Berlin, Germany

Germany’s capital was the beating heart of the Third Reich, which Hitler’s architect, Albert Speer, hoped to turn into a new glittering city called Germania. It has a fascinating and deeply moving collection of memorials and museums.

The Nazi policies that gave rise to the genocide of World War II were drawn up in the German capital, Berlin and one of the most important sites to see is the Wannsee Conference House where the plans for the Holocaust were finalised.

Getting there Berlin is connected to all major European capitals by air, rail and road. There are many long-distance flights.

Getting around Both the U-Bahn (underground rail) and S-Bahn (commuter train) systems are the best way to get around but can be confusing, so it helps to have a good transport map.

Berlin is a surprisingly easy city to visit by car. It has no congestion charge and, compared with other western European cities, parking is easy to find and moderately priced.

To see the former Sachsenhausen concentration camp 30km north of Berlin, take S-Bahn 1 to Oranienburg, then walk 20 minutes; or take bus 804/821.

Holocaust Memorial, Berlin

Memorials

Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (Cora-Berliner-Str. 1; w stiftung-denkmal.de; memorial: 24hrs daily; free) was unveiled in 2005. Made up of 2,711 grey stele of various sizes, symbolising Europe’s Jewish communities destroyed during the Holocaust, it covers an area the size of three football fields. The memorial receives 4 million visitors a year – be prepared to see people jumping from stele to stele or sitting on them drinking wine or having a snack. There is an excellent information centre below the memorial.

Kindertransport Memorial (Friedrichstrasse Bahnhof) Entitled Trains to Life – Trains to Death, the privately funded memorial was erected in 2008. It remembers the 20,000 children who left the Reich between 1938 and 1939 and those who were deported to their deaths.

The Rosenstrasse Women Memorial (near the Hackesche Höfe) The memorial erected in 1995, recalls the 1943 demonstrations by Christian women outside the Gestapo headquarters on Rosenstrasse after the arrest of their Jewish husbands, who were eventually released.

The Deserted Room (Koppenplatz) Karl Biedermann’s bronze sculpture depicts a table and two chairs, one of which has been overturned in a round-up.

Orte des Erinnerns (Places of Remembrance) 80 panels by American artists Renata Stih and Frieder Schnock, were put up in 1993 on lampposts around Schöneberg. They recall the successive steps the Nazis took in the persecution of the Jews. One outside a radio shop recalls the ban on Jews owning radios.

Wittenbergplatz U-Bahn station A striking memorial lists the names of concentration and extermination camps as if they were a schedule for commuter trains.

Grunewald S-Bahn station

Platform 17 (Grunewald S-Bahn station; free) This is the most moving of all of Berlin’s Holocaust memorials. It is located in a wealthy, leafy suburb west of the city. The first train left for the Łódź Ghetto from the station on 18 October 1941. Plaques next to the tracks list the transports that left Berlin between 1941 and 1945, the number of people, and their destinations – Auschwitz, Riga and Theresienstadt. Each transport consisted of roughly 1,000 people.

Herman Ehlers Platz Memorial (In the southern suburb of Steglitz near the Botanical Gardens) A mirrored wall lists 1,723 names of Jews from the deportation lists, among them 229 from Steglitz. The memorial stands on the site of the former synagogue which has been rebuilt and now stands at Düppelstrasse 41.

Star of David Memorial (Putlitzbrücke) On the bridge that connects the districts of Moabit and Wedding, remembers the 30,000 Jews who were deported from the Moabit Freight Depot.

Levetzow Synagogue Memorial (Levetzowstrasse 7/8) The synagogue was damaged in the bombing raids and demolished in the 1950s. Jews were gathered here prior to deportation. The current monument, put up in 1988, is in the form of a stylised freight car.

Auerbach Orphanage (Schönhauser Allee 162) In 1942, 60 children and three staff from the orphanage were deported to Riga, where they were shot in the forest. In November, 75 children aged between 10 months and 16 years old were deported to Auschwitz and gassed. The building was destroyed in Allied bombing raids in 1943. Since 2014 the names of the murdered children and staff have been inscribed on the only remaining wall of the building.

The Central Office of Jewish Emigration Memorial (In a bus stop by Kurfürstendamm 115/116). Adolf Eichmann ran the bureau from 1938 which attempted to encourage Jewish emigration.

Museums

New Synagogue (Oranienburgerstr. 28–30; entry fee) The Moorish New Synagogue was built in 1866 and was the largest synagogue in Germany, seating 3,200 people. Religious practice here corresponded with liberal Judaism. Partially destroyed during Kristallnacht in 1938, and damaged by Allied bombing in 1943, the main synagogue hall was demolished in 1958. After the war, Jewish survivors in East Berlin used the adjacent building, the former premises of the Jewish community council, as a meeting place. Reconstruction of the façade and entrance lobby began in 1988. Today the building houses the Centrum Judaicum Foundation a museum, archive and research centre.

