Berlin

Brandenburg Gate at night.

Listening for Hitler´s ghost atop his bunker.

Hitler´s previous living location is now home to fantastic Chinese dining!

Was happy to see that my brother´s in arms have already infiltrated this city.

The Reichstag, in all of its chocolatey glory!

City square somewhere in Berlin.

Jewish memorial in Berlin.

There are far too many smiling faces in this protectin shot, but nonetheless, Just Protectin´ the Berlin Wall.

Angel on a stick!

Feel free to create your own caption for this picture.

Mark my words, I would die for my Berlin football club.

Olympic Stadium.

German Committee members inspect the local recipe.

It was all fun and games prior to the actual fun and games.

Pergamon altar inside the Pergamon museum.

Lonely stone soldier stands watch over the Soviet memorial.

Inside za dome of za Reichstag.

Entrance to the concentration camp, with the horribly untrue slogan of "Work will set you free".

Execution trench, with bullet catcher in the back and a Canadian wreath in front.

Our group arrived in a slightly colder Berlin on the afternoon of the 14th after a 4 hour train ride from Prague. The border was probably the easiest I´ve crossed, with the guards coming on the train with a portable stamp and checking us all into Germany in less than a minute. Tara had taken care of our accomodations beforehand from Vancouver and had checked us into what I was later to learn is the 3rd highest rated hostel in the world, quite nice as would be expected and one of the reasons I´m still here.

The next day we signed on to a tour given by Terry, a fellow who has been doing it so long that he started his career by showing allied soldiers around the city after the war. During the marathon 10 hour walk through the middle of Berlin, we visited virtually every major historical site the city has to offer. Stopping off or passing by the Reichstag, the Brandenburg gate, Hitler´s bunker, Luftwaffe headquarters, the Berlin Wall, Hitler´s old house and a bunch more. Due to the freezing conditions, several members of our party had to make a hasty retreat back to the hostel, giving us another reason to walk around the city the following day.

Saturday saw us travelling out to the edges of Berlin to catch a Bundisliga game (Germany´s premiere soccer league). After adourning ourselves in the hometeam´s colours and scarves, we made our way into the famous Olympic Stadium, which also played host to the 1936 olympics. Although not quite as crazy as some of the South American games I´ve been too, the crowd was still leagues beyond anything typically seen in a North American sporting event. Unfortunately for us, Hertha Berlin experienced their first home loss in 10 months, casting a dismal mood over the blue, scarf covered fans on our trek home. That night we held a few of our own football matches in the back of a Berlin bar. The headline event being the Hatazawa brothers versus the Blanchets, and in a dastardly turn of events, my own side suffered one too many defeats at the end of the tournament. Little did I know that my sister has married some kind of fuseball guru, although I was able to barely beat him in a straight one on one, I did not like having a hobby I hold so dear being challenged by a mere mortal.

Following a quick breakfast the next morning, the gang saddled up their bags, jumped in a taxi and left me twiddling my thumbs on the side of a Berlin street, all by my lonesome. After aimlessly walking around the city listening to Wolfmother, I decided the only way to properly cheer up was to reacquaint myself with my good friend alcohol. Within minutes of signing up for one of the local pub crawls I was immersed in a world of a German pilsners, jaggermeister and absynth. The walk home at 3am, which should have taken 10 minutes, took over 2 hours, as I got incredibly lost in the bullet ridden/bomb scarred maze of East Berlin. To investigate the strange nausious, dizzy feeling I had recently acquired, I would randomly empty my stomach in an effort to sift through the contents and find the culprit. The following day was a write off, aside from a quick visit to the Pergamon museum, famous for housing the reconstructed gates of Babylon and other massive structures inside its walls.

This morning I grabbed a train and rocketed right out of the city to the little town of Oranienburg, home of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Sachsenhausen was the first concentration camp to be designed and built for the that specific purpose and was used as a model for future camps as well to train the officers and commanders who would later go on to rule over Aushwitz, Dachau and other happy places of the Nazi regime. Sachsenhausen is most notoriously remembered as the camp where over 10,000 Russian POWs from the Eastern Front were executed bringing the overall death toll of the place to just over 100,000. Most of the killings were done with a simple device that appeared to be measuring the victims height. After standing next to the ruler, a small panel slid down in which the hidden SS guard behind would insert his pistol and finish the job. After passing through the skull, the bullet would economically be caught in a bullet catcher on the far side, in order to be re-used for the next person. Near the end of the war, a gas chamber was installed to speed up the process, as well as several sets of gallows. The Soviets liberated the camp in May of 1945 (but not before the camp leadership decided a move was in order, resulting in a death march across Germany that killed an additional 6000 people) and thought it was such an efficient system that they would just keep using it! It was used simply as a "prison" for the next 5 years under the Russians, with another 12,000 inmates dying before it was finally shut down in 1950. Because of its location deep within Soviet territory, it´s still undergoing some changes, mainly the fact that the Russians only mentioned the heroic Communists who had died in the camp and totally failed to mention any Jews, Gypsies etc.

Tomorrow I spend my last day in Berlin, before flying out to London to meet up with more characters in this story. I had originally wanted to travel through Belgium and France in an effort to wet my endless appetite for war history, but decided against it after the cost was looked into. Berlin is a fantastic city for walking (which is how I tend to measure the quality of a city now), has a ton to see and last but not least, the flight up to London cost me $50!