Third Reich Berlin
Quick Overview
Description
Time
Choose your start time.
Duration
2, 3, 4, 6 or 8 hours
Meeting Point
The lobby of your hotel
Prices
2 hours
€249
3 hours
€299
4 hours
€389
6 hours
€559
8 hours
€699
Highlights
- Get picked up from your hotel and prepare to delve into various aspects of Nazi-era Berlin with your professional tour guide.
- Learn about the rise of National Socialism and everyday life under a dictatorship.
- Head to the Reichstag and learn how the fire of 1933 paved the way for Hitler to seize power.
- Go to the German Resistance Memorial Centre, where the instigators of the failed 20 July plot to assassinate Hitler were executed.
- Visit historic Tempelhof Airport, an impressive example of Third Reich architecture.
- Take in the imposing Olympiastadion, the stadium built by the Nazis for the 1936 Olympics.
- See Platform 17, a massive memorial commemorating the deportation of some 50,000 Jews from Berlin.
- Walk between the stelae of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.
- Gaze up at the monumental Soviet War Memorial in Tiergarten.
- As you visit the location of the Führerbunker, hear a gripping account of the Battle of Berlin and Hitler’s suicide in 1945.
Whether you have opted for a tour format of two, three, four, six or eight hours, your personal guide for the day will meet you at your hotel. Let the experts show you around! Your tour will begin with a closer look at the decline of the Weimar Republic and other factors that enabled Hitler to seize power in 1933. On our five-star tour, you can expect to hear stories of resistance, compliance and collaboration during Hitler’s reign of terror, and discover the remains of his “Thousand-Year Reich”: the Air Force Ministry, where Goering strategised during the Battle of Britain, as well as the site of the Propaganda Ministry, once run by Goebbels, and the Topography of Terror exhibition built on the ruins of Himmler’s SS and Gestapo HQ.
Hitler’s office, the New Reich Chancellery designed by Albert Speer in 1939, is the site where the Führer had his second bunker built in 1943-44. Your expert guide will chart Hitler’s final days, leading up to his suicide in 1945, and highlight some of the issues and difficulties Germany encounters today when it comes to appropriately memorialising such a space.
The Bendler Block complex once housed the German Military High Command, and is now the German Resistance Memorial Centre (Gedenkstätte Deutscher Widerstand). Here you can enter the room where Hitler set out his plans for war, and hear the heroic story of Claus von Stauffenberg and his co-conspirators and their failed assassination attempt on Hitler in 1944.
The tour follows the same route taken by Soviet troops towards the final battle for Berlin. The scale of their sacrifice is reflected in the monumental Soviet War Memorial: flanked by T-34/76 tanks and Red Army howitzers, it commemorates the 80,000 soldiers who lost their lives in the fierce fighting in April and May 1945.
As you stand in front of the Reichstag, your guide will talk you through the history of this fascinating edifice. Seat of the respective parliaments of the German Empire and the ill-fated Weimar Republic, gutted by the 1933 fire, in the wake of which the Nazis seized power – the Reichstag has often found itself in the eye of the storm. As Germany’s current-day democratic hub, the Reichstag has been home to the Bundestag since 1999.
Depending on the duration of the tour, you could opt to travel out to the 1936 Olympic Stadium, where Jesse Owens took four gold medals, much to Adolf Hitler’s consternation. See the Olympic bell tower and take in the stunning views over the city of Berlin. Another option is to head to the sprawling Nazi-built Tempelhof Airport and learn, for example, which warplanes were built there and how Berliners use this space today.
At the end of your tour, your Insider guide will be happy to point you in the direction of your next destination or advise you on how you might best spend your time in Berlin.
Example Itinerary
The following list of sites is intended to give you an idea of what you can expect to see on this tour. Please note that our exact route may vary on the day, depending on circumstances and your hotel pick-up point.
- The Reichstag, where a dramatic arson attack allowed the Nazis to consolidate their influence
- The site of Hitler’s bunker and suicide – a blow-by-blow account of how the last days of the war played out underground
- Soviet War Memorial in Tiergarten – a curved colonnade flanked by the first tanks to reach the city
- The imposing Nazi building that housed Goering’s Air Force Ministry
- The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe
- The Memorial to Homosexuals Persecuted Under Nazism
- The Memorial to the Sinti and Roma Victims of National Socialism
- The building out of which Joseph Goebbels ran the Nazis’ Propaganda Ministry
- The Bendler Block – the former seat of the High Command of the Armed Forces during WWII now commemorates the German Resistance.
- The Memorial to the Victims of the Nazi Euthanasia Programme
- The Topography of Terror exhibition – former HQ of Himmler’s feared SS and secret police
- Anhalter Bahnhof – one of the train stations from which Berlin’s Jews were deported by the Nazis
- Railway Bunker – WWII air-raid shelter
- Olympiastadion – Hitler personally reviewed the plans for this stadium built for the 1936 Olympics
- Tempelhof Airport – built by the Nazi regime to showcase their architectural and technical prowess
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