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.

1. 1933-02-27 - The Reichstag Fire. February 1933, the parliament burns; Hitler uses it to suspend civil liberties and seize dictatorial power.
2. 1933-05-10 - The Book Burning. May 1933, students burn "un-German" books on the Opernplatz; today a sunken empty-library memorial marks the spot.
3. 1936 - The Olympiastadion. The vast 1936 stadium, monument to Nazi architecture, still in use as Berlin's great arena.
4. 1936-08-01 - The 1936 Berlin Olympics. Hitler's propaganda spectacle, and Jesse Owens' four gold medals that defied the master-race myth.
5. 1938-04-20 - Leni Riefenstahl - Olympia. Riefenstahl's technically dazzling, ideologically charged 1938 film of the Berlin Games.
6. 1938-11-09 - Kristallnacht. November 1938, synagogues burn and Jewish shops are smashed across Berlin in the Night of Broken Glass.
7. 1939 - Speer's Germania. Hitler and Albert Speer's megalomaniac plan to remake Berlin as "Germania", world capital, mostly never built.
8. 1942 - Track 17, Grunewald. The station from which over 50,000 Berlin Jews were deported to the camps, now a haunting memorial of iron plates.
9. 1942-01-20 - The Wannsee Conference. January 1942, in a lakeside villa, senior Nazis coordinate the "Final Solution", the bureaucracy of genocide.
10. 1943-02-27 - The Rosenstraße Protest. February 1943, German women protest in the street for the release of their Jewish husbands, and win.
11. 1944-07-20 - The 20 July Plot. Claus von Stauffenberg's failed 1944 bomb plot; the conspirators are executed at the Bendlerblock, now a memorial.
12. 1945 - Stunde Null - the ruins of 1945. "Zero Hour", Berlin reduced to rubble, the Trümmerfrauen clearing the wreckage brick by brick.
13. 1945 - The Führerbunker. The buried command bunker near the Reich Chancellery where Hitler spent his final days and died in April 1945.
14. 1945 - The Battle of Berlin. April–May 1945, the Red Army storms the capital in the war's final, devastating urban battle.
15. 1945-05-02 - Raising a Flag over the Reichstag. The iconic May 1945 photograph of the Soviet flag raised over the ruined Reichstag.