Germany – Berlin

The Charlottenberg Palace was extraordinary for sure.

The ceramic room was right over the top, as was the castle chapel.

Interesting the lengths that were taken to fabricate a line of succession when none existed but money was available to deceive people into believing there was and it succeeded.

While John visited a museum I visited the Berlin zoo. After seeing so many animals in the wild I had a different impression of a zoo. These animals have been born in captivity. They are well cared for, don’t have to worry about the elements, hunting for food or being hunted for food. They are not alone and their home areas were pretty spacious, if you compare then to the Calgary zoo, when we were children, where the tigers were in a small concrete cages and just paced back and forth. The zoo helps to preserve species that are being endangered like the rhino, the one animal we never saw in Kruger.

Germany – Berlin

Our trip on the Spree River gave us an opportunity to see some of the buildings in Berlin from a different perspective.

The rock in the middle of the column is a part of the old Berlin Wall.

It is amazing when you are traveling how much of your day is devoted to getting where you are planning on going. You think you have the entire day but in reality by the time you get there after a bus and a tram ride, waiting for the transport to arrive, discovering which way to turn when you get off going the wrong way once or twice, stopping for coffee to get your energy back, you really do not accomplish as much as you thought you would that day.

The Adlon Hotel provided a great place for that rest. The decor, plush seats and pianist, made the very expensive coffee and hot chocolate worth every penny.

Getting lost is how we happened upon this gorgeous building.

Germany – Berlin

After the bombing of the city, the only part of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church left standing was the entrance.

Pretty amazing interior mosaics.

Train stations were very ornate.

Underground poster.

This fellow’s portable barbecue was interesting. John said the sausage was his guilty pleasure.

The Brandenberger Tor

The symbol of Berlin

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John visited the Sachsenhausen museum which is a train ride from the city. Together with adjacent Oranienberg, this was the first Nazi concentration camps, housing political prisoners as early as 1933.

As the war approached, others – common criminals. Gypsies, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals and German Jews – were included – over 200,000 in all. After the Soviet Union captured Berlin in 1945, Sachsenhausen became a “Special Camp” for former Nazi officers and then enemies of the Soviet state. It was declared a national memorial by the East German Government in 1956.

John also spent time at the Wall Museum, which is an incredibly detailed look at Berlin from 1945 to the destruction of the Berlin wall in 1989. Many of the artifacts are various ways that East Germans escaped to the West after 1961, when the wall was constructed, as well as pictures and posters of the time.

Brezhnev and Honecker – “The Kiss”

A third museum is dedicated to German resistance to the Nazi regime.

The Topography of Terror exhibit was built on the former site of the Berlin Gestapo.

The National Museum of History has a large exhibit showing the development and ultimate collapse of the Weimar Republic, after 1918. The propaganda poster collection illustrated the political turmoil of the twenties and the Nazi takeover by 1933.