German Resistance Memorial Centre (Stauffenbergstrasse 13, free). The German High Command was housed in the building which is still part of the Ministry of Defence. It is here that Count von Stauffenberg, who had attempted to assassinate Hitler in the doomed July Bomb Plot of 1944 in the Wolf ’s Lair, was executed. The permanent exhibition covers anti-Nazi resistance. The Silent Heroes Memorial Centre is part of the same museum and commemorates Jews who resisted Nazi persecution and those who helped them.

Topography of Terror Documentation Centre (Niederkirchnerstrasse 8; free) The permanent exhibition in German and English that focuses on the central institutions of the SS and police in the Third Reich and the crimes they committed across Europe. It is an important and rare site that looks at the perpetrators. The street, formerly Prinz-Albrechtstrasse, was the centre of the Nazi terror machine.

Jewish Museum Berlin (Lindenstrasse 9–14; w jmberlin.de; free) The museum, a short walk from Checkpoint Charlie, was designed by the architect Daniel Libeskind, who was born in Łódź in Poland in 1946 to survivor parents. The museum opened in 2001 and is the biggest Jewish museum space in Europe. The children’s museum, Anoha (w anoha.de; free; book online), is on the opposite side of the road.

Anhalt Station (Möckernstrasse, southeast of Potsdamer Platz) More than 9,600 people were deported from the now ruined Anhalter in 116 transports, which usually took place in the morning during the normal commuter bustle, with one or two third-class passenger cars attached to scheduled trains. The first Kindertransport also left from Anhalter on 1 December 1938 destined for the UK. A new Exile Museum is due to open here in 2027.

We Were Neighbours (John-F-Kennedy-Platz 1; free) A small exhibition in the Schöneberg town hall explores the stories of 170 Jews who lived in the area. On the walls are 6,000 handwritten file cards with the names, addresses and biographical data of the deported.

German Museum of Technology (Trebbinerstrasse; entry fee), The museum has an interesting exhibition on the role of the Deutsche Reichsbahn, the German Reich Railway, in the Holocaust.

Otto Weidt’s Workshop for the Blind Museum (free) This museum in the Hackesche Höfe near the New Synagogue documents the extraordinary bravery of Otto Weidt, who ran a broom and brush workshop which supplied the German army and employed many blind and deaf Jews.

The Anne Frank Centre (entry fee), also in the Hackesche Höfe complex, tells the story of perhaps the Holocaust’s most famous victim. The museum is aimed at teenagers and school trips.

Wannsee Conference House

House of the Wannsee Conference (Am Grossen Wannsee 56; free) On Tuesday 20 January 1942, in the middle of a freezing cold winter, an extraordinary meeting took place in the southwestern suburbs of Berlin hosted by the director of the Reich Main Security Office, SS Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich. The house became a memorial in 1992. The exhibition here documents the systematic process which led to the Holocaust and shines a spotlight on the desk perpetrators. The museum also has interesting online exhibitions, one of which uses 1,000 photographs and 380 diaries and letters by Wehrmacht soldiers who took part in the invasion of Poland in 1939.

Cemeteries

Berlin has several Jewish cemeteries, some of them are still in use.

The Old Jewish Cemetery (Grosse Hamburgerstrasse, a short walk from the New Synagogue) This was the city’s oldest Jewish cemetery, used between 1672-1827; today, the site is a small park. In 1943, the cemetery was turned into an air-raid shelter, and the gravestones used to reinforce its walls. It was also used for mass burials of civilians and soldiers killed in the air raids. A heartrending collection of sculpted figures, the Monument to Jewish Victims of Fascism, was placed by the entrance in 1985.

The other cemeteries are in Schönhauser Allee, Weißensee and Heerstraße.

Sachsenhausen Memorial and Museum (Oranienburg; Strasse der Nationen 22; w sachsenhausen-sbg.de; free) The former concentration camp of Sachsenhausen, 30km north of Berlin, is now a museum and memorial site.

Sachsenhausen played an important part in the story of the Boys. The camp built in 1936 originally held high-profile political prisoners, but after Kristallnacht 5,000 Jews were imprisoned here. In 1942 many Jewish prisoners were deported to Auschwitz from Sachsenhausen, among them Polish or stateless Jews from Berlin. Around 200,000 prisoners are thought to have passed through Sachsenhausen, and an estimated 30,000 people died here, of whom 10,000 were Soviet prisoners of war.

At the end of the war, death marches arrived in Sachsenhausen, notably the march from Auschwitz which left the camp in November 1944. To find out more about Sachsenhausen and its subcamps click here.