Underground / overground

At work it happened that one person's hobby is learning and extolling the delights and history of the 'Berlin Underworld'. There is quite a vast assortment of air raid shelters, stores and goodness knows what hidden beneath the cobbles. I got the opportunity to visit some of the bunkers and pass on the photos to you!

Electrified steel beams put across the interconnecting subway tunnels during the Berlin separation to stop people escaping to West Berlin;

Underground dorms and ladies loos (hooks on wall above show where curtains once hung);

Map of one of the bunkers;

For more bunker info see http://www.berliner-unterwelten.de/

Nearby ('S' bahn station Nordbahnhof) is a section of Berlin wall complete with the hinterland ('behind') wall and a dividing strip in between. The main wall was on the West Berlin side and the hinterland wall on the East Berlin (Communist) side. Anyone caught attempting to cross from East to West would be shot and killed.

One stretch of 'The Wall', at the end is a large reflecting stainless stell plate to give the impression that the wall just went right on....

At a break in the wall (since re-unification!) is a cross to commerate those who died in the conflicts. In the background is an old cemetry, some coffins were reburied in the cemetry as the dividing strip was also once a put of it. Also in the picture are sections of the wall, now removed.

The Church of Reconciliation stands on the site of a former church that ended up caught in the divided zone and was pulled down to give the wall guards a clear line of sight to shoot would be escapees.

Berlin also has some remains of Flak towers that basically housed anti-aircraft guns. these towers are largely demolished/covered with large mounds of rubble, now well wooded. Consequently there was not much to take pictures of although in the adjoining park is a quite nice rose garden......

For more flak tower info see..... http://www.berliner-unterwelten.de/

Sachsenhausen Camp

Sachsenhausen Camp is a concentration camp on Berlin's northern fringes and I eventually got to visit today. It has long been on my 'to-do' list so I was glad to take the train up and cycle over to it. It was very interesting, though sad to think what men can do to men, there must surely be something demonic about the perpetrators.

Here are the pictures...


Gate A - the entrance into the camp (any guesses about gate Z?). The camp side of the gate has a balcony with machine guns mounted and trained permanently on the prisoners.



Through the actual gate into the camp - with the inscription ARBEIT MACHT FREI, roughly translated as 'work will make you free'.



In case you do not work hard enough (and therefore 'don't feel free'), don't try to get free through the gravel 'shoot-at-will' zone, barbed wire, electric fence, dog patrol and concrete wall.


Roll call ground where prisoners were forced to stand or crouch, hands behind heads, for hours on end in all weathers. Move and you get beaten (and if you'll lucky, not killed). On the post war concrete wall are the outlines of more prisoner huts that used to stand there but are long since demolished.



Prisoner hut



Execution squad firing range also with 4 simple gallows in the beam across the top.




Cremation ovens - largely destroyed by the Communists. These ovens are in the part of the grounds called 'camp Z'. the implication being that you walk in through gate a but can only leave through camp Z via the execution methods and cremation ovens. A-Z, the full circle. :-(




Mortuary



Memorial