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Whitlam's Berlin Tours, Berlin (2025)

12/02/2025

This Sat Feb 15 I’m doing a Pay What You Want tour to the concentration camp memorial at Sachsenhausen.

Before you sign up, you should know it makes for a long and cold, but interesting and important day.

Head to the link in my bio for details and to sign up.

24/11/2024

Join me on Bluesky! 🦋

18/11/2024

The headless soldier 💀

💒 It adorns the Church at Südstern, which was originally intended to be used by soldiers stationed nearby

🪖 The statue was added in 1929 to honour the Garde-Pionier-Bataillon, elite engineers who built bridges and fortifications during WWI

💣 The statue WWII bombings but due to connotations with it glorifying war, it has become a target for criticism and vandalism

🧐 Around 2008 its head was removed - apparently no one knows where it ended up!

14/11/2024

“A British bomber robbed me of my one and all” 🪦

🌳 The grave, presumably, of a mother and son in the Stahnsdorf cemetery

💥 …and WWII bombs on display in the

☝️ I just happened to visit these places days apart. The message on the graves so personal, really got me. Very often the large tragedies of WWII are reduced to how many thousands of people were killed. It’s important to remember that it was individuals who were affected.

12/11/2024

Due to popular demand, here are four more pay what you want tours you can join *this weekend* 😀

📆 On Saturday the 16th it’s Karl-Marx-Allee in the morning and Weimar Berlin in the afternoon.

📆 Then, on the 17th, Jewish Berlin under the “Third Reich” followed by a Berlin Wall History tour

🙋‍♂️ Want to sign up?  📲 Check my Story or the link in my bio!

02/11/2024

I was very lucky to spend yesterday with a wonderful school group. I’ll be honest, school tours can be challenging, but this lot were so full of questions and insights, I could really tell they were engaged and interested. What a pleasure!

31/10/2024

Comment “Tour” to sign up

or go click the link in my bio 😉

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🗺️ This weekend I thought I’d do two opposites - Karl-Marx-Allee workers’ paradise on Saturday, and its exact opposite, the Grunewald district on Sunday

📆 Yes, Nov 9 is a crazy day in German history, a (failed) revolution, an actual revolution, another failed revolution, terror, and another revolution… let’s watch out backs that day, yeah?

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REMEMBER - only sign up if you 100% definitely actually intend to come. If you can’t make it in the end, that’s cool, but cancel your ticket online so someone else can have it.

29/10/2024

Tränenpalast – the “Palace of Tears” – once marked the divide between East and West Berlin 😢

🛂 Built in 1962, this border crossing at Friedrichstraße station saw countless emotional farewells, as families and friends were torn apart by the Berlin Wall

🚉 West Berliners could visit the East for short trips, but East Berliners rarely got the chance to go the other way, making goodbyes here especially heartbreaking

✨ Today, it’s a museum where visitors can explore stories of separation, escape, and everyday life in divided Berlin

24/10/2024

The Berlin Airlift Memorial at Platz der Luftbrücke ✈️

🌍 It commemorates the huge effort of 1948-49 airlift that kept West Berlin supplied during the Soviet blockade solely by air

💼 Food, water, clothes, medicine and more were needed to keep a city with a population of 2+ million alive

🛬 At its height planes were landing in West Berlin almost once per minute

☝️ You have to think how terrifying it must have been for Berliners to have British and American flying overhead - WWII ended only 3 years before the airlift began

🕊️ 78 pilots and crew lost their lives ensuring food, fuel, and supplies reached the city

🇬🇧🇺🇸🇫🇷 Think how that changed the Berliners’ perception of the Western allies - those who destroyed the city were now risking their lives to save its people

⚡️ Over 2 million tons of supplies in less than a year

🧱 West Berlin would never face a serious, sustained blockade again, even when the Berlin went up

🐹 Nevertheless, supplies were kept on hand, just in case

🚇 You can find this memorial at Platz der Luftbrücke - it’s easily accessible via the U-Bahn station with the same name

22/10/2024

A bomb from the U.S. Army Air Forces’ 1945 raid on Oranienburg 💣

⚛️ In March 1945, over 600 bombers targeted this town to destroy a uranium facility linked to N**i nuclear research

🚫 The aim? To stop the Soviets from seizing it as they advanced towards Berlin

🔎 Despite the devastation, Soviet forces still found enough uranium here to boost their own atomic bomb project

🧨 This bomb, now safely displayed outside the historic post office near the train station, reminds us of that day, March 15, 1945, when this small town was hit with an air raid so big that usually it would have been reserved for major cities

💣 unexploded bombs are still regularly found in the area to this date

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Fun fact! About 2 years ago, while leading a tour around the Sachsenhausen memorial for @ my group and I actually heard one of these bombs being blown up. The explosion was intentional, it had been deemed that this bomb, found during routine checks for these kinds of things, was just too dangerous to dispose of any other way. That means that just once in my life have I heard a singular WWII bomb explode. I can tell you, it was a brown pants moment for all of us. It caught us all off guard.

It really made us think how terrifying it would have been to hear 600 bombers flying overhead, each of them dropping as many bombs as they could. It must have felt like the end of the world to the people of Oranienburg. What would the concentration camp prisoners have thought?

By this point, Sachsenhausen was pretty much at its most crowded, the prisoners would have known the end of the “Third Reich” was near, but would have likely felt like they themselves were in a hopeless position. Would the air raid have given them hope that the end was that bit closer? Or terrified them, thinking that they might have been hit?

