Prague Journal

Friday, March 4, 2005.

The Berlin conference is officially over, but we took the opportunity to go to two more museums before heading home on an afternoon train. First we went to the Topography of Terror, which is near Checkpoint Charlie. The Topography of Terror is an outdoor exhibit, along a preserved section of the Berlin Wall, which shows the secret rooms below the former Prince Albrecht’s Palace. The palace was built in 1739, and redesigned 1830. In the Nazi period it housed the headquarters of the Gestapo, SS and Reichssicherheitshauptamt (Central Office for the Security of the Reich). The grounds of the Topography of Terror were named after the Prussian prince and heir to the Elector, Albrecht, who had purchased the palace on Anhalter Strasse in 1830. Between 1933 and 1945 the central institutions responsible for the crimes committed in Germany and Europe were located here. It was here, in close proximity to the traditional government district, that the Gestapo, the SS leadership, and the Reich Security Main Office set up their administrative offices. With the concentration of these institutions at one site, this area in effect became the government district of the National Socialist SS and Police State. This is where Himmler, Heydrich, Kaltenbrunner and their assistants had their desks. Here important decisions were made concerning the persecution of political opponents, the “Germanization” of occupied territories in Poland and the genocide of the European Jews. This is where the notorious Special Police Units (Einsatzgruppen) were assembled and where the “Wannsee Conference” was prepared. There is no other site where terror and murder were planned on the same scale. The building on the grounds, which in the final phase of the war had either been destroyed or severely damaged, were torn down by the mid-1950s. With the division of the city, the terrain, which in the early 1960s was cleared of all rubble and foundations. It was then located on the periphery of West Berlin, just beyond the Berlin Wall built in 1961.
With only two more hours to spend in the city, we went to the Pergamon museum, which houses spectacular works of architectural antiquities, including collections of Greek, Assyrian, Islamic and Far Eastern art. Many objects are of a magnitude rarely found indoors, such as the Pergamon Altar, with a 120 metre (394ft) frieze, the Market Gate of Miletus and the Ishtar Gate from Babylon.
We got back to the hotel to retrieve our luggage shortly after 3pm, then took the S-bahn to the East Station to catch the 3:42 train back to Prague, which arrived at Hološovice station at 8:23 and we were home by 9:30.

posted by JWinn @ 11:00 PM