Site of Reichpost TV Studios 1935 - 1938
The Nazi eagle remains, dated, above the entrance.
See: Television Under The Swastika (English Version)
See: Television Under The Swastika (English Version)
Recently uncovered footage, long buried in East German archives, confirms that television's first revolution occurred under the Third Reich. From 1935 to 1944, Berlin studios churned out the world's first regular TV programming, replete with the evening news, street interviews, sports coverage, racial programs, and interviews with Nazi officials. Select audiences, gathered in television parlours across Germany, numbered in the thousands; plans to create a mass viewing public, through the distribution of 10,000 people's television sets, were upended by World War Two. German technicians achieved remarkable breakthroughs in televising live events, including near instantaneous broadcasts of the 1936 Olympic Games. At the same time, the demand for continuous programming opened up camera opportunities far less controlled, and more candidly revealing, than Third Reich propagandists would have liked (an interview with a bumbling Robert Ley is particularly embarrassing). In its stated mission - to imprint the image of the Führer onto every German heart - Nazi television proved a major disappointment. But its surviving footage - 285 rolls have been found so far offers an intriguing new window onto Hitler's Germany.
Reichspolizeischule für Leibesübungen von Schirmer/Götze Hohenzollernring
Schlußstein reichsadler dating from 1939/40 above the portal of the Reich police school at Hohenzollernring 124-125.
The Nazi-era reliefs on both sides of the portal entrance
Nazi-era Eagle at the Siemens Ehrenmal
Joseph Wackerle's reichsadler dating from 1935 remains in situ
although Siemens itself has left. With the war, Germany's demand for
armaments began to intensify. Without the aid of foreign workers, the
manufacturing sector could no longer meet this demand which only grew
given that growing numbers of qualified employees at the company’s
various plants were drafted for military service. This led to the
increased use of forced labour starting in 1940 when Siemens relied
increasingly on forced labourers to maintain production levels. These
labourers included people from territories occupied by the German
military, PoWs, Jews, Sinti, Roma and, in the final phases of the war,
concentration camp inmates. During the entire period from 1940 to 1945,
at least eighty thousands of forced labourers worked at Siemens.
Although the company’s production of weapons and ammunition was rather
limited, from the end of 1943 onwards Siemens primarily manufactured
electrical equipment for the armed forces. 
Following
the war all of Siemens's factories in Berlin were closed after nearly
half its buildings and production facilities had been destroyed.
Whatever remained – the large number of functional machines, the
company’s entire inventory, a large portion of its stock and finished
goods as well as technical documentation and design drawings – was
dismantled and removed by the Soviet army as war reparations.The Allies
confiscated all the company’s tangible assets worldwide and all its
trademark and patent rights were rescinded. All its foreign assets were
lost. Overall, Siemens forfeited 80% of its total worth or some 2.6 billion German marks.
This church, built in 1929 in the Bauhaus style, comes complete with interior decoration from the Third Reich although there are bare patches where swastikas, illegal in Germany since 1945 have been ripped out. There is an image of a Nazi storm trooper side by side with Jesus Christ carved into the pulpit, the entrance is lit by a chandelier in the shape of an iron cross and the organ was used to stir the spirits at a torch-lit Nuremberg rally.
“There was a bust of Adolf Hitler in the nave,” Isolde Boehm, dean of the church, said. “A carved face of Hitler has been replaced by one of Martin Luther. There is even a rumour that the church was supposed to be called the Adolf Hitler Church.”
There is no other church in Germany so obviously from the Third Reich era. In the 1930s two thirds of the parish of Martin Luther Memorial were Nazi Party members. Their babies were baptised in a wooden font, which still bears the image of a storm trooper, and they married to music played by an organ that helped to create the dark atmosphere of the Nuremberg rallies. In 1932 the Protestant church came under the influence of a Nazi movement called the "German Christians" -- called "stormtroopers of Jesus," by the group's leader and founder Rev. Joachim Hossenfelder. In 1933 Hitler forced regional Protestant churches to merge into the Protestant Reich Church which, based on Nazi ideas of “positive Christianity”, portrayed Jesus as an “Aryan” and eliminated the Old Testament.
