Third Reich & Cold War
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
- Enjoy the advantages of getting picked up directly at your hotel by one of our expert guides and launching straight into your tour.
- Dive into the most tumultuous and epoch-defining events of the 20th century in the city where they happened.
- See key sights such as Checkpoint Charlie, the Reichstag, the Soviet War Memorial, Hitler’s bunker, the Berlin Wall, and the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.
- Head to Tempelhof Airport, a grandiose structure designed to showcase Nazi ideology that was later the site of the Berlin airlift of 1948-49.
- Visit surviving Nazi-era above-ground bunkers, since repurposed or transformed into memorial sites.
- Go to the Bendler Block, dedicated to the memory of Stauffenberg and his co-conspirators, who were executed here after the failed assassination attempt on Hitler’s life in 1944.
- Discover the open-air Berlin Wall Memorial on Bernauer Straße, where you can walk across the old “death strip” and see where the most successful escape tunnels were dug.
- Soak up the atmosphere at Checkpoint Charlie, site of the alarming 1961 tank standoff between the Soviet Union and the USA.
- Hear about the Tränenpalast, a border crossing point dubbed the “Palace of Tears” for the countless emotional farewells it witnessed during the Cold War.
Experience Berlin on our award-winning tour with someone who has a genuine passion for the city and its history. 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! The tour will begin with a walk across Museum Island – now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, but once a platform where Goebbels delivered impassioned propaganda speeches. It is also just a stone’s throw from the square where Third Reich censorship policies led to Nazi students organising book burnings in 1933.
As you walk through the old Jewish quarter, you will get an impression of what life was like under the Nazi regime and gain an understanding of how widespread anti-Semitism and political ambition cemented Hitler’s policy of persecution and extermination of Europe’s Jews. At the location of a rare act of civil resistance against Nazi policies, you will hear the remarkable story of the Rosenstraße protest of 1943.
En route to the site of the final battle for the Reichstag in 1945, your specialist guide will be able to point out battle-scarred buildings and pock-marked columns amid the remnants of the “Thousand-Year Reich”: Goering’s Air Force Ministry, Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry, and the ruins of Himmler’s SS and Gestapo HQ, now occupied by the Topography of Terror exhibition. Sites such as these illustrate how Germany memorialises its past and the issues the country faces when dealing with the dark chapter of Nazism in its history.
Your expert guide will lay out the city’s transition from capital of Nazi Germany to geopolitical hotspot of Cold War Europe. Sites that are key to your understanding of Berlin as a divided city include Checkpoint Charlie, the former military checkpoint where events came close to triggering WWIII in late October of 1961.
The tour makes an essential stop at the Berlin Wall Memorial at Bernauer Straße, where you will be able to see a preserved section of the original wall and hear stories of escape attempts, espionage and spy-swapping. This is also the site of Tunnels 29 and 57, by means of which 29 and 57 determined individuals pulled off daring escapes to West Berlin in the 1960s.
We head to Alexanderplatz, where on 4 November 1989, half a million East German citizens peacefully demonstrated for political reform, thereby sounding the death knell for the German Democratic Republic and directly precipitating the fall of the Berlin Wall. Hear about the many factors that converged to create a climate of change and set Berlin on the path to reunification.
At the conclusion of your tour, your Insider guide will happily point you in the direction of your next destination or advise you on how to make the most of 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.
- Museum Island and Lustgarten – the impressive backdrop for Nazi-party speeches and rallies
- Bebelplatz – site of the infamous Nazi book burnings
- Tränenpalast (Palace of Tears) – a former border crossing point between East and West Berlin
- Admiralspalast, where the East German SED political party was formed
- Berlin Wall Memorial extending 1.4km along the border strip on Bernauer Straße
- Former East German watchtower on Potsdamer Platz
- The Memorial to the Victims of the Nazi Euthanasia Programme
- The Bendler Block – now the German Resistance Memorial Centre
- The Reichstag, where a Soviet flag was raised to symbolise the defeat of Nazi Germany
- The Brandenburg Gate – marooned in no man’s land while the Wall stood
- Soviet War Memorial in Tiergarten
- The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe
- Site of Hitler’s and Goebbels’s bunkers
- Topography of Terror – exhibition on the site of the former HQ of the Gestapo and SS
- Site of the East German uprising of 1953
- Checkpoint Charlie – scene of spy operations, escape attempts and military confrontation during the Cold War
- Nordbahnhof – a “ghost station” in the divided city
- Former border strip – Chapel of Reconciliation and the site of Tunnels 57 and 29
- Alexanderplatz – scene of a pivotal anti-government demonstration in 1989
- Rosenstraße – memorial on the site of the 1943 protest against the deportation of Jews
Insider Reviews
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