Originally we planned a visit to Potsdam and Sans Souci, but we’re pretty palaced-out.  Instead we took the train to Wannsee, right on the edge of Zone B, where our rail passes finish.  Wannsee is situated on a lake, and has its own beach which is very popular on warm days.  Today was overcast so the neatly aligned deckchairs were mostly empty, though there were plenty of yachts out.  The rail passes include ferries, so we went aboard the commuter ferry which crosses the lake to Alt Kladow, a holiday village.

Our destination was the Luftwaffe Museum, another accidental discovery, with the bonus of free admission.  It’s located at Gatow Airfield, which played a major role in the Berlin Airlift of 1948-49, and was also used for training during the Third Reich.  The collection contains over half a million exhibits, displayed indoors in several large hangars, and outside.  It covers the whole history of military aviation, from the biplanes of WW1 right up until recent times.  It features an extensive collection of planes from the Cold War era, on both sides of politics – Russian, German, British, French and US aircraft are displayed side by side.  There was even an Australian RAAF C47 Dakota (the DC3 was the civilian version), which took part in the Airlift.

There are also artefacts such as an Enigma coding machine, and Goering’s uniform.  We even learned that the term “bean counting” was used in 1916, due to the requirement to register and report all pulses – peas, beans and legumes.  It was an excellent museum and took several hours to cover everything.  Ian saw a number of aircraft that he has not seen at other aviation museums, or certainly not in that quantity.  It is also unusual to see military aircraft from the 21st century. Anyone with an interest in aviation would certainly enjoy a visit.

From Gatow we took a bus to Spandau, then a train to Tiergarten.  Despite having walked for many kilometres, we felt the need to climb 285 steps up the steep spiral staircase of the Victory Column.  Erected in 1873, it commemorated Prussian victories over Denmark, Austria and France.  The golden statue of Victoria overlooks the Grose Stern (Great Star), an intersection of several major roads, and the Tiergarten, the huge park in central Berlin.  The Brandenburg Tor is at the opposite end of what was planned to be a triumphal way in Hitler’s grandiose vision for Berlin, dubbed “Germania”.

Our weary legs carried us through the leafy shaded paths of the Tiergarten, back onto the train to Charlottenburg, and the two block walk to the apartment, before we collapsed into the elevator.  Five flights of stairs were about 4.5 flights too many!