But Checkpoint Charlie remains a dodgy spot.
We are standing at the Berlin Wall’s historic crossing point, musing on tense prisoner exchanges on rainy nights, and Cold War spy thrillers.
And we are nearly filleted by a buffoon of bicyclists.
Swaddled in headsets, they wobble through us, blindly chasing their bike tour guide’s commentary.
He threads them onwards, past a madly inappropriate Starbucks coffee depot.
Your grumpy columnist shakes his fist at the retreating backsides.
The Duchess, refined as always, confines herself to no more than five profanities.
(The bicycle spokes would be toast if she’d brought her umbrella to Checkpoint Charlie).
It is 27 years since they pulled down the Berlin Wall and the entrepreneurs began selling it off at $10 a brick.
The wall split the city for three decades, and 140 East Germans were shot dead trying to escape across it.
What remains at Checkpoint Charlie is a victory for the West’s worst taste — a muddled, random theme park.
Colliding tour groups fight to ogle nothing of value.
It’s a historic spot that’s been obliterated.
Mentally, Berlin is a tough nut for the traveller to crack.
It’s modern, enjoyable, uber trendy, and a very different place to the historic Berlin you carry in your mind.
Perhaps it’s a Boomer affliction, but I find I’m a tourist who can’t blithely sail around Berlin’s quite recent past.
For 12 years it was the terrifying HQ to Hitler’s Germany, and part of its punishment was living out the next 45 years with its body sliced in half.
Walking tours are the go for visitors to Europe’s older city centres.
Here, the biggest queues aren’t for the modern Berlin — they’re for the Wall and the Nazi sites.
They disappoint, because there’s so little left to see — Bomber Command, the Red Army, and now modern development, has seen to that.
The bunker in which Hitler finally shot himself is famously concreted over.
I found a small information board, erected privately because the city refused to pay for one.
Part of the Wall is preserved, but it is difficult now to discern what was once East and West.
Apparently our hotel was in the bedraggled East.
You wouldn’t know.
I caught a commuter train to Oranienburg, on Berlin’s northern fringe.
It is home to the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp, built by the Nazis in 1936.
About 30,000 people died inside the iron gates, which carry the camps’ "Work Sets You Free" slogan.
The camp was comparatively "small" — but nonetheless, a massive thousand acres.
Today the ground is eerily bare.
There’s only a sample scattering of barracks and admin’ buildings.
The Nazis built it as their model concentration camp.
Being handily on the edge of Berlin, it became head office for the SS’s death camp programme, and a bizarre training school for camp guards.
The camp kitchen, which boiled a slow death diet of 600 calories a day, now houses a small museum.
This offered a new grotesquery.
A glass display case frames what looks like an ordinary fence post, its only feature a barely noticeable hole the size of a fingernail.
The label said: "Neck Shooting Stick."
Nothing more.
The exhibit made no sense until I came to the part of the camp the guards called Station Z.
That is — Z, the last station in life.
Station Z has a long execution trench into which prisoners were marched in groups and shot.
There is also a gallows site, a cremation oven and the remains of an experimental gas chamber.
Not far from the oven are the brick foundations of three interconnecting rooms.
The first was a waiting room where the prisoner stripped for a "medical examination".
The inmate was welcomed into the second room, where SS officers dressed in doctor’s outfits fussed, and lined their patient up against a measuring post, to record their height.
This post, in fact the museum’s preserved "Neck Shooting Stick", was cemented into a wall behind which, in the third room, another guard was hidden.
When the faux doctors had successfully aligned the back of the prisoner’s neck with the small hole drilled through the measuring post, a signal button was pushed.
The hidden guard, protected from repeatedly viewing his handiwork, put the mouth of his pistol into his side of the hole, and pulled the trigger.
The bullet travelled about four inches.
This sneaky, no-dramas job took about 10 minutes per unwitting prisoner.
It was a sly, wacko, killing "science" that blew out 10,000 humans’ brains.
What sort of people could conceive of this?
Well it happened, and our world travels on.
It can be hard to move with it.
- John Lapsley is an Arrowtown writer.
