Victorious Wehrmacht soldiers parade under the Brandenburg Gate and along Unter Den Linden, following the 1939 campaign in Poland.
(author's collection)

Similar view today. During the era of the Berlin Wall,
this area was off limits in East Berlin.

The Brandenburg Gate was severely damaged during the war. Here is the scene in May 1945, with a wrecked SS Kubelwagen left beside it. The same view on a busy summer day in 2000, with the restored Reichstag building in the background.  (Bundesarchiv Berlin)

The famous Hotel Adlon near the Brandenburg Gate is seen here decorated for Berlin's 700th anniversary celebration in 1937. The hotel was recently remodeled and is again Berlin's premier luxury accommodation.  (period postcard)

The Berlin Dom (Cathedral) was also the scene of Nazi parades. In the photo on the left, a parade through the Lustgarten in front of the Dom in 1933. The Dom was badly damaged by bombing during the war, and was not rebuilt to match exactly the pre-war building.  (from "Deutschland erwacht - Werden, Kampf und Sieg der NSDAP," Hamburg, Cigaretten-Bilderdienst, 1933)

Adjacent to the Dom is the Lustgarten, a large open area flanked by museums. On the left and below can be seen the May Pole (Maibaum) with the Altes Museum in the background, during a May Day celebration.  (left - Hubert Schrade, "Bauten des Dritten Reiches," Leipzig, 1937)

The Neue Wache (New Guard) was originally a royal guard house erected in 1816. It became a war memorial in 1931, and was the focus of many parades down Unter den Linden during the Third Reich era. The building to the right is the Zeughaus (Arsenal), which houses a history museum today.  (author's collection)

Left - Changing the guard at the Neue Wache, from a 1936 postcard view. Right - Heroes Memorial Day in 1935.  (left - author's collection; right - Bundesarchiv)

Two different armies at the Neue Wache. On the left, Austrian soldiers parade following the Anschluß of March 1938 (the Berlin Arsenal (Zeughaus) appears in the background). On the right, East German honor guards keep watch in the 1980s.  (photo on left from Gerd Rühle, ed., "Das Dritte Reich," Berlin, 1938 ed. (author's collection); photo on right courtesy R. Fogt).

Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring's Air Ministry building on Wilhelmstraße was a classic example of Nazi architecture. The building somehow escaped major damage during the war, and was restored by the East German government. Its appearance today is almost exactly as in the 1930s (minus the Eagles and Swastikas).  (period postcard)

The large eagle-and-swastika Hoheitszeichen were by sculptor Walter Lemcke. Lemke also did the large eagle at the Prinz-Albrecht-Straße side of the building (bottom).  (top and bottom from Werner Rittich, "Architektur und Bauplastik der Gegenwart," Berlin, 1938; below from "Deutsches Volk - Deutsche Heimat," Munich, 1940)

The recessed entryway on Wilhelmstraße seen in the photos above figured in the funeral service for Luftwaffe ace Werner Mölders, who had died in an air crash in November 1941. Seen in the center of this photo are, left to right - Martin Bormann, Julius Schaub, Adolf Hitler, Dr. Karl Brandt, and Field Marshall Erhard Milch.  (period photo)

The ornate Ehrensaal, or Honor Hall, of the Air Ministry.  (from "Kunst in Deutschen Reich")

Other decorative sculptures in the Air Ministry Building were by Arnold Waldschmidt.  (from Werner Rittich, "Architektur und Bauplastik der Gegenwart," Berlin, 1938)

Joseph Goebbels' Ministry of Propaganda stood prominently on Wilhelmstraße, across the street from the old Reichs Chancellery. During building construction just before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, a dreary East German building was erected in the open area just on Wilhelmstraße, blocking the front of the old Ministry building. This modern building is today a youth activities building, and access to the old Propaganda Ministry building behind it can be difficult. However, the entrance shown here was on Mauerstraße.  (from Frau Prof. Gerdy Troost, "Das Bauen in Neuen Reich," Bayreuth, 1938)

Wehrmacht headquarters on Bendlerstraße was where Army officers who opposed Hitler planned the attempt on his life on 20 July 1944. After the attempt failed, the leaders were rounded up and shot in the courtyard of this building; among these was Col. Claus von Stauffenberg, who had planted the bomb. Today the building houses the Memorial and Museum of the German Resistance. The street has been renamed Stauffenbergstraße.  (Gedenkstätte Deutscher Widerstand)

Left - an SA column marches past the Anhalter Bahnhof (train station). The station was severely damaged by bombing during the war, and the ruins were pulled down in the 1960s, leaving only part of the front façade.  (Anhalter Bunker Museum)

The Anhalter Bahnhof air-raid shelter, seen from the side closest to the Bahnhof. The air-raid shelter serves today as a haunted house and bunker museum. (My advice if you visit - skip the "haunted house," and proceed directly to the bunker museum on the lower floor.) (Anhalter Bunker Museum)

Horst Wessel was a member of the SA who was murdered by Communists in 1930. Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels turned him into a Nazi martyr and hero, and Wessel's song "Die Fahne Hoch!" became the favorite Nazi marching song. After the Nazi takeover of the government in 1933, Bülowplatz was renamed Horst Wessel Platz, and the Communists were thrown out of their headquarters at the Karl Liebknecht Haus, which became SA headquarters and a shrine to Horst Wessel. (Click here to see the site of Wessel's grave in the nearby Nikolaifriedhof cemetery.)  (period photo from Imre Lazar, "Der Fall Horst Wessel," Stuttgart, 1980)

Berlin was protected by concentrated anti-aircraft defenses, including three huge concrete flak towers. Flakturm 1 (also called the "Zoo Bunker") in the Tiergarten was completely destroyed after the war. Flakturm 3 in Humbolthain Park (shown here) was only partially destroyed after the war. The massive concrete walls of the front half of Flakturm 3 remain today in Humbolthain Park. (The metal railings seen below are not period.) The main gun positions at each corner were for long-range twin 12.8cm flak guns; the smaller pedestals on the level below were for smaller caliber guns of shorter range (2.0cm and 3.7cm).  (private collections) (MapQuest Map Link)

  Inside the upper level of the Humbolthain Flakturm 3, just below the gun platforms. This part of the ruined structure can be visited during a tour by the Berlin Unterwelten group.