During the war Alfred Rosenberg conceived a new National Reich Church which would replace the Bible with Mein Kampf. Until 1942 bells embossed with the swastika called the Nazi faithful to church on Sundays. Then the bells were melted down and made into cannon.
Parishioners and priests are trying to raise the €3.5 million needed to rescue the church from collapse. Sources: Der Spiegel and The Times on Line
Arch
with stone carvings of helmeted stormtroopers whilst the encircled
swastikas on the top left panel and the right surmounted by the Nazi
eagle have been erased
Adolf-Hitler-Platz
, shown with German and Italian flags and, centre, decorated for the
Olympic Games, 25 July 1936 is now Theodor-Heuss-Platz...
...
but one wouldn't know it from Google maps which mislabelled
Theodor-Heuss-Platz, in the western Charlottenburg district of Berlin,
with the name it held from 1933 to 1945: Adolf-Hitler-Platz. Google
couldn't explain the error when approached by German mass-circulation
daily B.Z. which first reported the story, but a Google representative
said they were looking into the matter. The square had been returned to
its current name by 21.00 that night. The square was originally called
Reichskanzlerplatz when it was constructed in the early 1900s. In April
of 1933 it was renamed Adolf-Hitler-Platz, which it retained until the
Nazis were defeated. The square's name returned to Reichskanzlerplatz
from 1947 to 1963, when it was given the name of the first federal
president of Germany, Theodor Heuss.
The Funkturm and Ausstellungshallen in Charlottenburg during the 1936 Olympics and today
Charlottenburg
Palace, the largest palace in Berlin and the only royal residency
in the city dating back to the time of the Hohenzollern family. During
the Second World War the palace was badly damaged but has since been
reconstructed with Andreas Schlüter’s epic Reiterdenkmal
des Grossen Kurfürsten of 1699 which shows the
Great Elector on horseback, also returned to
the front courtyard.
The Funkturm and Ausstellungshallen in Charlottenburg during the 1936 Olympics and today
Schloss Bellevue- The Presidential Palace- from Berlin in Bildern, published 1938, and today. Hitler
had used the building as the site for the museum of ethnography, before
being renovated as a guest house for the Nazi government in 1938. In
that year Paul Otto August Baumgarten transformed the guesthouse so
that in the process the two entrances, which are now known as arched
windows of the side elevation, were walled in and the present middle
entrance with the free staircase was created.It was the residence of
actor, director and general director of the Prussian State Theatre,
Gustaf Gründgens, until the end of the war. On May
31 1931, Hitler toured the Bellevue Castle which had by then been
transformed into an official guest house for prominent foreigners hosted
by the Third Reich. Professor Baumgartner had supervised the
refurbishing of the facilities. Hitler displayed particular interest in
the rooms assigned to foreign dignitaries. In spite of his ambitious
intentions, these rooms were destined to serve only a second- rate
clientèle, insignificant politicians from the various Balkan states,
because of the increasing isolation of Germany internationally.
During
the war it was severely damaged by strategic bombing as early as April
1941 and during the Battle of Berlin, after which it was refurbished
substantially from 1954 to
1959 by the architect Carl-Heinz Schwennicke as the seat of the Federal
President of the Federal Republic of Germany. From the West German point
of view, a seat of office was possible in spite of the four-power
status of the city in accordance with Article 23 of the Basic Law. From
the time of its creation, only the ball hall designed by the architect
Carl Gotthard Langhans remained in the upper floor of the castle. The
renovation in the style of the 1950s was mocked because of its
ahistorical additions and conversions as a "mixture of film star
sanatorium and ice cream parlour" and has for its part largely given way
to numerous further renovations.
