Head's Newsletter 13 July 2018

Year 10 Trip to Berlin 2018

On Thursday 21 st June, the History department took fifty year 10 historians to Berlin for three days. The aim of the trip was to provide an introduction to Weimar and Nazi Germany which the boys will study in depth next year. Berlin is a fascinating city for the historian not only because it was the capital of the Nazi regime but also because it also played a key role in the Cold War; another topic from our GCSE course.

a Nazi concentration camp. Built in 1936 this huge camp contained over 80 hectares prison barracks within its triangular walls.

Today its buildings serve as a museum to the atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis and made for a grimly fascinating visit. After lunch we visited the SS museum, the Reichstag building and finished with a hunt for the remains of the Kroll Opera House, which housed the German parliament after the Reichstag fire. Our last day had perhaps the busiest itinerary of the trip. We started with a behind the scenes tour of the Olympic Stadium home to the 1936 ‘Nazi Olympics’. We then drove out to the abandoned Tempelhof airport where we walked down the runway that kept West Berlin free during the Berlin Blockade. Finally we drove out of the city to Potsdam and explored the Cecilienhof Palace, venue for the ‘Potsdam Conference’ between the UK, USA and USSR that is often cited as the starting point of the Cold War.

Save for some blustery turbulence that briefly turned the plane into a something akin to a ride in Thorpe Park, our trip was very smooth. Our first historical activity was a fascinating walking tour of central Berlin led by history students form Berlin’s Humboldt University. We took in sites such as Bebelplatz, where the Nazis burnt enormous piles of banned books in 1933; Checkpoint Charlie, the main crossing point between East and West Berlin during the Cold War before finishing on the former site of the Reich Chancellery, where Hitler made his final stand in 1945. On Day 2 we had a ‘lie in’ until 8.30am when we boarded our coach to a town 20 miles north of Berlin called Oranienburg. This was the location of Sachsenhausen, a