Third Reich Sites in Berlin: What Is Actually Left to See
Updated: Sep 19
Every few weeks somebody stops me near the World Clock and asks where Hitler's bunker is. I always pause before I answer, because the honest answer disappoints people. It is a car park behind a block of flats on In den Ministergärten, about five minutes from the Brandenburg Gate, with one information board and nothing else. That is the whole visit.
That single moment explains most of what visitors get wrong about Third Reich sites in Berlin. People arrive expecting buildings, and Berlin mostly gives them ground: a gravel field, a square, a plate of glass in the paving, a lawn. Then, a few streets away and completely unmarked, an enormous ministry from 1936 is still standing and in daily government use, and almost nobody looks up at it.
Why most Third Reich sites in Berlin look like nothing
After 1945 Berlin made a decision that still shapes your day as a visitor: the buildings of the perpetrators were not preserved as objects to look at. The Reich Chancellery was cleared. The Gestapo and SS headquarters on Prinz-Albrecht-Straße were bombed, then demolished. What survived either disappeared into ordinary use or was left deliberately plain, and the remembering was moved into documentation centres and memorials built on the cleared ground.
The result is that two completely different things get filed under the same heading. Some places keep the original fabric and tell you almost nothing. Others keep nothing at all and explain everything. Those two qualities move independently, and a site can be high on one and near zero on the other.
That is the useful way to plan. Before you spend an afternoon on any of these places, ask two questions: how much of the original will I physically stand in front of, and will anything there explain it to me. The tool below plots eleven sites against exactly those two questions, with what each one costs and how long it realistically takes.
Start at the Topography of Terror
If you have time for one site, make it this one. The Topography of Terror sits on Niederkirchnerstraße, on the ground where the Gestapo, the SS leadership and the Reich Security Main Office had their offices. The buildings are gone. What you get instead is an excavated line of cellar walls under a long canopy, roughly 200 metres of the outer Berlin Wall running above them, an open-air exhibition down the length of the trench, and a free documentation centre indoors.
It is free, it is open daily from 10:00 to 20:00, and the grounds close at dusk. No booking, no queue on a normal day.
Niederkirchnerstraße: the cellar walls of the Gestapo headquarters on the right, the Wall above them, and the empty gravel field where the buildings stood.
My advice: go here first, even if it is not the site you came to Berlin for. Everything else on this list assumes you already know how the institutions fitted together, and this is the only place in the city that lays that out for free, in English, in about ninety minutes. See my longer guide to the Topography of Terror if you want to know what to read on the way round.
The buildings that are still standing, and nobody stops
Walk ten minutes north up Wilhelmstraße and you reach the biggest surviving Nazi building in central Berlin. The former Reich Aviation Ministry, built for Hermann Göring between February 1935 and August 1936, is completely intact and is now the Federal Ministry of Finance. Its architect, Ernst Sagebiel, built the Tempelhof terminal on the same monumental logic a few years later.
You can only see the outside, and the outside is worth ten minutes. On the Leipziger Straße side there is Max Lingner's ceramic mural from 1953, twenty-four metres of cheerful East German workers building the socialist republic. Sunk into the pavement directly in front of it is Wolfgang Rüppel's glass memorial: a photograph of the real workers who rose against that republic on 17 June 1953. Two propaganda images from the same decade, three metres apart, one of them under your feet.
Wilhelmstraße 97: about 2,000 rooms finished in eighteen months, and today a working government ministry with no exhibition and no visitor entrance.
Where the resistance story is kept
The German Resistance Memorial Center at Stauffenbergstraße 13-14 is the most underrated place in this whole article. It occupies the Bendlerblock, the army headquarters where the 20 July 1944 coup was run, and the courtyard where Claus von Stauffenberg and three others were shot that night is the actual courtyard you walk into.
Entry is free. Weekdays 09:00 to 18:00, weekends and holidays from 10:00. The permanent exhibition covers the full range of German resistance, not only the officers in this building, and it is large enough to need an hour or more.
The Bendlerblock courtyard, ten minutes on foot from Potsdamer Platz and almost always quiet.
It is also the one site on this list that is about people who refused. If you are travelling with someone who finds the perpetrator sites hard going, this is the place to put in the middle of the day.
The memorials built where nothing was left
Three central sites hold almost no original fabric at all, and two of them are among the strongest things you will see in Berlin.
The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe is 2,711 concrete stelae on cleared ground between the Brandenburg Gate and Potsdamer Platz. The field is open at all hours and free. The part most visitors miss is underneath it: the Information Centre, also free, open Tuesday to Sunday 10:00 to 18:00 with last entry 45 minutes before closing, and closed on Mondays. Give it an hour. Ten minutes among the stelae and a photograph is not the visit, and my guide to the Holocaust Memorial goes into what is in the rooms below.
The field of stelae is free and always open. The free exhibition underneath it closes on Mondays, which catches a lot of people out.
Bebelplatz, on Unter den Linden, is where more than 20,000 books were burned on 10 May 1933. Micha Ullman's 1995 memorial is set into the paving: a whitewashed underground room with empty shelves for 20,000 volumes, seen through a glass plate at your feet. There is a Heinrich Heine plaque nearby and very little else. You have to know to look down, and hundreds of people walk over the glass every day without seeing it. My separate piece on Bebelplatz explains what the square was before and after.
Micha Ullman's sunken library on Bebelplatz. It reads far better after dark, when the room below is lit.
The bunker site is the third, and it is the one I would only send you to if you are already walking past. The information board went up on 8 June 2006, in German and English, with a plan of the rooms. Everything else there is parked cars.