The Presidential Palace in March 1941 during the visit of the Japanese Foreign Minister in Berlin. The photo on the extreme right shows
German First Lady Bettina Wulff apparently giving the Hitler salute
from the steps. Franc Rennicke, a member of the far right NPD party
who made an unsuccessful bid to become president himself earlier in
2010, sent the photo to prosecutors. “For decades the so-called
German greeting has been outlawed and thousands of people have been
taken to court for making it,“ wrote Rennicke. “The photo of her
outside Schloss Bellevue in Berlin clearly shows her making this
banned gesture.“
Hitler inspecting a guard of honour shortly after assuming full power
in 1934 and Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, the future Pope Pius XII,
leaving the presidential palace on the right after meeting with Hitler
in March 1939.
Charlottenburg
Palace, the largest palace in Berlin and the only royal residency
in the city dating back to the time of the Hohenzollern family. During
the Second World War the palace was badly damaged but has since been
reconstructed with Andreas Schlüter’s epic Reiterdenkmal
des Grossen Kurfürsten of 1699 which shows the
Great Elector on horseback, also returned to
the front courtyard. Charlottenburg, where the journalist Margret Boveri lived, was an affluent area, and one of the last to surrender. She became aware of the change in the situation when she ventured out on to the streets to obtain her last quarter-pound of butter. She found Russians already sniffing at the queues. Most of the Berliners had thought it prudent to don white armbands. They openly complained of the Party for the first time. When she got home she found that German soldiers had broken into a neighbour’s cellar to steal civilian clothes. They intended to make a break for the west: no one wanted to be caught by the Russians. ... The terror began quietly in Margret Boveri’s Charlottenburg. ‘Ich Pistol!’ announced the soldiers. ‘Du Papier!’ That meant that they had guns, and no amount of paperwork was going to do you any good if you wanted to hang on to property or virtue. ‘There is nothing in this city that isn’t theirs for the taking,’ reported another woman who lived near Neukölln in the south. At first the Russian soldiers came for watches. With a cry of ‘Uhri! Uhri!’ they snatched, sometimes discarding the previous acquisition, which had simply stopped and needed to be rewound. This anonymous ‘Woman’ saw many Red Army soldiers with whole rows of watches on their arms ‘which they continuously kept winding, comparing and correcting – with childish, thievish pleasure’.. Most of the rapists in Charlottenburg, Margret Boveri discovered, were simple soldiers sleeping rough in the park. Those who had been properly billeted behaved better. She resorted to sleeping pills to get though the night, and didn’t wake when the Russians knocked at her door. Only in the morning did she hear the grim news from the neighbours.
MacDonogh, After the Reich
The Reichsadler remains on the front façade of the Amtsgericht in the Berlin suburb of Wedding.
The hospital at Danziger Straße 64 on Prenzlauer Berg was originally the Reichsluftschutzschule
The
Schlossbruecke across the Spree in Charlottenburg, where the Soviet
Second Guards Tank Army forced its way, despite the damage, on April 29,
1945.
Denkmal der nationalen Erhebung
Reichsadler dating from 1935 by
Max Esser at Lüdenscheider Weg 2-4 near Haselhorster dam in Spandau
within a children's playground inside a block of residential buildings
in Berlin-Haselhorst. Esser was best known as an animal sculptor and
designer of porcelain figures. At the World Exhibition in Paris in 1937
his plastic otter, created in 1934, was awarded a Grand Prix. Esser died
in Berlin in 1945 at the age of 60 and is buried in the Zehlendorf
cemetery.
German Reich Railways Central Office
Through Gleichschaltung,
the Nazis placed the rail network under direct government control on
10 February 1937, adding swastikas to the Hoheitsadler on the railcars.
Here, at the back of the central office of the Deutsche Reichsbahn, is
the stone emblem- a winged wheel- although the swastika relief at the
base has been removed.
The Regionaldirektion Berlin-Brandenburg der Bundesagentur für Arbeit
as it appeared when it served as the administration building for Fritz
Todt's Armaments Ministry and today, where it serves as the state labour
department. The building dates from 1938 when the architect Hans
Fritzsche was commissioned by the Reichsarbeitsministerium to
design a new service building for the Gauesamt of the Gaues Brandenburg.
