Berlin; Tuesday, 21 February, 2006

After having checked out from the hotel and dropped my luggage at Freidrichstraß station, I caught the S1 out to the end of the line at Orienburg. From there it was a 20-minute walk north from the town centre to the small village of Sachsenhausen.

This quiet town was the home to Northern Germany’s main Concentration camp during the Second World War, and after the war, the Soviets used it as a “Special Camp” for dealing with their prisoners. The site was the “model camp” and it was from here that the entire concentration camp system across the Nazi occupied lands was run. From here, decisions were made that effected people in camps from Salaspils near Riga in the North through Dachau near Munich to Auschwitz in Poland and many more. Even today, a sense of Evil pervades the place and on a bitterly cold and windy February morning, it was even more so.

The site has a visitor’s centre that has recently been built. From here, you can hire very comprehensive audio guides, which take you around the only parts of the site that are remaining and help to put into context some of the things that happened here and tell the stories of some of the prisoners, some who survived, and many who did not.

I headed back into town and out to Potsdamer Platz where I visited once again the Panorama lift in the Daimler-Chrysler building for the views over the area. From the top, I confirmed for my own eyes how many changes there had been in the two years since I had last stood there. From the acres and acres of what was death strip, there is now just one empty space, which is being built upon, and a long green strip running down the centre of one of the roads as a reminder to where the wall used to run.

I wandered a couple of streets across to have a look at the “Topographies of terror” exhibition at the last remaining chunk of un-preserved wall. The outdoor exhibition (there has been a very long running saga over getting a proper museum built!) tells the history of the Third Reich, war, building of the wall and the events that took place on the Eastern side of it. There is also an exhibition on the Nuremburg war crimes trials.

I wandered back through the streets to the opera house on Babelplatz. Once called Opernplatz it was here, on the night of May 10th 1933, that the Nazis burnt the books from the library of Magnus Hirschfeld. Being a Jewish, homosexual, Social democrat he was pretty much top of the list of people the Nazis wanted to get rid of. Today a memorial to the event is in the square. One of the paving stones has been replaced by a large pane of glass, which looks down into a space with lots of empty shelves, symbolising the destroyed library.

I had wanted to do one final thing before leaving Berlin and climb the Reichstag dome in daylight. Unfortunately, when I got there the queue was too long, so I walked back along the riverside to Freidrichstraß station, collected my luggage and headed back out to Schönefeld and the flight home.