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Woking High School Berlin Visit

3rd to 6th November 2016

Name: ____________________________ Tutor Group: ____________________________ Room Number: ____________________________ Other people sharing my room:

____________________________ ____________________________ ____________________________ ____________________________ ____________________________

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Contact Details

Hotel: Meininger Hotel, Oranienburger Str. 67-68, 10117 Berlin Tel: +49 30 31879816

Nearest U Bahn stations:

Mr Jones: 07590 777035

Guide: Mr Jeff Garner

Useful German Phrases

GREETINGS GENERAL YOU NEVER KNOW! Guten Morgen

Good morning

Guten Tag

Hello/good day

Guten Abend

Good evening

Gute Nacht

Good night

Auf wiedersehen

Goodbye

Ich möchte .......... ein Mineralwasser/ein

Cola/eine Limonade/eine Tasse Tee

I would like ......... a mineral water/a coke/a lemonade/ a cup of tea

Wieviel kostet das?

How much is that?

Bitte

Please

Danke

Thanks

Wo sind die Toiletten?

Where are the toilets?

Wie komme ich am besten zum

Bahnhof?/Hotel?/Stadtmitte?

How do I get to the station?/hotel?/town centre?

Es tut mir leid dass ich so spät

komme, aber mein Hamster ist

gestorben

Sorry I’m late but my hamster died

Ich bin ein Berliner

I am a doughnut

Communications Telephone: Telephone boxes are called Kartentelefon and are mainly card operated. Cards can be bought from post offices and newspaper kiosks. Calls are 15% cheaper between 2200-0800 and on Sundays. To call Britain dial 0044 and knock off the first 0.e.g for WHS 00441483 888447. Mobile phones can be used in Berlin, but this is expensive. Both the caller and the receiver are charged for the conversation. Post: Stamps can be bought from vending machines located near post boxes. The post boxes are

bright yellow. A postcard will take two to three days to reach Britain.

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Food and Drink As a capital city Berlin offers a wide range of food from all over the world. Indian and Turkish foods are very popular. There are over 7300 restaurants, snack counters, bars and food parlours, with a further 300 cafes and ice cream parlours. Traditional German food uses a lot of pork and beef with cabbage and peas. Try sauerkraut (pickled cabbage) with Buletten (meatballs) or kartoffelpuffer (savoury potato pancakes). In Berlin many Wurstchenbudes (sausage stands) offer Thuringer Bratwurst (grilled sausage), spicier Krakauer and Frankfuter Bockwurst. These are served in a bread roll with mustard or tomato ketchup.

Did you know?

The Berlin bear has been on the city’s coat of arms since 1280.

The population of Berlin was 3.5 million in 2000. 46% are male and 54% female.

Each section of the Berlin Wall was 3.6m high and 1.2m wide and cost DM856 to make. 45,000 sections of the wall were used.

The food hall in the KaDeWe department store sells 34,000 different items, including 500 kinds of bread and 1300 varieties of cheese.

People from 185 different countries live in Berlin.

Berlin covers an area of 890 km2 – 45km from east to west and 38km from north to south – nine times the size of Paris, Munich, Stuttgart and Frankfurt together!

Berlin Zoo holds 3 world records: 1. the most species with more than 1600 different animals; 2. the most animals 24,083 at the last count; 3. the most visitors with 3,873,691 in 2000.

In Berlin there are 170 museums and exhibitions

What do you expect to gain from the visit to Berlin?

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Travel Quiz and challenging German Stereotypes

Tasks Answer Day

Name of the aeroplane to Berlin

The first person to say ‘the people look like ants’?

How does the captain of the aeroplane describe the weather in Berlin?

Names of the coach drivers

The first person to say they feel travel sick

What are the names of German motorways?

Location of the first traffic jam

First train station to be used

Spot a man wearing lederhosen

Tick

Spot a woman walking a poodle

Tick

A German drinking a large glass of beer

Tick

What are the names of German railways?

Location of nearest frankfurter stall to the hotel

Location of nearest site of historical interest to hotel

First place where you saw a man with a mullet haircut

Most ridiculous rule you saw being obeyed by a German

What are the three airports in Berlin called?

Who said ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’?

First person to say in a restaurant ‘I don’t like this’?

When and where did I have sauerkraut?

What is the difference between an S-Bahn and a U-Bahn?

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Out & about in Berlin German Resistance Memorial Centre

The German Resistance Memorial Centre is a site of remembrance, political studies, active learning, documentation, and research. A wide range of activities document and illustrate resistance to National Socialism. The centre's goal is to show how individual persons and groups took action against the National Socialist dictatorship from 1933 to 1945 and made use of what freedom of action they had.

Are you surprised at the amount of resistance there was to the Nazi regime?

