Berlin commonwealth cemetery part 2 ww2

Wonder around Berlin ww2 cemetery for the men of bomber command

Transcript

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Hello and welcome to the Beater Panel Podcast, a travel blog taking you down the crisscross paths of a century worth of warfare. I'm your tour guide, Martin Lambert, and for the past twenty odd years I've looked after people and taken them to the battle sites of the first and second world war. However, I've decided to take my own path, and through this blog I can teach you how to travel to those sites that not many people get to see. Hello and welcome to Peter Battlefield. This week is part two of the British Cemeteries around Berlin. Berlin, I spent a week there, and it's my ancestral home. My grandmother grew up there and would meet my granddad in the post-war period as he was part of the British occupation forces in Schlottenburg. I've done several podcasts, and there will be more podcasts about Berlin to come up. I did want to do a Ten Best Places to Visit in Berlin, but there are more and more coming up every time. And there are so many people that cover the different histories of Berlin, of course, the rise of fascism, and then the Battle of Berlin, and all in between. It's an amazing city to go to, and every avenue has something completely different. But this week we're at the Berlin 1939, 1944, 1945 War Cemetery, which is located in Schlottenburg, which is the British area of occupation, during that period and the Cold War. So how do we get there? Take the S Bahn out to the Olympic Stadium, and before you leave the st leave it to go towards the cemetery, take a right and just take in the sheer size of the Olympic Stadium, obviously opened for the Berlin 1930s Olympics, and would be a statement to the world about Germany and the rise of fascism. I've not quite got a chance to do a tour there, and one day I'd love to wander around it just to get the sheer scale of it. But you can see the sites which haven't changed for many years, and during the World Cup, the exterior and facade stayed, but they rebuilt it inside to be more to the modern age. Outside of it is a bell, one of those bells that rang in the 1930s Olympics. And if you look very closely and get a chance to stand next to it, you can see where a round went through it in the final days of the Battle of Berlin. We now leave the Olympic Stadium, and we're going to walk down the road, and you're going to come to one of the main roads leading into Berlin. Cross the road and turn right. And just keep walking until you see that familiar sign of the Commonwealth War graves. Down the side, up a little leafy path, like we've walked up so many on the Western Front and all the other parts of the battlefields. We come to a gate and we look over the graves of 3,500 soldiers, airmen, and naval personnel who died in Western Germany during the Second World War. Nearly 80% of them are those who died in Bomber Command. But then we also have the prisoners of war who died in German captivity, and many of those who would die in the death marches and the long marches back into Germany at the end of the Second World War. All over Germany we have these Commonwealth Wargrave cemeteries, and even after the First World War, it was decided that they would congregate these cemeteries into larger ones. So Germany was split up into many different districts, and we've already covered the cemetery in Hamburg, and this one is now for the West. And it's quite interesting. There are many different cemeteries also located in Poland, which soldiers would die in and airmen would die in for that period. And the way the Commonwealth War Graves set things up is it is literally based not on what the closest cemetery is, but how the maps were carved up. Recently I was researching an air crew who died on the attack on Pinnamunda, and there are some that are buried from that attack here as part of Operation Crossbow in August 1943. However, one crew landed and crashed in Pinnamunda, but their bodies were taken a hundred metres into the Polish across the Polish border and buried by the locals. So they're actually buried in Poznan, which I find quite weird because it is 300 kilometres opposed to 100 kilometres. But this just goes to show how the Commonwealth Wargraves organise these organise these things. The Commonwealth War graves look after thousands of sites throughout the world in all the countries where men and women of the Commonwealth have perished in conflict of the 20th century. And we all, as taxpayers in the United Kingdom, or one of the other six nations that pay into this Australia, Canada, New Zealand, India, and South Africa, the English contribution is two pound per taxpayer to pay for the nearly 1.2 million graves located throughout the world. And every time I've been to the cemetery in the winter and the summer, it's always immaculate, and you hardly remember that you're in the outskirts of a metropolis like Berlin. When you walk through the gates, you're greeted by back-to-back headstones. This is a congregation cemetery, made up of tiny little burials brought from all over the place. So they had time to lay it out in a way that was effective to the space they were given. And then when you look to your left, you'll see a number of army graves, and buried amongst them is the only escape from Calditz to be shot. That is Lieutenant Albert Michael Sinclair, known as the Red Fox. He'd been captured with a Rife Brigade in 1940 in the evacuation from Dunkirk. He would then be sent to seven different several different prisoner of war camps throughout Poland and Germany, and he'd always tried to escape, so they decided to send him to the big house, Calditz Castle, not too far from Dresden. This was meant to be inescapable. The actual castle itself being used several times throughout the Second World War for different purposes, and I will revisit this. Today it's actually a youth hostel, which you can stay within the castle and do the tour, but that is for another day. It had been a concentration camp for a short period of time as part of the T4 project. Here, people who were seen as mentally unfit would be murdered and left to die. It also used to hold Soviet prisoners, and then eventually it would be used to use those of the other Allied forces. Within its home, it had French, Polish, and all the other airmen and army officers who stayed there. But, as I say, that's for another day. But Albert Sinclair attempted to escape on the 