Od Reichstagu do Haus am Checkpoint Charlie
Street of 17 Juni ends at the Brandenburg Gate, but it is better to start a little further north - from the Reichstag.
This building was erected at the end of the 19th century as the seat of the German parliament. In October 1918 The Weimar Republic was proclaimed from the balcony of this building, while Karl Liebknecht sealed his fate, as well as the fate of Rosa Luxemburg, not far away from here, proclaiming the rise of a socialist republic. We remember the fire in 1933 year. In recent years, there has been a revival of the discussion about the perpetrators of arson. After a short trial, the Minister of Internal Affairs of the Prussian state, Göring, sentenced the mentally retarded, the half-blind Dutch bricklayer Marius van der
Chubby, member of the communist party, for committing arson; a year later, an execution took place. It is just as likely, that the SA members set the fire, forerunners of the SS, to justify the persecution of opponents of the Nazis, that soon followed. The day after the fire, with the help of a special decree, basic civil rights have been suspended, provided for by the constitution of the Weimar Republic and the death penalty was introduced for a number of political crimes. Here, too, in that other year, Hitler stripped the deputies of power over the country. In years 1945-1990 The Reichstag was shrouded in a haze of irony: once a symbol of German unity, with the inscription Dem Deutchen Volke, he was sentenced to be adjacent to the Berlin Wall. Obecnie Reichstag, rebuilt after the war, houses a fascinating exhibition entitled Problems in German History (wt.-nd. 10.00-17.00; Free entrance).
The best, of course, are the passages on the Third Reich: pictures / Olympics, antyżydowska propaganda, horrifying photographs of the executions in Plotzensee prison and many documents from the war, which are rarely seen.
When walking along the remains of the Berlin Wall just behind the Reichstag building, it is worth remembering some facts from the post-war history of Germany, According to Stalin's Yalta agreements, Roosevelt and Churchill, Berlin was divided into four sectors, which were to coexist peacefully under common management, but soon there was a bitter conflict between the authorities in the Soviet sector and the rest of the sectors. Already three years after the end of the war, the Soviet authorities prevented access to the city from the German Federal Republic by introducing the so-called Berlin blockade, but the Allies dealt with its effects with airdrops, which lasted for over a year. Blockade, riots in the year 1953, great migration across the border and numerous "incidents" led to the construction of 1961 year of the Berlin Wall, which ran exactly along the border of the Soviet sector and cut through houses with maddened consistency, squares and rivers.