4th day in Berlin (Sat, June 21)

Ok so it seems I never finished updating my blog about Germany.

On the 4th day of our time in Berlin we had a tour of the Deutscher Bundestag (German federal parliament building) as well as visited the Holocaust memorial, and the Jewish museum. It was a day of mixed emotions for me as I thought about what happened to the Jewish people right here in the city I was visiting.

(1st Picture and 2nd picture) This is a picture from inside the Bundestag where the German federal parliament meets to govern the country. This building was practically burned to the ground in 1933. It was blamed on a communist who was beheaded for the crime. However, it is also is suggested that the Nazis's themselves burned it with the purpose of blaming the communists for the crime so that communism would be hated by the people. The Nazis party used the fire as an excuse to purge Germany of communists supporters.

(3rd picture and 4th picture) The holocaust memorial is a series of concreate slabs of varing sizes from the very small to the very large. Its hard to get the scope of how big of a memorial it is here, but below are 2 pictures from facing two different directions. You can see Ellen's head poking up above one of the slabs. Underneath the memorial is a museum honoring the lives of those killed by the Nazis party from 1930's-1945 for being a Jew, homosexual, Gypsy, or having a mental illness. It was a very through and thought provoking experience to say the least. Pictures were not permitted inside the museum.

(5th and 6th picture) Our last stop for the day was at the Jewish Museum. The purpose of this museum is to tell the story of the entire history (2,000 years) of the Jewish people from ancient times to modern times. It was opened in 1933 but closed by the Nazis party in 1938. The current museum was finally reopened in 1999. The architecture itself is intended to be symbolic of the history of the Jewish people, but was impossible for me to capture with my pathetic camera skills. The 6th picture is a few members of my team standing in a sort of memorial garden that is intended to be a smaller representation of the Holocaust memorial shown above.