Stalin bet West Berlin could not be fed from the air. For fifteen months a plane landed, on average, every 2 min 23 s.

Conquest, siege and the destruction of cities, 1939–45.

The Second World War1943–1946 Mitte lost more than half its homes to the war. Pankow lost fewer than one in ten

The Second World War1939–45 Stalingrad was the smallest of the three cities and the bloodiest battle. Berlin, the largest, was taken in 16 days.

The Second World War1945 Berlin’s 1945 death counts differ sixfold, because they count different ground

The Second World War1945 The 9th Army counted 112,143 men on 16 April 1945. Below it, the order of battle stops counting.

The Second World War1939–41 In less than two years Nazi Germany invaded ten countries. Nine fell. The tenth stopped the Wehrmacht about 30 kilometres from the Kremlin.

The Second World War1945 In seventeen days the Red Army broke Berlin’s three lines of defence and took Hitler’s capital street by street

The Second World War1940–45 Berlin was bombed 363 times. The raids stopped on 21 April 1945 only so the Red Army could begin its assault

The Second World War1945 The Berlin offensive cost Soviet forces 352,475 casualties in 23 days

The Second World War1944–45 Reached from both ends: the camps were freed east to west and west to east, and the last was reached the day after Germany surrendered

The Second World War1945 A gun every 3.7 metres: the Red Army's breakthrough line on the Oder

The Second World War1945 The last fifteen kilometres took as long as the first seventy-one

The Second World War1944–45 Cut through, the Tiger II carries 233 mm of steel across its nose. The SS battalion that fought it in Berlin reported twelve.

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Blockade, Wall and spies in the divided city, 1945–90.

Cold War Berlin1948–49 Stalin bet West Berlin could not be fed from the air. For fifteen months a plane landed, on average, every 2 min 23 s.

Cold War Berlin1961–1992 For 28 years, West Berlin’s trains ran under the East through 15 sealed stations where they were forbidden to stop

Cold War Berlin1962–1990 West Germany bought 33,755 political prisoners out of East German jails

Cold War Berlin1963 Kennedy had seven and a half hours in West Berlin. The speech the world remembers took about nine minutes of them

Cold War Berlin1944–1952 The Morgenthau Plan was never adopted. Yet for twenty-six months its words told the US Army not to rebuild Germany

Cold War Berlin1953–56 The KGB knew about the Berlin spy tunnel before it was dug, and let it tap Soviet lines for 11 months, 11 days

Cold War Berlin1935–1995 Gatow had no hard runway until the RAF laid one. Through it, British aircraft flew in nearly half the food airlifted to West Berlin

Cold War Berlin1947–1987 For 20 years and 10 months, four armies took turns guarding one Nazi prisoner

Cold War Berlin1961–1989 The Wall the world photographed was the last of nine barriers

Cold War Berlin1961–1990 East Germany spent 28 years hardening the Berlin Wall. One sentence opened it 4 h 37 min later

Cold War Berlin1962–1986 Forty-three people crossed this bridge. Thirty of them walked west.

Cold War Berlin1961–1989 At least 140 people died at the Berlin Wall. 90 of them died in its first decade

Cold War Berlin1949–1961 Before the Wall went up, 2.7 to 3.5 million East Germans had left

Cold War Berlin1963 At 19, Wolfgang Engels drove a stolen armoured carrier into the Berlin Wall. It stuck, and drinkers from the corner pub pulled him over the top

Cold War Berlin1961–1984 Within a fortnight of the Wall, West Berlin stopped riding its own S-Bahn. East Germany ran the near-empty trains for more than twenty-two years

Cold War Berlin1945–2024 After the Wall, US troop strength in Germany fell 71% in six years

Cold War Berlin1961–1989 Historians examined 576 deaths at the Berlin Wall. They could prove 140; the youngest was 15 months old

Cold War Berlin1962 Four years, twenty-one months, six months — all ended on one February morning

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The capital of the Third Reich, 1933–45.

