Another fun day down. Started off the day with a pleasant taxi towards the Berliner Unterwelten. (Berlin Underworld), the location of an old 1920’s subway station converted into an air raid shelter for the German people during the war. Unfortunately photos were completely verboten. It was a fascinating winding underground network of tunnels and rooms where people would hide the the destruction above. Throughout the tunnels were display cases of old relics, many Nazi things such as pins and belt buckles with swastikas. There was  a room with dozens of old rusted out rifes and pistols and wepons of war, from bullets to a hollowed out bomb to a panzerschreck (rocket launcher), bullets, a hollowed out bomb and shell casings from small bullets to huge 3 foot tall artillery rounds. One room is covered with an orignal paint the glows in the dark. If you stand in front of it in darkness then shine a bright light the room paint will glow except for a dark silhouette of you on the wall. Another room had tons of soldiers personal gear from Russian and German soldiers. And dozens of helmets too.

Back above across the street is just a completely ordinary hill with nothing strange about it  whatsoever. Pictures below. A lengthy walk back to the city center had me walking through the famous Brandenburg Gate into the massive Tiergarten (animal garden, and at which point it started raining again). A ways down I was headed to Bendlerblock Straße (street), passing many nations embassies. On the street is an ordinary looking brick building, called the Gedenkstätte Deutscher Widerstand. An archway leads to a non-desript courtyard. In the center of this courtyard is a statue of a naked man, whose hands are bound. The statue is of Colonel Claus von Stauffenburg, and this courtyard is where he and his high ranking conspirators were executed for being involved in the famous July Hitler assassination plot. The building is called the Memorial for the German Resistance, and the street has been renamed from Bendlerblock to Stauffenburg.

Back towards the Tiergarten, I passed through the iconic Sony Center at Potsdamer Platz to what is known as the Topographie des Terrors, or the Topograpy of Terror – the location of the ruins of the headquarters of the Geheimnisse Staats Polizei, aka the Gestapo and SS. Little is left save for a museum next door dedicated to it, and lots of signs detailing their formation and brutality. A short walk past that is the holocaust memorial. A large area with hundreds of large gray stones of different shapes and sizes. There is no rhyme or reason, it just is. A small block away is an apartment complex with a parking lot and a signboard. The signboard is the marker for the location of the Führerbunker, where Hitler spent the last months of the war, before killing himself. It was demolished and completely paved over making it an ignominious part of life and nobody would ever know just passing by. I then returned to my home away from home for a job wel done.