Memorials & Monuments in Berlin

Herbert Baum was chairman of a group of mostly Jewish members who openly challenged national socialism. On 18 May 1942 the group attacked an antisemitic and anti-communist exhibition that was designed by Joseph Goebbels and staged in the Lustgarten of Museumsinsel. The attack was not successful and 20 group members were sentenced to death. Baum himself was arrested on 22 May and tortured to death in the prison at Moabit. This memorial commemorates the actions of Baum and his group in the Lustgarten in May 1942.

In the centre of Berlin, this is Germany’s principal memorial to the six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust. There ae wo parts to the monument. Above ground is the very striking and thought-provoking field of stelae, 2711 in total. Underground is an information centre, which examines the persecution and extermination of Jews across Europe. The memorial is located on what was the death strip of the Berlin Wall. During WWII this area was the very heart of Hitler’s killing machine. Specifically, Goebbel’S villa and bunker were situated in this space.

Inaugurated in 2008, the memorial to homosexual men and women persecuted by Nazism lies on the eastern edge of Tiergarten directly opposite the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. The concrete cube, measuring 3.60 m high and 1.90 m wide, is a reference to the Holocaust Memorial. A window into the cube shows a film on loop showing two men hugging and kissing – a reminder that the Nazi’s outlawed such acts of intimacy between members of the same sex in 1935. A nearby information plaque, in German and English, outlines the persecution of homosexual at the hands of the Nazis, and how the end of the war did not bring an end to the discrimination.

In a quiet and peaceful corner of Tiergarten, opposite the Reichstag, is a circular basin with a triangle at its centre. Around the rim of the basin the poem Auschwitz by Italian Roma Santino Spinello are engraved. An estimated 50,000 Roma and Sinti men, women and children were persecuted and put to death by the Nazis. An open-air exhibition adds a personal dimension with the biographies of nine members of Roma and Sinti communities around Europe. These are stories of persecution, murder and resistance, and the continued fight for civil rights recognition.

One of three Soviet memorials in Berlin to the 80,000 Red Army soldiers who died trying to capture city during the Battle of Berlin. Dedicated 4 years to the day after the end of WWII on 8 May 1949, here 7,000 Russian soldiers are buried. This memorial together with two others in Russia, The Motherland Calls in Volgograd and the Rear-front Memorial in Magnitogorsk, make up a triptych commemorating Soviet’s involvement and losses during the Second World War. The focus of the memorial garden is a 12 m bronze statue of a Soviet soldier carrying a young German child standing with his sword over a broken swastika.

Just outside Friedrichstraße train station in Berlin is the Trains to Life – Trains to Death bronze installation by the Israeli architect and sculptor Frank Meisler. The memorial depicts two groups of children that represent the contrasting fate of Jewish children during the Nazi era. On 1 December 1938, 190 children departed from Friedrichstraße station for England under the kindertransport scheme. Many more children were deported to death camps around Europe.