Nazi Berlin1904–2023 3,000 letters came back from Canada. Then the museum in Georg Kolbe’s own studio said he had served the Nazi power elite

Nazi Berlin1936 3.77 million spectators came to Berlin’s 1936 Games — and were shown a false picture of tolerance

Nazi Berlin1933 The fire had a script: nine oaths named fifteen writers, and only three were still in Germany

Nazi Berlin1928–1969 More people died building Hitler’s V-2 than it killed. Its technical director went on to direct the rocket that sent Apollo 11 to the Moon

Nazi Berlin1937–1943 To clear Berlin for a dome 290 metres high, Speer’s office drove out Jewish Berliners, and counted 75,000 “resettled”

Nazi Berlin1902–1994 The Nazis’ law against gay men outlived Hitler. West Germany convicted 53,592 men under it in 1950–69

Nazi Berlin1921–1946 Outnumbered at Every Count, the SS Still Broke the SA

Nazi Berlin1944–45 The coup against Hitler was ended by officers inside its own headquarters, an hour before his guard battalion arrived

Nazi Berlin1938–1959 Berliners burned their own park to survive. Of some 200,000 trees, about 700 were left

Nazi Berlin1933–1991 The Reichstag Building Went 57 Years Without a Plenary Sitting

Nazi Berlin1945 Ten days from Hitler’s last public appearance to suicide

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Deportation, murder and memory, 1933–45.

Persecution & the Holocaust1941–45 More than 50,000 Jews were deported from Berlin. About 2,000 came back.

Persecution & the Holocaust1933–45 Nazi Germany dismissed one in five of its university teachers. Four in five of them were thrown out on antisemitic grounds.

Persecution & the Holocaust1941–45 By one historian’s reckoning, the ones who planned it lived at three times the rate of the ones who ran

Democracy, culture and crisis, 1918–33.

Weimar Berlin1920–1933 Berlin’s Social Democrats and Communists outvoted the Nazis at every Weimar election. They never once voted together

Weimar Berlin1919–1945 In 1919 the Prussian Academy of Arts took its first woman member since 1833. In 1933 the Nazis forced her out

Weimar Berlin1929–1938 Convicted for printing military secrets the Reichstag had partly heard already. The conviction still stands.

Weimar Berlin1926–2017 Marlene Dietrich became famous at this cinema in one night. Five years later, an antisemitic riot began at its door

Royal and imperial Berlin, and the painters who drew it.

Prussia & the Kaiserreich1834 In 1834 Eduard Gaertner painted Berlin all the way round from a church roof. The palace, the cathedral and the Bauakademie in it are gone.

Prussia & the Kaiserreich1887–1931 Berlin thought Lesser Ury’s night streets “crazy”. He died 20 days before the Nationalgalerie’s show of 158 of his pictures

Prussia & the Kaiserreich1711–1915 Anton von Werner painted a war minister who was off sick into the German Empire’s founding picture

Prussia & the Kaiserreich1896 Berlin’s 1896 exhibition drew 7.4 million visitors — 14,000 a day short of the number it was built for

Prussia & the Kaiserreich1812–2013 A Prussian king built a Russian village for the last twelve singers of his choir. In 2013, three of its thirteen log houses were still home to their descendants

Prussia & the Kaiserreich1881–1930 Berlin turned Siemens down. So the world’s first public electric tramway ran in Lichterfelde

Prussia & the Kaiserreich1824–2026 Schinkel’s brick church has been shut for 49 of its 195 years

Prussia & the Kaiserreich1613–1817 A Reformed dynasty ruled Lutheran Brandenburg for 204 years

Prussia & the Kaiserreich1845–1878 Prussia loved Menzel’s Frederick the Great. Menzel said the king in it “stands there like a shop clerk”

Prussia & the Kaiserreich1685–1809 By 1700, roughly one Berliner in five was a French refugee

Prussia & the Kaiserreich1871–2024 Eighty-five years on, Berlin still has 653,000 fewer people than in 1939

Prussia & the Kaiserreich1733–1771 Potsdam’s three surviving gates span 37 years — its Brandenburg Gate came eighteen years before Berlin’s

Prussia & the Kaiserreich1701–1918 Nine Hohenzollerns ruled Prussia for 217 years. In 1888, three of them wore the crown within 99 days.