25th of September 1944. He'd already tried to escape several times from Caldits, but as he jumped over the wall, a German soldier pointed his rifle and tried to fire a warning shot. This warning shot's ricochet went through his elbow and straight into his heart. He would be the only prisoner of Calditz to be shot trying to escape. And now he's buried here at Berlin Cemetery. When we look at those prisoners of war who were captured, many of them would have been in 1944. There's a fair few men who would have been captured at Arnhem and were brought here. And I've also found quite interesting in researching this is several men would find themselves in the Czech Republic, and there's a large number of airmen from Arnhem who are buried in Prague. But we can research most of these stories. We also have men of the Royal Marines. Not the Royal Marine commandos, though. However, there are some who would have died at Saxonhausen, but they were cremated and their bodies are never found. After Hitler gave out the commando order after the attack on Norway, all Royal Marine commandos who was caught would be executed in this way, and sadly we don't have their remains. You then walk along from the plot on the far left, and you see a mismatch of different graves. This plot is dedicated to the servicemen who died in the post-war period, part of the occupation forces of Germany. The British Army wouldn't leave Germany until 1996, and amongst them we also have the Charles Graves, of the sons and daughters of soldiers who were serving over there, who sadly died in Berlin. Then we turn to our right and we have the main memorials. And this back wall, we then get a full scale, and we look over those who have died over the battles of Germany. But then we see of all these immaculate graves, we see some graves pointing out into a different direction. These are dedicated to those of the Indian Army, who they respect each and one of their different religions, and how they were buried. And they've all been placed in this plot. So we can see them all together. Eighty per cent of the graves here are those who died in Bomber Command. And thanks to the International Bomber Command Memorial located in Lincoln, we can tell some of these stories. And each individual air crew tells a story of those different times fighting over Germany. There are a fair number of them who would have died in the areas around Berlin. And if you get a chance, visit the International Bomber Kamal Memorial site, and you can research and find out where these men took off from and how they died, and where they died. There's also a lot of soldiers here who died on the long march. As the Russians came from the east, prisoner war camps started to be closed up, and very similar to the concentration camps, they'd be closed down and forced into Germany to be used as bartering tools. Many would die on the march. And researching many of these, we found out that as they walked on the marches, the RAF, who had air superiority all over Germany, would see these large groups walking along the walls and along the roads and believed them to be Germans on the march, and some of them died by their own hands. But then also many were malnourished, mistreated, and after years of captivity, they didn't have the quit the equipment or the strength to survive the harsh winter of 1944, so many of them perished by the wayside. And some are buried here, but many have never been found and remembered on the several different memorials located back in the United Kingdom. But as you wander along the long rows of those from Bomber Command, you start to look at their ages, and when you see 19-year-olds have the distinguished Firing Cross and the DSOs, we can see it's a different generation of lads and men who took up that time to fight for what they believed in. It's always a place to reflect, and I do always come here when I'm in Berlin. It's just located outside the city, but Berlin itself is an amazing city to go and visit, and it has so many different avenues and so much history. Located not too far from Spandau. Now this leaves me down to my own personal story of Berlin. So my nan emigrated to the United Kingdom in 1951 from Berlin because there was nothing much to go go on. She would work during the Berlin airlift, designed to try and feed the people of Berlin who were starving as it was surrounded by the Russians. And here she would meet my grandfather. My granddad courted my my nan for a little while and then said to her, Will you marry me? And she said, No, you've probably got someone back at home. So she then eventually came to England and could see my granddad had no one. And my mother and her sisters would spend a lot of time in Berlin going around Schlottenburg and going to the palace and using the more the tombs of the former kings and queens as slides throughout their time. And I wouldn't visit Berlin for many years. My mum didn't return to Berlin for many, many years, because I actually took her to the Brandenburg Gate and we stood there and I went, Oh mum, has it changed anything? And she goes, I've never been here because that time the Brandenburg Gate was in the Russian zone. But when I went back there many years ago, and I asked my mum, What shall I see of Germany? What shall I go and see in Berlin? And she said, Oh, go to the go to the apartment where you where we grew up. And I went there and had my experience. Obviously, all the family have long since passed who went through those doors, but it gave me a little bit of a connection. But my mum also said, Go to Spandau prison. That's where your granddad worked for a little period of his time when he was there. And of course, it wouldn't shut until 1987 when uh Rudolph Ho Rudolf Hess would die in suspicious circumstances. So I didn't really research that much. I just went to Spandau and thought I'd have a look around and think, oh, there must be something here. And of course I didn't know it got knocked down in 1991, so it is now a shopping centre. But it's always just kind of shows me and always teaches me to do your research. So we're going to do some more uh more podcasts about Berlin and tell you some more stories of this amazing city. Thank you for listening. If you've enjoyed this, please share and like it and put it on social media. You can also buy us a coffee. Link is in the show notes. And if you've got any questions you want to ask for the future episodes or perhaps some ideas, please email beattobattle at gmail.com. Thank you and good night.