A site between Friedrichstraße and Charlottenstraße in the southern
Friedrichstadt was chosen to serve as a location. The plot of
approximately seventy metres in width and 110 metres high was originally to
be built with commercial buildings. The building was eventually built in
1940 by Heilmann & Littmann. According to Matthias Donath, the
Gauworkamt is a "typical example of the monumental architectural style
which was preferred for official administrative buildings after 1933."
The eagle remains unmolested, overlooking the capital still. The
model for this design was the entrance spylon of the German pavilion
designed by Albert Speer at the world exhibition in 1937.
Post office on Knesebeckstraße 95, showing the Reichsadler above door
The former entrance to the Flakregiment at Reinickendorf Heiligensee showing the Luftwaffe eagle on the façade.
Schubertstraße in Lichterfelde, hit by the RAF on the night of January 28/29 1945, after the war and today
Post office on Knesebeckstraße 95, showing the Reichsadler above door
Race and Settlement Main Office of the ϟϟ
On this street was located the Race and Settlement Main Office of the ϟϟ (Rasse-und
Siedlungshauptamt, RuSHA), the Nazi office that dealt with racial
matters. Established in 1931, RuSHA was designated as an ϟϟ Main Office
in 1935. The office's tasks included
doing research and providing instruction on race issues, including
special
training courses for elite Nazi groups; making sure that ϟϟ men and
their
wives were racially pure; carrying out the resettlement of ϟϟ men in
Nazi-occupied countries as part of the global Nazi plan for expanding
the German
Reich throughout Europe; and encouraging them to settle on farm lands
near
cities. RuSHA's staff included many determined and industrious young men
who either had medical or some other professional eligibility. Some were
later
promoted to senior ϟϟ positions.
The
RuSHA began evicting landowners from their homes and settling
Germans in their place in mid-1939. RuSHA offices established in the
parts of
Poland annexed to the Reich were in charge of confiscated Jewish- and
Polish- owned land. In 1940 RuSHA came up with the plan to "Germanise"
Poles who had the appropriate racial qualities. Possible candidates were
screened and interviewed by "race experts and qualifications examiners."
These experts also checked out the racial authenticity of Poles who
registered
themselves as "ethnic Germans" (Volksdeutsche). In addition, RuSHA made
plans to "Germanise" the Ukrainian people. The bombing raid on Berlin on
February 3, 1945 destroyed almost all buildings in the Hedemannstraße
and in the southern Friedrichstrasse.
Heavy Load Testing Body
The
heavy load testing body was constructed to examine the weight-bearing
capacity of the below the surface soil for the Nazis planned monumental
structures, especially for the triumphal arch. Located in the in the Tempelhof district, it
remains as one of the few structures of the “Germania” plans still
standing today. A cylindrical concrete structure towers fourteen metres
in height and delves another eighteen metres into the ground. It is 21
metres in diameter. This engineering feat was built in 1941 making use
of French slave labourers. The load-bearing structure had a weight of
12,650 tons and was supposed to help determine the maximal load-bearing
capacity of the ground along the North-South Axis. The construction of a
colossal, 117 metre-high triumphal arch was dependent on these results.
Albert Speer planned to build the arch nearby, based on a design by
Hitler. Renovation of the heavy load-bearing structure was completed in
2009.
Built between 1934 and 1940 to a design by Heinrich Wolff to house the central bank, the Reichsbank
became the Finance Ministry and later headquarters of the Central
Committee of the East German Communist Party. Today it serves as the
Charlottenburg tax office responsible for the taxation of everyone
living in the Charlottenburg district and also for the payment
transactions of all Berlin-based tax offices. There
remains today a reichsadler designed by Kurt Schmidt-Ehmen over the
doorway of the Finanzamt Charlottenburg on Bismarkstraße in Berlin, the
swastika covered by the address number. Schmid-Ehmen is considered to
be the creator of the Nazi eagle and the Nazi emblem. His entry into
the Nazi Party in the early 1930s and his acquaintance with the
architect Paul Ludwig Troost gave him his first orders and personal
acquaintance with Hitler. 
