The Journey -
Rosy goes to Berlin

And so to Berlin. 

The Wall went up shortly before I was posted to Germany.  It was possible to visit Berlin via the road or rail corridor, but that required a certain amount of advanced planning, and even the near future was pretty much impossible to foretell due to the 'exigencies of the Service'.  So.  This was my first visit to Berlin. 

We came in via Spandau, which I knew as the name of the prison where Hess was banged up.  After he suicided, I had heard that the prison became a NAAFI shop, so I didn't bother going to look for it.  We were moored by a big, old, brick-built warehouse, pockmarked with bullet holes and shell spatters.  In Berlin, if such damage cannot be seen, then either the structure is new or it has been renovated. 

Serious stuff

Whilst on such a mournful topic, I'd like to include the worse parts of the trip.  I was born in 1943, and father was absent for the first few years of my life - he took part in the invasion of Europe.  The true awfulness of the Nazi regime was in the background of my up-bringing - the penny-dreadful magazines and the paperback histories of 'The Nazis' and 'The Third Reich'. 

However, I have to admit that I was surprised how deeply I was moved when confronted with the hard, physical evidence. 

Our first visit was to Ravensbruck - a women's concentration camp.  It had held Jews, Roma and other 'undesirables' from all over Europe, including some British Commonwealth citizens.  Much of the camp has been flattened, and it is sometimes not easy to get a picture of how things were.  There had been huts, crowded with bunk beds, two or three people per bunk.  The HQ and 'prison' blocks remain - the 'prison' being for special inmates and for inmates who had contravened the rules. 

The women were required to work, and there were two kinds of work. 

From a survival point of view, the best work was in the factories.  These were run by commercial companies, some of which still operate in Germany (more about that later).  Electrical goods were made, and there is photo of a room full of women working away on Singer sewing machines. 

The other work was road building.  The roads were, essentially, hand-made with pick and shovel, and a large concrete roller was hand-hauled over the surface to compact it.  Working on low rations, in the heat of the summer and in the cold of the winter, with thin, skimpy clothes … truly awful. 

Just outside the gates of the camp itself are the barracks of the soldiers(?) who guarded and ran the camp.  The barracks are of the type seen all over Germany, solidly built, and a bit gaunt.  As I had seen in Menden, with some greenery and flowers and a lick of paint they can become quite pretty - or, at least acceptable.  But could YOU live next door to Ravensbruck Concentration Camp? In a house or apartment where one of the guards lived? That is what is happening now - the barracks are apartments, and people live there. 

We then went on to visit Sachenshausen.  There is much more of this left - mainly because the Russians took it over, and also used it as a prison camp.  The main entrance has the Arbeit Mach Frei (Freedom through work).  Again, the internal prison block has been particularly preserved along with the instruments of punishments and beatings whose use was so casually authorised. 

I hadn't heard before of 'The March of Death'.  Towards the end of the war, the authorities didn't want evidence of what they had been doing in these concentration camps to be seen by the Allies (proof, indeed, that the Nazis did, indeed, know the ghastliness of their methods).  The authorities at Sachenshausen devised a 'plan'.  They would march the inmates north to the sea, find some boats, put the prisoners on the boats, take the boats out to sea and sink them.  This plan finally failed when the weary column was overrun by the invading Russians.  Before this happened, many people died en route, and their falling places are, today, marked.  Hence the route of the march is well signed, and is The March of Death. 

In Berlin, a large and controversial work is currently being installed in memory of the Jews who suffered under the Nazis.  The work is a field of rectilinear blocks, built on an undulating site, and with the tops of the blocks also forming gentle undulations - not necessarily matching those of the ground.  The blocks are quite close together, though there is space to walk between them - indeed, it is expected that visitors will do just that.  BUT …

Who loves big blocks of stone? Graffiti artists, that's who.  How to counter the graffiti artists? Perhaps coat the stones with a substance which either resists paint, or allows the paint to be easily removed.  Tenders were put out, and a contractor appointed.  Unfortunately … Someone noticed that the contractor supplying the paint resistant substance was none other than the same one who had supplied the Nazis with Zyklon-B - the gas used in the gas chambers. 

In the great debate that followed, the consensus was that if all the companies that had colluded with the Nazis were barred, then much of German industry would be barred.  Companies work with whatever regime is in place.  Can Germany afford to loose Krupp, or Siemens?

That's enough of that!!! 

