Third Reich & War
The darkest chapter — the Nazi seizure of the capital, the 1936 Olympics, the persecution, the bombing, and the ruins of 1945.
Part of Berlin
15 moments in this segment.
- — The Reichstag Fire. February 1933 — the parliament burns; Hitler uses it to suspend civil liberties and seize dictatorial power.
- — The Book Burning. May 1933 — students burn "un-German" books on the Opernplatz; today a sunken empty-library memorial marks the spot.
- — The Olympiastadion. The vast 1936 stadium, monument to Nazi architecture, still in use as Berlin's great arena.
- — The 1936 Berlin Olympics. Hitler's propaganda spectacle — and Jesse Owens' four gold medals that defied the master-race myth.
- — Leni Riefenstahl — Olympia. Riefenstahl's technically dazzling, ideologically charged 1938 film of the Berlin Games.
- — Kristallnacht. November 1938 — synagogues burn and Jewish shops are smashed across Berlin in the Night of Broken Glass.
- — Speer's Germania. Hitler and Albert Speer's megalomaniac plan to remake Berlin as "Germania", world capital — mostly never built.
- — Track 17, Grunewald. The station from which over 50,000 Berlin Jews were deported to the camps — now a haunting memorial of iron plates.
- — The Wannsee Conference. January 1942 — in a lakeside villa, senior Nazis coordinate the "Final Solution" — the bureaucracy of genocide.
- — The Rosenstraße Protest. February 1943 — German women protest in the street for the release of their Jewish husbands, and win.
- — The 20 July Plot. Claus von Stauffenberg's failed 1944 bomb plot; the conspirators are executed at the Bendlerblock, now a memorial.
- — The Führerbunker. The buried command bunker near the Reich Chancellery where Hitler spent his final days and died in April 1945.
- — Stunde Null — the ruins of 1945. "Zero Hour" — Berlin reduced to rubble, the Trümmerfrauen clearing the wreckage brick by brick.
- — The Battle of Berlin. April–May 1945 — the Red Army storms the capital in the war's final, devastating urban battle.
- — Raising a Flag over the Reichstag. The iconic May 1945 photograph of the Soviet flag raised over the ruined Reichstag.