Gleis 17: the platform is the memorial
At Grunewald S-Bahn station, out on the S7, the goods platform used for the deportation of Berlin's Jews is still there, with the track in place and small trees now growing between the rails. Along both platform edges run 186 cast-steel plates, one for each transport, each carrying a date, a number of people and a destination. You can read Berlin to Auschwitz, Berlin to Theresienstadt, with the number beside it.
Gleis 17, Grunewald: 11 August 1944, 32 people, Berlin to Theresienstadt. One plate out of 186.
It is free and open at any hour, signed as Mahnmal Gleis 17 from the station underpass. There is no exhibition and barely any text beyond the plates themselves, so read something first. The memorial deliberately explains nothing. If you want the same history at street level in the centre, the Stolpersteine do a version of it outside people's front doors.
The two that need a train
Two sites are worth a serious block of time, and neither fits into a morning of central sightseeing.
The House of the Wannsee Conference is the villa where fifteen senior officials coordinated the murder of Europe's Jews on 20 January 1942. The building is intact, the exhibition runs through the actual rooms, and it is free, daily 10:00 to 18:00. Take the S1 or S7 to Berlin-Wannsee, then bus 114 towards Heckeshorn to the stop named after the house. About 45 minutes each way from the centre, all inside tariff zone AB.
Am Großen Wannsee 56-58. The garden runs down to the lake, and the view from the terrace is part of why the afternoon stays with you.
Sachsenhausen, the concentration camp at Oranienburg, is the heaviest thing on this list and needs a half day minimum. Admission is free. The grounds and exhibitions open 08:30 to 18:00 from 31 March to 26 October and 08:30 to 16:30 in winter, and the visitor centre runs 08:30 to 17:00 daily. The S1 takes about 45 minutes from Friedrichstraße, or the RE5 gets you there in about 25 minutes from Hauptbahnhof, then it is a 20 minute walk or the 804 bus. Zones ABC. Leave the evening free afterwards.
Olympiastadion and Tempelhof: big architecture, real tickets
These two are the only sites here with a ticket price, and they sell scale rather than explanation.
Olympiastadion, €11 for an adult self-guided visit. You get the exterior areas and the stands, with information boards along the way; the interior rooms need the guided tour. Hours shift with the season, and the visitor centre closes on Hertha home-match days and other big events, so check the calendar before you ride out to the far end of the U2.
Tempelhof, free field, ticketed building. The airfield is a public park you can walk straight onto for nothing, and it is a genuinely good Berlin afternoon. The terminal interior is another matter: it opens only on booked guided tours, sold through Museumsdienst Berlin and released about four weeks ahead. English tours run. If the building is why you are going, book it before you fly in.
One day that actually works
If you have a single day and you want it to make sense, keep it in the centre and walk it in this order:
10:00 Topography of Terror. Ninety minutes, free. This is the frame for everything after it.
11:45 Wilhelmstraße. Ten minutes at the old Aviation Ministry, then the pavement memorial to 17 June 1953.
12:15 the bunker car park. Four minutes, only because it is on the way.
12:30 Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. The field, then an hour in the Information Centre below. Not on a Monday.
14:30 lunch around Potsdamer Platz, then ten minutes on foot to the Bendlerblock.
15:00 German Resistance Memorial Center. Free, an hour or more, and it ends the day on the people who resisted.
That is five free sites, one paid coffee, and no train out of the centre. Bebelplatz slots in easily if you are heading east afterwards.
If you would rather have the connective tissue in your ears while you walk it, my Third Reich Berlin audio tour covers ten places from the Reichstag to the Topography of Terror in 12 chapters, about 39 minutes of audio, on a desk-planned route of roughly 2.6 km. It costs €9.90, and the MP3 downloads and PDF route guide work offline.
None of this is on my free walking tour, which stays in the historic centre of former East Berlin around Alexanderplatz and Museum Island. The nearest overlap is the Lustgarten, the lawn in front of the cathedral, which the regime used for mass rallies and which is now where people eat their sandwiches. If you want that centre explained first, you can join the free tour and treat this list as a separate day.
How to be a decent visitor at these places
Berlin is relaxed about most things and specific about this. A few habits make the difference:
Keep your voice down and your phone away at the memorials. People come to Wannsee, Gleis 17 and Sachsenhausen because of their own families.
Do not climb or pose on the stelae. It is the single thing that most upsets both staff and other visitors at the Holocaust Memorial.
Photograph the place, not yourself in it. At Sachsenhausen especially.
Nazi symbols and salutes are criminal offences in Germany, including as a joke for a photograph. People are arrested for this every year in Berlin.
Give yourself a gap afterwards. Two of these sites in one day is enough, and a lake or a park afterwards is not disrespect, it is how the locals do it.
Image credits
Source and licence details for the 7 photographs used in this article.
The excavated cellar walls and Berlin Wall segment at the Topography of Terror: Arild Vågen, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
The former Reich Aviation Ministry on Wilhelmstraße, today the Detlev-Rohwedder-Haus: Fred Romero, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Micha Ullman’s sunken library memorial under the glass plate on Bebelplatz: Mike Peel, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
A path between the stelae at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe: Joseolgon, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
The Bendlerblock courtyard at the German Resistance Memorial Center: Stefan Kemmerling, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Inscribed steel plates along the deportation platform at Gleis 17, Berlin-Grunewald: Andreas Praefcke, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
The villa that houses the House of the Wannsee Conference memorial and educational site: Franek Vetulani, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.