Tour guide and historian Steven Richards explores a week of intense fighting in Neukölln during the Battle of Berlin…
Every square metre of Berlin saw fighting in April 1945. That scale is what makes the Battle of Berlin so difficult to grasp and so easy to walk through today’s streets without knowing what could have happened there 81 years ago.
Last April, a photograph of a bullet-riddled window on Saalestraße appeared in Kate Bettes’ piece on Berlin’s battle scars here on Slow Travel Berlin. The photo raised more questions than it answered. Was the window a sniper position? A machine gun nest? Errant Soviet fire? The uncertainty drove us to dig deeper.
The answers in this article came from research we have been conducting in Neukölln as we develop new battlefield tours in the area. On the Front Tours is one of Berlin’s key specialist WW2 tour operators. We run twelve tours dedicated to the Battle of Berlin, the rise and fall of National Socialism, and we have featured in documentaries on National Geographic and the Discovery Channel.
What started as a single unanswered question — who fired at that window? — turned into something much larger. The more we looked, the more we found: a factory that built the gas wagons used in mass executions on the Eastern Front; a concentration sub-camp operating beneath a busy train station; an anti-tank barricade assembled by men old enough to have fought in the First World War; and a deserter hanged from a tree by a regime in its final death throes. Within 500 metres of that bullet-riddled wall — a stretch of Neukölln that most Berliners walk through without a second thought — almost the entire history of the Third Reich is compressed into a single walkable area.
What follows is our attempt to stand still at a single intersection in southern Neukölln and let the battle come to us. No generals’ maps. No city-wide sweep. Just one small square, and the people who were standing in it during the last days of April 1945.
Kirsten-Heisig-Platz
One of the biggest challenges facing historical educators working on topics related to the Second World War is how to engage with a subject that affects every square inch of an entire city.
The Battle of Berlin is a particularly sensitive topic. It marks the final, arguably decisive battle in the Second World War in Europe and involved a wave of hyper-violence passing through the city in an extraordinarily short period of time – estimates for the death toll for the 16 days of the Berlin Strategic Offensive Operation, including the Battle of Seelow Heights, exceed 300,000. This puts its daily death toll well above the most infamous urban campaign of the Second World War, Stalingrad, with an estimated 1.2 million deaths over a period of over five months.
When you include the estimated 100,000 survivors of sexual violence in the city, as well as the over 1.8 million rounds of artillery and rockets fired on Berlin by the Red Army, it becomes clear that Berlin experienced a deep and enduring trauma that now, over 80 years later, expresses itself through the absence of engagement by the local population with this topic. In other words, Berlin went through an intensely traumatic event which has left enduring scars in the city, but there is rarely any reckoning with the actual cause of those battle scars. As a guide working in Berlin, it is clear that – with some limited exceptions – the level of general knowledge about Berlin’s greatest trauma is next to nonexistent. Most simply refer to the Neubau and Altbau, without paying heed to the extreme brutality that created the distinction in the first place.
Within the heart of Neukölln, and less than 50 metres north of the section of Ringbahn running between S-Neukölln and S-Hermannstraße, lies Kirsten-Heisig-Platz. On one side of the square – which is shaped like a triangular hourglass at the intersection of Emser Straße and Kirchhofstraße – is the local fire station. Diametrically opposite, across the square, are two pubs of deep political significance: the anarchist-syndicalist Syndikat and German-run, pro-Israel pub Bajszel. Across from the fire station are a smattering of local businesses: a tattoo parlour, a bakery, a Späti and an Algerian-Italian restaurant.
This square is one of the many places in Berlin with horrific narratives about the Battle of Berlin to share, and one that encapsulates much of the brutal civilian experience.