memorial.  We saw the last remaining, in-tact, stretch of the wall. The wall is actually 2 walls.  One on the east side of Berlin and the other on the West, separated by 10-15 feet of sand called “no man’s land”.  During the Soviet occupation of Eastern Berlin, those trying to escape where shot and killed on site in “no mans” land. There a ton of memorials and stories of the people who perished trying to escape from East Berlin. It was amazing to see!  

After the wall we went to the Topography of Terror.  This is the site of the Secret German Police, who served Hitler and the German Third Reich.  Hitler’s police station used to sit on the site, and it was destroyed during the war.  The ruins were uncovered in the 1980’s and the remaining building remnants were preserved.  We spent 2 hours looking around and reading about how Hitler came to power.  We all gained a new appreciation for how Hitler came to power in WWII and how the German people were brainwashed.   He was a master of manipulation in persuading people into feeding into his propaganda. 

Tomorrow Kim and Ryan join us and we spend our last day in Berlin.... and we head to a football game!  

The weather in Berlin is beautiful right now! There are a ton of gardens setting out their flowers, and pumpkins and gords!