Kurfurstendaam This is the famous tree lined boulevard in the west of Berlin, with busy cafes and restaurants on both sides. The Kurfurstendamm is the equivalent to Oxford Street in London. Look out for Kranzler the famous coffee shop.

What does this street tell you about modern Germany? How is it different from London?

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Berlin Wall – Bernauerstrasse

In the fifteen years following the Second World War over 3 million people emigrated from East Germany to West Germany.

At a meeting in 1961 Nikita Khrushchev (USSR) suggested to John F. Kennedy (USA) that NATO forces should withdraw from West Berlin. Kennedy refused and in August 1961, Erich Honecker (East German leader) ordered the blocking off of East Berlin from West Berlin by means of barbed wire and antitank obstacles. Streets were torn up, and barricades of paving stones were erected. People living in East Berlin and East Germany were no longer allowed to enter West Berlin. This included 60,000 people who had been working in the city.

The wall was 166 km long cut through 192 streets, 97 of them leading to East Berlin and 95 into East Germany. Over the next few months construction workers began replacing the provisional barriers by a solid wall. A new wall was built in 1965. This consisted of concrete slabs between steel girder and concrete posts with a concrete sewage pipe on top of the Wall.

The Berlin Wall was heavily guarded and around a hundred people were killed and many more were seriously wounded trying to cross the wall. The last person to be killed was Chris Gueffroy on the 2nd June, 1989. With the collapse of communism in 1989 the Berlin Wall was removed and the two German republics were united.

How has the wall been treated by the West Germans? How has the wall been used to remember what happened during the Cold War?

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Goering’s Air Ministry

Hermann Goering was born in Rosenheim, Bavaria on 12th January 1893. The son of a senior army officer, he was educated at a military school and became a member of the Prussian Cadet Corps.

Goering became a fighter pilot and scored his first victory on 16th November 1915. By the end of the war Goering had achieved 22 victories and had been awarded the Iron Cross and the Pour le Merite for bravery. After the war, Goering earned his living as a pilot working for the Fokker company based in Holland.

Goering returned in 1923 and after hearing Adolf Hitler speak joined the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP). He later admitted: "it was political love at first sight". Hitler also admired Goering and appointed him as head of Sturm Abteilung (Storm Section). The SA (also known as stormtroopers or brownshirts) were instructed to disrupt the meetings of political opponents and to protect Hitler from revenge attacks.

In 1923 Goering also took part in the Munich Putsch, leading the SA in a failed attempt to violently take control of the government. Goerng was wounded and fled to Sweden.

When Adolf Hitler became chancellor in January, 1933, he made Goering a cabinet minister without portfolio. Later he became minister of the interior and prime minister of Prussia. He immediately replaced 22 of Germany's 32 police chiefs with SA and SS officers. He also appointed Rudolf Diels as chief of the political police, the Gestapo.

After the Reichstag Fire on 27th February, 1933, Goering launched a wave of violence against members of the German Communist Party and other left-wing opponents of the regime. He also joined with Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, in setting up Germany's concentration camps.

After the outbreak of the Second World War Goering was placed in charge of the Luftwaffe and took credit for the quick defeat of France, Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg in the summer of 1940. However, he failed to stop the British evacuation of Dunkirk.

Goering organised the German war effort during the Battle of Britain and made the crucial mistake of changing his tactics and launching the Blitz in September, 1940. He was criticised for the failings of the Luftwaffe during Operation Barbarossa.

When the Red Army made advances into Germany, Goering moved his headquarters to Berchesgaden. After the suicide of Adolf Hitler Goering surrendered to the US Army in Austria on 8th May, 1945. Hermann Goering was found guilty at Nuremberg War Crimes Trial but avoided execution by swallowing potassium cyanide on 15th October, 1946

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Checkpoint Charlie It was at this former border crossing that Soviet and US tanks faced off following the construction of the Wall in August 1961. The original prefabricated sentry box has been replaced with a replica, complete with sandbags and two idealised portraits of US and Soviet servicemen by an artist. The museum is popular with all people. It shows how people escaped from the East in adapted cars, trick suitcases and a hot air balloon.

How has the checkpoint been used today? Has it been to remember the past or for tourist today?

New Memorial to the Holocaust

From BBC News: German politicians and Jewish leaders have marked 60 years since the end of World War II by officially opening Berlin's vast Holocaust memorial.

The Monument to the Murdered Jews of Europe is a sprawling field of 2,700 stone slabs near the Brandenburg Gate. The dedication comes after years of delays and disagreements over design and construction issues. Backers of the memorial say the stones will be central to Berlin's identity, but critics say it is too abstract. Others have criticised Berlin, capital of the Third Reich, for taking so long to erect a fitting memorial to its victims.

