Third Reich & Cold War History Guided Walking Tour Berlin

Brandenburg Gate and Pariser Platz

The walk starts in front of the tourist information point on Pariser Platz, beneath the Brandenburg Gate. Built in 1791 as a city gate at the end of Unter den Linden and crowned by the four-horse chariot of the goddess of victory, the gate has watched every turn of modern German history: the torchlit parades of 1933 passed through it, Soviet soldiers raised their flag on it in 1945, and from 1961 to 1989 it stood sealed inside the death strip of the Berlin Wall, visible from both sides but reachable from neither. Since reunification it is the symbol of the united city, and the square around it holds embassies, a hotel and the academy of arts rebuilt on their pre-war sites.

Your guide uses the first quarter of an hour here to set the scene, explaining how a democracy collapsed into dictatorship and how the city was later split in two. The Brandenburg Gate tour makes most sense first thing, before the crowds arrive on the square.

The Reichstag and the 1933 fire

A few minutes north stands the Reichstag, the parliament building of 1894 whose glass dome now draws visitors from all over the world. On the night of 27 February 1933 its plenary chamber burned out, and within a day the new government used the fire to suspend civil liberties, arrest opponents and clear the way for one-party rule; who really lit the fire is still debated, and the guide lays out the evidence on the spot. The building then stood as a shell through the war, became a front-line target in the battle of 1945 and spent the Cold War just inside West Berlin, with the Wall running directly behind it.

From the lawn in front you also see the modern government quarter along the river and the white crosses that remember people killed trying to cross the Wall here. Allow about fifteen minutes; the tour does not go inside the Reichstag, which requires a separate advance registration that we can advise on.

Soviet War Memorial in the Tiergarten

The route then crosses into the Tiergarten park along the broad avenue of Strasse des 17. Juni, named after the East German uprising of 1953, to the Soviet War Memorial. The Soviets built it within months of the end of the war in 1945, on the axis of the planned Nazi capital, using stone said to come from the demolished Reich Chancellery, and placed two tanks and two field guns of the kind that took the city on either side of its colonnade. Behind the bronze soldier lie the graves of thousands of Red Army men who died in the Battle of Berlin. The memorial stood in the British sector throughout the division of the city, guarded by Soviet honour guards who were escorted in from the East.

Your guide tells the story of the final battle for the city here, about fifteen minutes, and the memorial is one of the most striking photo stops on this Berlin history walking tour.

Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe

Back across Pariser Platz and one block south lies the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Germany's national Holocaust memorial, opened in 2005 on a site that was once part of the government district and later the death strip. It is a field of 2,711 grey concrete slabs of different heights set on an undulating ground, so that as you walk in, the slabs rise above you and the city disappears. There is no inscription and no prescribed route; the design leaves each visitor to find their own way through. Beneath the field an information centre documents the fate of individual families and the names of victims, and it can be visited after the tour.

The guide pauses here to explain the memorial's long debate and how it fits the Berlin way of remembering rather than hiding the past. Visitors are asked to move through the slabs quietly and not to climb them; the stop takes about ten minutes.

The Führerbunker site and the former Reich Aviation Ministry

A short walk from the memorial, an unremarkable car park between apartment blocks marks the site of the Führerbunker, the underground complex beneath the garden of the Reich Chancellery where the dictator spent his last weeks and died in April 1945. The bunker was blown up and sealed after the war and the area built over by East Berlin housing; only an information board installed in 2006 tells visitors where they are standing, which is deliberate, so that the site cannot become a shrine. Your guide explains the layout of the vanished chancellery and the events of the final days.

The route continues along Wilhelmstrasse to the former Reich Aviation Ministry, a vast stone building of 1936 that survived the bombing almost untouched, became the House of Ministries of East Germany, where the uprising of June 1953 began, and today houses the Federal Finance Ministry. A socialist mural of the 1950s on its facade faces a ground memorial to the uprising, a Cold War contrast in one courtyard.

Topography of Terror, the Berlin Wall and Checkpoint Charlie

The next corner holds the Topography of Terror, an open-air and indoor exhibition on the excavated grounds of the headquarters of the Gestapo, the SS and the Reich Security Main Office, from which the police state was run between 1933 and 1945. The buildings were demolished after the war, and the cellars where prisoners were held can still be seen along the exhibition trench. Running the length of the site on Niederkirchnerstrasse is a preserved 200-metre section of the Berlin Wall, one of the longest original stretches of the outer wall left in the city centre, protected behind a fence since 1990.

The walk ends two blocks east at Checkpoint Charlie, the crossing on Friedrichstrasse reserved for foreigners and diplomats, where American and Soviet tanks faced each other at a distance of metres in October 1961. A replica guardhouse and the famous sector sign stand on the spot, and the guide closes with the story of the escapes, the confrontation and the night the Wall opened.