Day Three: Berlin, Germany
    Today was more of a transition day. I flew from Basel to Berlin and caught up with my Reformation Doctorate classmates.

We stayed in Berlin a few hours for a short tour of the highlights of Berlin before driving about two hours to Wittenberg.
The highlights for Berlin included some of the familiar sights: the Berlin Wall, Tower, Charlie Checkpoint, Bradenburg Gate, and a Holocaust memorial. Because all of these are well known icons of Berlin, I’ll only offer brief explanations and since I didn’t research these, many of you will have much more information than I do about these sites.
This is the largest tower in the world after Moscow.

It was a symbol of intimidation and a way of saying “Big brother is always watching.” There were officials stationed up on the tower and they literally were watching over the city. When residents looked up they were reminded they were living under a Communist regime. But residents saw something else when they looked up. A shining cross would often appear on the ball on the tower. The atheist regime did everything they could to get rid of it. They painted the ball, scrubbed it, coated it with different material but the cross kept showing up. Our tour guide explained, “I think it was God’s revenge.”
We saw both iron remnants of the Berlin Wall as well as the wall itself.

There is still about a mile left standing.


The wall was built by the East Germans in 1961 to “protect” its citizens from capitalism, although citizens couldn’t understand why the guns were pointed at them instead of the other side. There were a few checkpoints where some West Germans and those with credentials could come and go. Our guide went through these as a child and said the wait would often be 3 hours to get through the checkpoint and the guards would inspect his stuffed animals and school books.
Three checkpoints in particular led from the American sector of Germany to the East German side. Charlie Checkpoint is the most famous, not named after the person but the well known NATO phonetic alphabet. The first checkpoint was Alpha, second named Bravo, and this third checkpoint dubbed Charlie Checkpoint.


Allied soldiers and foreign visitors traveling to East Germany were registered at the checkpoint. There was a very well done display of several heart breaking incidents at the checkpoint of those who tried to escape or get back to the West side. Some made it. Some didn’t.
The Bradenburg Gate is the most famous of all Berlin sites.

For centuries this monument has overshadowed the plaza and seen historic events in Germany. I’ll let you google this if you want to know more about the Bradenburg Gate. The temporary white fence around it was just put up the day before for the festivities to celebrate reunification on October 3. Although reunification happened on November 9, that day was also the anniversary of Kristallnacht when the Nazi party organized a boycott and riot against the Jews. The people did not think a celebration should happen on such a date so they moved it to October 3.
Finally, we squeezed in a short visit to a memorial of the Holocaust. It was powerful. The blocks started off small, almost unnoticeable.

But not only did the blocks get bigger, the ground sloped down so that before you know it you were lost in a maze of blocks.



The intention was that you cannot see around the blocks so you never knew who was around the corner. This was the experience of the Jewish people who never knew who was a spy or when they would simply be arrested by the Nazi police. It was a very unsettling experience. Walking through life carefully, hesitating, peaking around the corner before continuing produced a slight sense of fear as you walked through. The undulating pavement made your footing unstable. It was a sense of relief to get to the other side. This was a foretaste of what we were going to experience in Buchenwald later in the week.
That night we arrived at Wittenberg and celebrated with Luther beer. We were finally in Luther’s city!