'Most terrible crime'

German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder joined Jewish leaders and parliamentary president Wolfgang Thierse for the opening ceremony. "Today we open a memorial that recalls Nazi Germany's worst, most terrible crime - the attempt to exterminate an entire people," Mr Thierse said. He added that the memorial signified the fact that Germany now "faces up to its history".

US architect Peter Eisenman, whose design divided opinion and was finally approved only in 1999, said he hoped that Berliners and visitors to the city will navigate the pathways as part of their daily lives. "I like to think that people will use it for short cuts, as an everyday experience, not as a holy place," he said.

He dismissed claims that 60 years on was too late to erect a memorial, adding: "One hundred years from now, people will not say 'this came too late'. For me, it is still early."

National reminder

Standing on a 19,000 sq m (204,440 sq foot) patch of land sandwiched between the East and West Berlin of the Cold War, the new memorial is an undulating labyrinth of stone plinths.

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Visitors can move through the tilting featureless stones - each one a unique shape and size - from any direction. There are no plaques, inscriptions or symbols along the way.

The stones have been treated with an anti-graffiti agent that authorities hope will ward off vandals and neo-Nazi sympathisers. Even the anti-graffiti agent provoked controversy: initially the architect felt graffiti could benefit the memorial; later it emerged that the company supplying the agent once manufactured poison gas for use in Nazi death camps.

Disagreements over design and tone also dogged the project. Some said the design was too abstract, while others pointed out that many thousands of non-Jews perished in the Holocaust, but are excluded from mention in the memorial. Others still said the monument's lack of obvious religious symbolism meant that it was not Jewish enough.

As a compromise, a visitors' centre has been constructed underneath the stones, offering information and context on the Nazi campaign against the Jews. German journalist Lea Rosh, who first proposed the memorial in 1988, said it was essential that the country that tried to exterminate an entire people build a fitting memorial. "It will be a reminder for the country of the aggressors," she said.

What do you think about the memorial? Was it too late? Are the stones a fitting memorial? What does the anti graffiti paint tell you about Germany today?

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Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp,

Thousands of members of the Social Democrat Party, Communist Party and trade unions were arrested and sent to Germany's first concentration camp at Dachau, a village a few miles from Munich.

Originally called re-education centres the Schutz Staffeinel (SS) soon began describing them as concentration camps. They were called this because they were "concentrating" the enemy into a restricted area. Hitler argued that the camps were modelled on those used by the British during the Boer War.

Soon afterwards the Communist Party and the Social Democrat Party were banned. Party activists still in the country were arrested and by the end of 1933 over 150,000 political prisoners were in concentration camps. Hitler was aware that people have a great fear of the unknown, and if prisoners were released, they were warned that if they told anyone of their experiences they would be sent back to the camp.

It was not only left-wing politicians and trade union activists who were sent to concentration camps. The Gestapo also began arresting beggars, prostitutes, homosexuals, alcoholics and anyone who was incapable of working. Although some inmates were tortured, the only people killed during this period were prisoners who tried to escape and those classed as "incurably insane".

Inmates wore serial numbers and coloured patches to identify their categories: red for political prisoners, blue for those who were foreigners, violet for religious fundamentalists, green for criminals, black for those considered to be anti-social and pink for homosexuals.

As well as the one built at Dachau concentration camps were also built at Belsen and Buchenwald (Germany), Mauthausen (Austria), Theresienstadt (Czechoslovakia) and Auschwitz (Poland). Each camp was commanded by a senior Schutzstaffel (SS) officer and staffed by members of the SS Death's Head units. The camp was divided into blocks and each one was under the charge of a senior prisoner.

As well as using members of the SS the camp commander often recruited Baltic or Ukrainian Germans to control inmates. As they had previously been minorities of repressed communities, they were particularly good at dealing harshly with Russians, Poles and Jews.

By 1944 there were 13 main concentration camps and over 500 satellite camps. In an attempt to increase war-production, inmates were used as cheap-labour. The SS charged industrial companies around 6 marks for each prisoner working a twelve-hour day.

At the Wannsee Conference held in January 1942 it was decided to make the extermination of the Jews a systematically organised operation. After this date extermination camps were established in the east that had the capacity to kill large numbers including Belzec (15,000 a day), Sobibor (20,000), Treblinka (25,000) and Majdanek (25,000).

It has been estimated that between 1933 and 1945 a total of 1,600,000 were sent to concentration work camps. Of these, over a million died of a variety of different causes. During this period around 18 million were sent to extermination camps. Of these, historians have estimated that between five and eleven million were killed.