Prussia & the Kaiserreich1840–1861 The king’s 21-year building programme changed hands twice in five years

Prussia & the Kaiserreich1831–1888 He waited 27 years to be emperor. He reigned for 99 days — and could not speak

Prussia & the Kaiserreich1848 Over 900 barricades forced the King of Prussia to pull his army back

Prussia & the Kaiserreich1906 An ex-convict shoemaker bought a captain’s uniform piece by piece and took over a town hall with real soldiers

Prussia & the Kaiserreichlate 16th – early 20th century Under the Berliner Dom lie 91 Hohenzollern burials. Frederick the Great’s queen is one of them. Frederick is not.

Prussia & the Kaiserreich1417–1918 Twenty Hohenzollerns ruled for 501 years. They began as electors of Brandenburg and ended as German emperors.

Prussia & the Kaiserreich1415–1918 One family ruled Brandenburg for 503 years. It ended with an abdication announced without the Kaiser’s consent.

Prussia & the Kaiserreich1746–1886 Fifteen of Friedrich II’s potato orders survive. The first, in 1746, was a measure against famine

Prussia & the Kaiserreich1756–1763 After 1,955 days of war, a death — not a battle — saved Prussia

Prussia & the Kaiserreich1859–1941 Fourteen members of one family sat on or beside nine European thrones in 1914. The kinship set none of the sides.

Prussia & the Kaiserreich1788–2002 For 28 years, Berlin’s defining gate was made inaccessible

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How Berlin was planned, built, bombed and rebuilt.

Architecture & the built city1899–1930 Alfred Grenander designed 61 Berlin U-Bahn stations. Fifty-nine are still in service.

Architecture & the built city1927–2024 The plan to rebuild Europe’s largest department store put 80 % more floor on the block — and less than a fifth of it selling floor

Architecture & the built city1991–2003 Berlin’s Chancellery is not eight White Houses. It is 10.2 — or 0.94

Architecture & the built city1874–1908 Berlin built itself a Middle Ages

Architecture & the built city1963–1974 West Berlin built a good 17,000 flats here — and left five sixths of the ground open

Architecture & the built city1882–1999 Wallot won the Reichstag with a dome that could not be built

Architecture & the built city1866–1912 Hobrecht cut Berlin into twelve drainage systems. Not one of them sent its sewage across the Spree

Architecture & the built city1880–1899 Berlin’s building law required one yard 5.34 metres square. Riehmer built two private streets instead.

Architecture & the built city1709–2001 Wedding and Gesundbrunnen held 356 people in 1817 and 240,662 in 1910. The same ground, 676 times over

Architecture & the built city1894–1999 Fifty years after a Soviet banner flew from its roof, the Reichstag vanished under fabric. Four years later, parliament moved in beneath glass

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The people and institutions that made Berlin.

Culture, science & society1930–2026 Berlin eats an estimated 70 million currywurst a year — and cannot prove it invented them

Culture, science & society1825–2026 Café Kranzler opened in the west in 1932, not in 1945

Culture, science & society1874–1939 Kept out of Prussia’s universities and out of politics, five Berlin women built their own institutions. Two are still open.

Culture, science & society1949–2025 In twenty-one federal elections, only one parliamentary group has ever won a majority of the Bundestag: Adenauer’s CDU/CSU, in 1957

Culture, science & society1974–2026 Berlin’s marathon began in the woods in 1974. Its winners have since run 43:44 faster, and broken the men’s world record nine times

Culture, science & society1696–2024 The youngest of Berlin’s four universities is now the largest

Culture, science & society1901–2025 Germany won more science Nobels than any nation for four decades. After 1933 it never came first again.

Culture, science & society1949–2026 Adenauer, Kohl and Merkel held Germany’s chancellery for 46 of the Federal Republic’s first 76 years

Culture, science & society1956–2021 Germany’s constitutional court cannot start a case. Handed eight, it banned a party, stopped a census and voided Berlin’s rent cap

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The city since 1990.

Reunified Berlin1920–2024 In 2001 Berlin folded its twenty-three boroughs into twelve districts. Two of the new districts joined East and West across the line of the Wall

Reunified Berlin2001–2023 Berlin is split into twelve districts, each with its own mayor. The smallest, Spandau, has 243,827 residents; the largest, Pankow, 406,631

Reunified Berlin2016–2025 Berlin wrote a 2,400-km cycle network into law. By the Senate’s own count, 6% of it has been built

The strange, surprising and overlooked, measured.

Unusual facts1949–1951 Moscow built over a public street to get 169 metres of Unter den Linden