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Monday, September 19, 2016

A wander about town

Another day of sightseeing. First, the Prussian Victory Tower commemorating the victory in the Danish-Prussian War, now in the middle of a traffic circle - it was the location for Barack Obama's speech in Berlin as a US presidential candidate during his visit to Germany on July 24, 2008, a bit controversial as it celebrates German military victories. No one able to tell us who the handsome chap in the statue is:









Quite dramatic from a distance:


On to the Reichstag and Bundestag:




Memorial to members of the Reichstag of the Weimar Republic murdered by the National Socialists:

The lovely Brandenberg Gate is now crowded on all sides by later buildings, which is really a shame:




Checkpoint Charlie - well, don't bother. Nothing original left and mostly taken over by street performers.

Reminders of the Nazi past include the Topography of Terror, an open-air museum built on the site of buildings which during the Nazi regime from 1933 to 1945 were the headquarters of the Gestapo and the SS:



There is also a dramatic and touching Holocaust memorial, a five-acre site of 2,711 concrete slabs arranged in a grid pattern on a sloping field:



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