Understand Berlin’s most complex history

On this tour, we follow themes of the origins of the Nazi regime, the crystallization of the Holocaust from ideas to terrible reality, the experience of Berliners during WWII, focusing on the end battlefield in 1945, and the fate of Hitler and his core enablers.

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Today as we explore Berlin’s darkest history, we strip away the speculative and traverse a sober landscape of sites and memorials including lesser-known stories of resistance, and memorial sites often missed.

On this tour, we examine the transformation of the city of Berlin from the modern home of 1920’s German democracy to Nazi capital and its eventual destruction, and hunt the ghosts of what remains.

What did the majority of Berliners think and do during these 12 years? How does this complex history live on in the physical urban memory of Berlin and Berliner’s minds today?

This tour covers the following sites:

Understand the conflict from which our 21^st century world grew

Visit all 4 sectors and trace the stories behind the superpower fight for global supremacy in the divided city, and life on both sides of the Berlin Wall.

Learn of the dark arts of Berlin as a ‘city of spies’ and the details behind the symbol of a divided world – The Berlin Wall. 

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We examine the struggle for information during the crucial ideological battles of the 1950’s in the espionage capital of the world. What was life like behind the wall in both east and west? What were the events that led to nationwide uprisings in East Germany in 1953, events that catalyzed the building of the wall in 1961? 

Lies and Lives: What was it like to live under the Orwellian machinery of the infamous East German Stasi? Who were they, what did they hope to achieve, and how? Understand why and how the communist system collapsed in 1989 and what Berliners do feel about that aspect of their past today.

Sites we cover:

Total Berlin – the Walking Tour

Your perfect starting point: This tour is the most satisfying Berlin experience, with all the important sites and stories. Of course, we see the Berlin Wall, Brandenburg Gate, the Reichstag and Checkpoint Charlie, and other major highlights, BUT we can comfortably add in the focus theme(s) YOU find most interesting, as we explore beyond these major sites to get context to understand your Berlin in a new light.

Berlin is a fascinating city, both now and then

Origins explained

As a young city (think Athens!) where did Berlin come from? From a 12^th century Slavic village to Prussian royal residence town in the Middle Ages – Berlin’s rise to world prominence is a story like no other European city. Hear about the rapid rise of Berlin from village to European power under Frederick the Great.

Berlin takes on the world twice: As Berlin emerged as the new Imperial German capital in 1871, it set itself on a course that would lead the world into WWI and WWII leaving a city today that shows the forces and pressures of the 20^th C like no other.

During your tour we also discover Berlin now, a dynamic, fascinating and fast changing city. Along the way we can explore:

• Tour what’s left of Hitler’s WWII Nazi capital, the ruins of dictatorship and monuments to its victims – how could it happen, what happened, why did it happen? (I was involved in the creation of the information board at Hitler’s bunker site)
• Trace the route of the Red Army invading Berlin in 1945 and the last hours of the war for Berliners and the Nazi regime.
• Understand the reasons why the Berlin Wall was built and its legacy then and now,
• see how Berlin deals with its past and future at the Brandenburg Gate and Reichstag parliament, home of a German government once more.

Today, Berlin is finally rebuilding from the years of the Berlin Wall, unifying and modernizing for its new role as the heart of Germany and the EU.

This tour covers the following sites and stories:

The women who blew up Berlin.

Walk down any Berlin main street and you will be struck by its discordant architecture.  

Today’s new 21^st century glass and steel cages, still retaining the same mass as the rare surrounding surviving pre-war blocks, now fill the old vacant spaces left by WWII and the rare stone, bullet scarred facades of pre-1945 Berlin.  

In between comes the bulk of ’50s and ’60s concrete boxes, the face of the Berlin’s great (and still ongoing) post-war relaunch.  These were erected fast and cheaply, once the bombing rubble had been cleared away, to house tomorrows world.  Symbolically, this fresh, modern style was chosen to represent a future in what was then the most important city in Europe.  

These post-war buildings would become the faces of two choices of future, one in east Berlin and one in the west – a future under either communism or democracy.

Students of architecture would have sensed a continuity in this post-war city-wide style.  It retained elements of the earlier architectural projects that fell under the broad label ‘Modernism’.  