  On the left, gun crews load one of the 12.8cm guns in a Berlin flak tower. Ammunition was lifted to the gun platform on the top of the tower by a hoist (seen in the right foreground), and carried by hand to the guns from there. The guns had automatic rammer mechanisms to load the cartridges into the breech. On the right is one of the smaller gun positions on the Friedrichshain tower (Flakturm 2) - a Flakvierling four-barrel 2.0cm gun, for engaging low-flying aircraft. The photos below show a 2.0cm Flakvierling position on Flakturm 1 ("Zoo Tower").  (Bundesarchiv)

Lichterfelde Kaserne, southwest of the downtown area, was an old Prussian cadet training school. The Nazis took it over in 1933, and it became the headquarters of Hitler's body guard regiment, the Leibstandarte-SS "Adolf Hitler." In this December 1935 photo, Hitler and LSSAH commander Sepp Dietrich review the Leibstandarte. The U.S. Army took the compound over in 1945, and it served the Berlin Brigade as Andrews Barracks until 1993, when it was returned to the German government. The older part of the barracks area seems mostly deserted now.  (National Archives, RG 242-HB)

Other buildings on the Kaserne were built in the 1930s especially for the Leibstandarte.  This was their headquarters building, with their name above the main entrance. The two stone guards, or "Reichsrottenführer," stood eternal watch. The newer part of the compound is now a German government archives. The Soviets removed the eagle and swastika before the Americans arrived, and the US troops removed the Leibstandarte name. The "Reichsrottenführer" guards were not removed, but covered with concrete; they remain today on their pedestals, although hidden from view.  (Wenn alle Brüder schweigen, 1981 ed.)  (MapQuest Map Link)

One of the most recognizable sights in the western part of Berlin today is the spire of the Kaiser-Wilhelm Gedächniskirche (Memorial Church). This view shows the church in the early 1900s. The church was severely damaged during the many bombing attacks on the city. The ruins of the spire and transept were left as a memorial to the victims of World War II.  (author's collection)

Berlin hosted the 1936 Olympic Games, a propaganda coup for Adolf Hitler. The view of the stadium remains much the same on the outside as it was in 1936, although the curved swastika symbol has been removed from the right-hand tower. The interior was completely modernized for the 2006 soccer World Cup.  (period photo from Werner Rittich, "Architektur und Bauplastik der Gegenwart," Berlin, 1938)

Berlin was the scene of intense building-to-building fighting, with tank battles and artillery barrages, during the final days of World War II in late April and early May 1945. Remaining German units were thrown in piecemeal to try to stem the tide of the Soviet advances. On 29 April 1945, two King Tiger (Tiger II) tanks of the 503rd SS Heavy Tank Battalion were stationed in Potsdamer Platz. Tank Nr. 101 seen here was commanded by SS-Oberscharführer (E-6, equivalent to U.S. Staff Sergeant) Karl-Heinz Turk. Turk's tank destroyed several Soviet tanks over a three day period in the Potsdamer Platz. With damage to his track and almost out of ammunition, Turk and his crew abandoned the tank in front of the Potsdamer Bahnhof, where it was later photographed with its turret turned toward the east.

This is an example of the difficulty of matching many wartime photos to the current Berlin locations. The Potsdamer Bahnhof was badly damaged during the war and later torn down. Most of the other buildings on Potsdamer Platz were demolished by the Soviets because the Berlin Wall ran right through the center of the square. When the rebuilding of Berlin began in the 1990s, building blocks and even entire streets in this area were changed from the 1945 configuration. Turk's Tiger tank sat in the foreground of the modern photo, about where the line of cobblestones crosses the paved area (this line of cobblestones marks the location of the Berlin Wall). The Potsdamer Bahnhof was located in the near distance, just beyond the grassy mound.

This photo is often labeled as showing the famous Weidendammer Bridge, scene of one of the final tank actions of the war on the night of 1-2 May 1945. However, it is actually the Moltke Bridge, some 1300 meters to the west. As the Soviet tanks came onto the bridge from the north (other side of the bridge in these photos), they could see their goal of the Reichstag building straight ahead, only 600 meters away.  (Bundesarchiv Berlin)

An exact corresponding view is not possible today, as the building from which the period photo was taken no longer exists, necessitating a modern view from street level. This area remains under construction as part of the new Berlin.  (MapQuest Map Link)

The Reichstag building had not been restored by the Nazis since the 1933 fire that gutted the interior, but the Soviets considered it a prime target in the battle for Berlin, and artillery and tank fire took their toll on the building. In the foreground of the photo on the right above is an 88mm Flak gun. The Reichstag has been completely restored, with a new glass dome, and the German government once again meets there.  (Bundesarchiv Koblenz) (MapQuest Map Link)

Sans Souci, the palace of Frederick the Great in Potsdam, was a favored spot for visiting military units to get a group photo taken on the steps. On the left, a group from the 1. Kompanie of the Leibstandarte-SS-Adolf-Hitler poses in August 1942. On the right is a Fallschirmjäger (Paratrooper) unit.  (left - "Der Freiwillige"; right - private collection)  (MapQuest Map Link)