21/10/2024

At first, you might think this is the Berlin Wall. In fact, it’s a completely different wall loaded with Cold War history 🇵🇱

🧱 This piece of wall comes from Gdańsky’s Lenin shipyard, where in 1980, L**h Wałęsa led the strike that started the Solidarność (Solidarity) movement

⚒️ Solidarność began as a trade union, fighting for better working conditions, but quickly grew into a national movement challenging the communist regime

💪 It became the first independent trade union in a communist country, and helped bring down Poland’s communist system, inspiring other movements across Eastern Europe in the late ‘80s, including in East Germany

📅 The wall was installed here on 17 June 2009, just a few metres from where the Berlin Wall once stood, marking the anniversary of the 1953 East German uprising, where Soviet tanks and soldiers brutally shut down East German protests

16/10/2024

Beaten to death & silenced to death: to the homosexual victims of National Socialism

🙏 This memorial stands outside Nollendorfplatz station, home of Berlin’s gay district pre- and post-N**i dictatorship

🔕 Beaten to death we can understand, but what’s meant by “silenced to death”?

❌ The fact is that tolerance towards homosexuality took a long time after the N**is were defeated

☝️ In fact, it remained illegal to be gay in both East & West Germany until the late 1960s, though the East were more tolerant in this regard

🇩🇪 That meant that when the two Germanys were founded in 1949, gay men that had been forced to wear the pink triangle in the concentration camps were the only group that couldn’t talk about their experiences

🏳️‍🌈 Their sexuality, relationships, and true selves had to remain hidden

12/10/2024

Amazing group on today’s pay-what-you-want tour 🥰 Thank you all for coming. Look out for more tours in November!

10/10/2024

Willi Sänger was a German athlete turned resistance fighter ✊

⚔️ He worked as a key organiser for the Communist resistance against the N**is

📜 Sänger helped distribute the illegal magazine Die Innere Front, encouraging workers to resist

💥 He was arrested in July 1944 after his group was betrayed, having been infiltrated by a Gestapo informant

💀 He was sentenced to death

🪦 On 27 November 1944, he was executed by guillotine in Brandenburg Görden Prison

🇩🇪 In East Germany, he was honoured as a hero, with many streets and institutions bearing his name

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Image of Willi Sänger: Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-1988-1113-004 / CC-BY-SA 3.0

06/10/2024

Josef Thorak’s bronze horses were made in the 1930s for Hitler’s New Reich Chancellery 🐎

🛠️ They symbolised N**i ideals of strength and power - just look at how over the top the muscles on the horse are

🕵️‍♂️ but they vanished after WWII, long considered smashed to bit in the war…

📦 It turns out the Soviet army moved them to Brandenburg, where they were hidden until the late ‘80s

🎭 After being traded on the black market in the chaos around the end of the Cold War, they resurfaced in 2015 during a raid led by the police and art detective Arthur Brand

⚖️ After legal disputes one of these monumental horses is now on display in the Spandau Citadel - the exhibit of ‘forbidden statues’ is well worth a visit!

05/10/2024

🌳 The Humboldthain Flak Tower, constructed between 1941 and 1942, was one of three towering anti-aircraft bunkers built to defend Berlin from Allied bombers. These colossal structures were designed to withstand intense bombardment, with reinforced concrete walls up to 3.5 metres thick

🛡️ Armed with four twin 128mm anti-aircraft guns on the upper platforms, the Humboldthain tower could fire at enemy planes flying as high as 14,800 metres. It also had smaller 20mm and 37mm guns positioned to defend against low-flying aircraft

💥 Ultimately, the towers provided psychological support, and physical protection for Berliners; in terms of shooting down planes and stopping bombs from hitting the city centre, they failed

💣 during air raids and the battle of Berlin they could offer shelter to over 10,000 civilians at a time

💀 Conditions inside were tense, and stressful. Civilians were left to wonder what kind of world they would walk outside to - would their home still be standing? What their friends and family be killed?

⚫️ As the Red Army approached in the dying days of the war, many Berliners, particularly women, decided to jump from the towers’ stairs, choosing death on their own terms instead of brutal treatment, particularly r**e, at the hands of the invading army

🚇 Today, the tower’s partially surviving structure can be visited in Humboldthain Park, a short walk from Berlin-Gesundbrunnen station. Though much of it was destroyed and buried after the war, parts of the bunker remain accessible via Berliner Unterwelten’s tours

03/10/2024

The Bunker am Heckeshorn in Wannsee was built in 1943 during WWII 🏗️

🏢 It was a key air defence command centre for Berlin, coordinating Flak units and fighter planes

📡 After the war, it was used for communication during the Berlin Blockade/Airlift - one of the most important episodes of the Cold War

🏥 In the 80s it became an emergency hospital with room for 400 patients

🛑 Today, it’s closed to the public, but is sometimes open for special tours

⛑️ The bunker walls are made from 4m-thick (12 foot) steel-reinforced concrete - hard to get rid of - and so, it’s still here today!

02/10/2024

Arno Breker was perhaps Hitler’s favourite sculptor 🏛️

🎨 His Berlin studio was built so that he could continue making huge statues for the N**i’s ever-growing number of construction projects and monuments

🚫 Breker mostly didn’t use the studio much though - he worked in another one out of town, safe from WWII bombs

⚒️ Post-war, having survived the war mostly intact, it became a workspace for other artists

✨ Today, it’s Kunsthaus Dahlem, showcasing modernist art, and home to a lovely cafe ☕️

Whitlam's Berlin Tours