The River Spree runs through Berlin (the river gives us the expression 'Out on a spree') and the authorities provide several, free, 24 hour moorings.  In high summer they are much in demand.  They are a bit bouncy as barges pass by at full whack, and trip boats pass by at even whackier speeds.  One skipper counted some 50 boat movements in a one hour period - long fore and aft lines and some spring lines are needed to protect a moored boat against the surges. 

If you want a quick trip round Berlin, the best value for money is the FREE walking tour - a 3-hour stroll around the main sites, guided by a knowledgeable person.  These free trips tend to be advertised in pensions and youth hostels, and not in the Tourist Information Offices.  They leave from the Starbucks, a hundred metres east of the Brandenburg gate, at 10.45 and 14.30 daily.  I don't know if they operate all through the winter.  It's best to arrive 15 minutes early, when the guide will be found hovering on the pavement.  Although free, they would very much like you to tip them - 5 Euros is about the minimum.  They make their money by selling other PAID tours, and reckon that 75% of free clients go on to become paying ones - I'm one of the 25% who didn't.  The tour took in: an intro to the history of Berlin, the Brandenburg gate, the Reichstag, the Jewish Memorial, a distant view of Hitler's Bunker (the bunker is no more, a block of flats has been built on it), Potsdammer Platz, The Topography of Terror (ex SS/Gestapo cellars where torture took place), Luftwaffe HQ (one of the few buildings to survive the war), Checkpoint Charlie, The Gendarmenmarkt, Bebelplatz (where Hitler burned 20,000 books in the 1930s), the New Guard House (which is now a memorial to the victims of tyranny with a wonderful piece of work by Käthe Kollwitz in it), the Berlin Cathedral and the People's Palace.  The only building we actually went into was the New Guard House.  On the way round we saw bits of, and traces of, The Wall.  I also got an explanation of the posters with crosses on that we had seen at intervals as we cruised along the Spree.  Each cross represents someone who was shot trying to escape from East Berlin to West Berlin - in places, the border ran down the middle of the Spree. 

We stooged around Berlin for a while, before heading back to Magdeburg (through Potsdam and Brandenburg) to go down the Elbe (again) to Havelberg in order to cruise the Havel - a lovely little river, with locks a bit shorter than a UK wide lock. 

Thence back to Berlin with, of course, a view of the Glienicker Bridge - the one that appears in all of the Cold War spy films when the Goodies (UK and USA) swap spies with the Baddies (USSR). 

We found a mooring off the Spree, beside a park, and near to the Turkish quarter.  We still had the trip boats rushing by, but no barges.  I enjoyed the mooring - many people stopped to ask about the boats, and it was close to public transport to get into the centre of Berlin - but the crew of Temujin felt it was all a bit too busy and public, especially when some Rasta brothers took us up!! 

We eventually left Berlin, and started to explore the waterways to the east of Berlin - again it was canals and rivers connecting through to lakes.  We spent several days moored at Schmockwitz, a small town that is at a waterways crossway.  It was designated as a 48 hour mooring, so we used it as a respite haven in between cruises.  One of the major explorations was down the River Dahme and its side arms - we went down to its end which, for us, was a weired lock, that allows canoes and other portable craft to explore the upper reaches in peace - away from powered craft. 

We also spent several peaceful days moored at the little village of Philadelphia, where the villagers seemed to enjoy our presence - we are reasonably quiet, and our boats are quite pretty, and we became a bit of a talking point!!  After a couple of days we had a procession of villagers visiting us, to give us presents of their excess windfall apples and pears. 

Eventually, it was time to head east, along the Oder Spree Wasserstrasse towards our winter quarters at Eisenhuttenstadt.  On the way, we turned off to follow the Spree to its head of navigation - at an abandoned lock.  This included mooring beside a weir of the paddles and rhymer type (I think that is the spelling).  Two (or more) horizontal bars are fixed across the navigation, one vertically above the other.  Square (maybe 4 inches square) wooden paddles are placed vertically against these bars on the upstream side (so that the current holds them firmly in place against the bars).  These paddles holds back the flow.  In normal times, a few paddles are removed to allow the river to flow, but the flow rate (and, hence, the depth of water above the weir) can be controlled by adding, or removing other paddles. 

And so to Eisenhuttenstadt.  Our approach was through the steel works that were built around the canal.  Both coal and ore has to be brought in from the east.  Much use is made of rail as movement up and down the River Oder is not always possible - fast water in winter, low water in summer.  There are four great furnaces, and huge piles of ore and additives, covered conveyor belts and tall chimneys.  We saw the cars of the employees, but as to live human beings … we saw one up near the top of one of the chimneys and another on a gantry having a smoke break. 

More soon …

[Bill sent a number of photographs along with this episode, which can be seen here.]