On Saturday, June 6th, 2025, we took a tour around the Koelln District, exploring numerous memorials, historic places, and buildings that played a huge role in the making of the Berlin we know today. The first place we found ourselves at was the Brandenburg gate. Where we also seen the (remodeled) art museum, Lieber- Manns welt. We learned that each layer of the columns was there to document the wars of integration. We learned the art academy; Akademie der Kunst allowed the Nazis to spread propaganda and control the distribution of art. Which was also a topic that came up at the art museum on Thursday. Then, we got to the memorial of the Sinti and Roma of Europe, where over 500,000 people were victims of the genocide. We learned the Nazi’s identified different groups of people by a specific-colored triangle. Each having a different meaning. We went to a memorial for murdered homosexual which was a struggle to be built with people arguing over whether gays deserved memorialization. We went and seen a monument for Jewish people. Our tour guide told us a story about two boys who were together in a relationship. One of them had gotten deported to a camp so, in attempt to save his partner and their family, the boys partner (not taken by the Nazi’s) named Gad Beck stole a Nazi youth uniform. He then walked up the officers, or Stazi, who were running the deportation stop point for the camps and told them he had received orders from the Stazi to take some of the people out for a work order. Surprisingly, Beck got away with it. Allowing him to save his boyfriend from the camp. But his boyfriend, said “If you take me and my whole family dies, it’s no better than if I died.”, kissed him goodbye, and walked away. That was the last they seen each other, Beck survived the Holocaust while the boyfriend and his family passed at the camp. A story and quote that so easily reflects on the suffering of Jewish families during the Holocaust and expressing the sorrow and fear surrounding the potential loss of one’s family. We ended the tour at Checkpoint Charlie, a commonly known historical landmark, one of the most important crossings between East and West Berlin.
– Cooper and Addison