This early 20^th century architecture was characterised by a shedding of historic styles, as a rapidly changing 19^th century Germany industrialised, mechanised, urbanised and democratised.  This new world demanded a New Berlin. Old Germany disintegrated, perishing as horse drawn Imperial carriages were replaced by electric mass public transport vehicles processing through Potsdamer Platz and the Brandenburg Gate. This transition was so profound its fall-out dictated world history for the following century.

After WWII, the famed ‘Rubble Women’ cleared broken Berlin by hand, creating the ‘rubble mountains’ on both sides of the city.  But one women was a different type of rubble women.  She didn’t remove it.   She created it.  Her name was Hertha Bahr. And she blew up bits of Berlin.

There are very few images of Frau Bahr.  She appears in broadcast of TV news in mid-July 1957.  Berlin was still in ruins, and there amongst them is Hertha, surrounded by gangs of grinning men overalls.  She is definately in charge.  And she is laying charges as the footage cuts to here inserting dynamite into bore holes. Minutes later, the vast, ruined temple of industry, Lehrter Bahnhof (now Berlin Main Station), crashes to the ground.

Hertha Bahr was Germany’s first female demolition expert.  Her company base was a renovated villa in the wealthy Grunewald district.  Here she organised her operations. In the late 1940’s an eye witness account mentions her company involved in the demolition of buildings surrounding the famous Baroque Gendarmenmarkt Square in central Berlin. 

All reports on Behr’s activities (admittedly a novelty), often seem obsessed with her appearance. This time it’s noted, she was sporting a ‘green silk blouse and red nail polish’.  While she was at work here, folks were squatting in the rubble and cellars and refused to leave. One was nearly crushed by a falling wall.

Bahr’s first major commission was to destroy the building at the very heart of Hitler’s Berlin – the New Reich Chancellery from 1939. This project was a central part of the ‘denazifaction’ policy introduced by the victors in the late 1940s. Part of this ‘deprogramming’ was to remove Nazi period buildings to avoid them, in defeat, becoming places of sentimental memory of the Nazi regime. This was deemed necessary, its reported that tearful crowds gathered and sung outside the Chacellery in the immediate post war years. Even the wall plaster of Hitler’s mountain house was removed by locals as ‘the Führers breath had condensed in it’).    

Though Hitler spent more time making key decisions and directing WWII from 2 other places than the Berlin Reich Chancellery (these were the ‘Wolfs Lair’ in Eastern Poland today and his ‘home’ – the Berghof – in Berchtesgaden – roughly 1000 days spent in each place) this building symbolised the core of his regime in the Nazi capital.  Here was his office, and in the garden of the building his body would burn in 1945.

History does not record what she was wearing during this operation, (but it seems to have been a dark, roughish coat and black skirt).

In the late 1950s she destroyed Lehrter Station, and in the summer of 1960 the remains of Anhalter Station, leaving the entrance façade as a reminder of the ruins of war, perhaps a response to growing resistance amongst west Berliners that reminders of old west Berlin were practically all gone.

She was still working in west Berlin the 1970s, removing the ruins of domestic buildings for redevelopment, appearing in action depressing the plunger of a detonator in an article in the Carlisle Citizen newspaper based in Iowa.  A white summer dress was apparently the choice here.

They quote her: ‘Blowing up a building is a safe as crossing the road, as long as you know what you are doing’.

4 Tour Basics

1. I’ll always come and pick you up wherever, whenever suits you.
2. Berlin’s historical center is very walkable – it’s about the size of a village. We break whenever you want.
3. Motorize the tour? Easy, in your private vehicle with a professional driver: go further, see more in safety and comfort. 
4. Tours last a half day (ca. 4 hrs) or a full day (ca.6/7 hrs).

Your Explore Berlin Tour

– our perfect starting point

This tour is the most satisfying Berlin experience, with all the important sites and stories. Of course, we see

• the Berlin Wall,
• Brandenburg Gate,
• the Reichstag,
• Checkpoint Charlie
• and other major highlights,

BUT we can comfortably add in the focus theme(s) YOU find most interesting, as we explore beyond these major sites to get context to understand your Berlin in a new light.

Educational Group Tours Berlin

All the listed Berlin Tours can be tailored for Educational Student groups. I have a great deal of experience in this field.

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