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Olympic Stadium The Nazis held the Olympics in 1936 to try to prove to the world how superior the Aryan race was. Many countries such as the USSR boycotted the games in protest of the Nazis racism. Goebbels as Head of Propaganda wanted to show off what the Nazis could achieve. He wanted to show Germany as a modern, civilised and successful nation. The stadium held 100,000 people, lit by modern lighting for the time (electricity) and with space for TV cameras (the first Olympics to be recorded in this way). It also had the most accurate clock at the time. Many people were impressed by facilities and organisation of the games. However the Black American Jesse Owens won four gold medals and broke 11 world records! Ten Black Americans won 13 medals between them. So much for Aryan superiority! Many visitors were disturbed by the behaviour of the German army and the SS controlling the crowds inside the stadium.

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Wannsee

At the Wannsee Conference held on 20th January 1942, Reinhard Heydrich chaired a meeting to consider the logistics of the ‘final solution’. Also at the meeting were Heinrich Muller, Adolf Eichmann and Roland Friesler.

Eichmann gave the seminar numbers of the Jews living in the occupied territories. This included Nazi occupied territories in Eastern Europe (3,215,500), Germany (131,800), Austria (43,700), France (865,000), Netherlands (160,800), Greece (69,600), Belgium (43,000), Denmark (5,600) and Norway (1,300).

Eichmann also provided details of the Jews living in countries that the Nazis hoped to have control over during the next few years. This included the Soviet Union (5,000,000), Hungary (742,000), Britain (330,000), Romania (342,000), Turkey (55,000), Switzerland (18,000), Sweden (8,000), Spain (6,000), Portugal (3,000) and Finland (2,300).

From that date the extermination of the Jews became a systematically organised operation. It was decided to establish extermination camps in the east that had the capacity to kill large numbers including Belzec (15,000 a day), Sobibor (20,000), Treblinka (25,000) and Majdanek (25,000).

It has been estimated that between 1942 and 1945 around 18 million were sent to extermination camps. Of these, historians have estimated that between five and eleven million were killed.

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Brandenburg Gate The gate was designed by Karl Gotthard Langhams in 1788 to 1791. The gate was modelled on the Acropolis in Athens as an arch of peace. However the arch was often the background to the Nazis touch light marches. The figure riding on top of the chariot is the goddess Viktoria. After Napoleon defeated the Germans the statute was moved to Paris. However in less than ten years it was returned. The gate formed part of the border between East and West Germany after the Second World War.

If you were entering Berlin for the first time through this gate, what would you feel about Berlin?

Reichstag

The Reichstag: the large domed building in Berlin that was the home of the German Parliament. It was burnt down on 27th February. After the Reichstag Fire the German Parliament was held in the Kroll Opera House in Berlin.

On 27th February the Reichstag caught fire. When they police arrived they found Marinus van der Lubbe on the premises. After being tortured by the Gestapo he confessed to starting the Reichstag Fire. However he denied that he was part of a Communist conspiracy. Hermann Goering refused to believe him and he ordered the arrest of several leaders of the German Communist Party (KPD).

When Hitler heard the news about the fire he gave orders that all leaders of the German Communist Party should "be hanged that very night." Paul von Hindenburg vetoed this decision but did agree that Hitler should take "dictatorial powers". KPD candidates in the election were arrested and Hermann Goering announced that the Nazi Party planned "to exterminate" German communists.

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Tempelhof

On 20 June 1948, Soviet authorities, claiming technical difficulties, halted all traffic by land and by water into or out of the western-controlled sectors of Berlin. The only remaining access routes into the city were three 20 mi (32 km)-wide air corridors across the Soviet Zone of Occupation. Faced with the choice of abandoning the city or attempting to supply its inhabitants with the necessities of life by air, the Western Powers chose the latter course, and for the next eleven months sustained the city's 2½ million residents in one of the greatest feats in aviation history. Tempelhof also became famous as the location of Operation Little Vittles: the dropping of candy to children living near the airport. The original Candy Bomber, Gail Halvorsen noticed children lingering near the fence line of the airport and wanted to share something with them. He eventually started dropping candy by parachute just before landing.

Alexanderplatz

Alexanderplatz is a large public square and transport hub in the central Mitte district of Berlin. Berliners often call it Alex, referring to a much larger area of former East Berlin. It is surrounded by several notable structures including the Fernsehturm (TV Tower), the second tallest structure in the European Union.

Alex also accommodates the Park Inn Berlin and the World Time Clock, a continually rotating installation that shows the time throughout the globe, and Hermann Henselmann's Haus des Lehrers. During the Peaceful Revolution of 1989, the Alexanderplatz demonstration on 4 November was the largest demonstration in the history of East Germany.

Alexanderplatz was also featured in the Bourne Supremacy, with Matt Damon leaping onto the famous yellow trams in order to avoid his captors, during a political demonstration.

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What did you learn as a result of the visit to Berlin?

Look back to what you wrote at the start of the week; how was the visit to Berlin different from your expectations?