It was he who designed the memorial to the 'martyrs' of November 9, 1923 in the Feldherrnhalle, the eagles that were installed atop the party buildings in Munich, on the Nazi Party Rally Grounds in Nuremberg and the eagle relief that was seen in the smoking room in the New Reich Chancellery.
Schmid-Ehmen made the nine-metre high bronze eagle for the German
Pavilion at the 1937 World Exhibition in Paris referred to above and
received the Grand Prix de la Republique Française for it. From 1936 he
was a member of the Presidential Council of the Reich Chamber of Fine
Arts, and on January 30, 1937 Hitler appointed him professor. In 1938
Hitler bought his Spear bearer. In 1939 Schmid-Ehmen was represented at
the Great German Art Exhibition in the House of German Art in Munich
with the bronze sculpture 'Mädchen mit Zweig'.
It was he who designed the memorial to the 'martyrs' of November 9, 1923 in the Feldherrnhalle, the eagles that were installed atop the party buildings in Munich, on the Nazi Party Rally Grounds in Nuremberg and the eagle relief that was seen in the smoking room in the New Reich Chancellery.
Schmid-Ehmen made the nine-metre high bronze eagle for the German
Pavilion at the 1937 World Exhibition in Paris referred to above and
received the Grand Prix de la Republique Française for it. From 1936 he
was a member of the Presidential Council of the Reich Chamber of Fine
Arts, and on January 30, 1937 Hitler appointed him professor. In 1938
Hitler bought his Spear bearer. In 1939 Schmid-Ehmen was represented at
the Great German Art Exhibition in the House of German Art in Munich
with the bronze sculpture 'Mädchen mit Zweig'. The Charlottenburg tax office
itself was built in 1936–1939 according to plans by the architect Eugen Bruker
and was the largest tax office in Berlin at the time. The building
consists of a representative main wing on Bismarckstraße, a central wing
and a rear wing on Spielhagenstraße. The three-storey high portal niche
around the main entrance sets a monumental accent, marked by four
angular shell limestone pillars. The eagle above the entrance door
grasps a swastika with its claws, which is now hidden by the building
number. Today the building is one of the architectural monuments of the
district of Charlottenburg.
The former entrance to the Flakregiment at Reinickendorf Heiligensee showing the Luftwaffe eagle on the façade.
Schubertstraße in Lichterfelde, hit by the RAF on the night of January 28/29 1945, after the war and today
Stefan
Braunfels's disturbing Marie-Elisabeth-Lüders-Haus, home of the parliamentary library, located in the
government district of Berlin between Adele-Schreiber-Krieger-Straße and
Schiffbauerdamm, inaugurated after five years of construction on
December 10, 2003 and how the site appeared immediately after the war. Braunfels
justified his design as part of a "jump over the Spree," being connected
to the equally awful Paul-Löbe-Haus from east to west, supposedly
symbolising the 'togetherness' of East and West Germany and intended as a
counterbalance to the vision of what the Nazis would laud as Welthauptstadt Germania.
The Marie-Elisabeth-Lüders-Haus stands to the right and left of the
earlier course of the Berlin Wall. In fact the first major competition Braunfels, grandson of the composer Walter Braunfels, won was for the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich in 1992 which when opened in late 2002 became one of the largest new museums in Germany.
The
Jewish Hospital used by the Gestapo from 1941-43 as an assembly point
for Jews being deported which was located on the corner of
Exerzierstrasse and Schulstrasse in Wedding. Once
a top Berlin facility, it gradually became a clearinghouse for Jews
facing transport to the camps. The Nazis apparently wanted the Jews
healthy before sending them off to die. According to its website, it
"is the only institution in the whole of Germany to survive the Nazi
terror and is the oldest still-existing establishment founded on a
concept developed by people of Jewish belief." This hospital was the subject of the book Refuge in Hell: How Berlin's Jewish Hospital Outlasted the Nazis by Daniel Silver, a lawyer and former general counsel to the CIA.
