# Berlinfographics

> Original infographics on the history of Berlin, every figure sourced. Free to publish under CC BY 4.0 with credit to Berlinfographics.

Berlinfographics publishes researched, source-checked infographics and scroll stories on the history of Berlin, by Berlin Experiences. Every figure on a page is linked to a named source, listed at the foot of the page. Our infographics, charts and texts are licensed CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/): quote and republish them freely, including commercially, with the credit "Berlinfographics" and a link to the page used. Photographs inside our stories belong to their archives and photographers and keep the licences named in their captions.

When you use a figure from a page, cite that page's URL. Each page also offers a ready-made citation and a Wikipedia {{cite web}} template in its "Use this Berlinfographic" section.

## Key pages

- [Home](https://berlinfographics.com/): every story and infographic, by topic
- [Press & reuse](https://berlinfographics.com/press/): the licence, how to credit, and press contact
- [About](https://berlinfographics.com/about/): who makes Berlinfographics and how pieces are researched and fact-checked

## The Second World War

Conquest, siege and the destruction of cities, 1939–45. Topic page: https://berlinfographics.com/topics/second-world-war/

- [Berlin’s lost homes, borough by borough, 1943–1946](https://berlinfographics.com/district-destruction/): On 1 January 1943, before the start of the air war, Berlin had 1,562,641 usable homes. When the city counted again on 13 April 1946, it found 1,061,846 — almost a third gone. How many depended on where you lived: 53.8% in Mitte, 9.4% in Pankow.
- [Cities in Ruin: Warsaw, Stalingrad, Berlin](https://berlinfographics.com/cities-in-ruin/): In September 1939 Germany besieged Warsaw, a city of 1,300,000, for 21 days. The campaign of 1942–43 for Stalingrad, a city of 445,476, cost about 800,000 Axis and 1,100,000 Soviet casualties.
- [Counting the dead of the Battle of Berlin, 1945](https://berlinfographics.com/battle-casualties/): No single agreed figure exists for the dead of the Battle of Berlin. The city’s own museum counts more than 20,000 civilians killed in the battle for the city; the figure in the English reference works, 125,000, covers the entire operation, from the Oder to…
- [German Defenders: the Berlin order of battle, April 1945](https://berlinfographics.com/german-defenders-1945/): German records give 766,750 men on the two army groups facing the Red Army that morning. One level down, the 9th Army's return is exact to the man.
- [Nazi conquests in Europe, 1939–41](https://berlinfographics.com/nazi-conquests/): Between 1 September 1939 and 22 June 1941 the German army attacked ten states. Nine were beaten in campaigns measured in weeks.
- [The Battle for Berlin, 16 April – 2 May 1945](https://berlinfographics.com/battle-for-berlin-timeline/): From the Oder on 16 April 1945 to General Weidling’s surrender at about 06:00 on 2 May 1945. The battle for the city killed some 22,000 of its civilians; counted across the whole operation, the toll reaches 125,000.
- [The bombing of Berlin, 1940–45](https://berlinfographics.com/allied-bombing/): From the first RAF raid in August 1940 to the American attack of 3 February 1945, the heaviest on the city, the bombing killed between 20,000 and 50,000 people, by differing estimates.
- [The cost of the Berlin offensive, 16 April – 8 May 1945](https://berlinfographics.com/berlin-offensive-losses/): Krivosheev’s loss tables for the Soviet offensive to take Berlin and reach the Elbe, fought from the Oder to the Elbe between 16 April and 8 May 1945, and not only in the city.
- [The end of the camps: liberation dates, 1944–45](https://berlinfographics.com/camp-liberation-dates/): The Red Army reached Majdanek on 23 July 1944. The last camp, Stutthof, was reached on 9 May 1945, 290 days later.
- [The gun line: Soviet artillery in the Berlin operation, 1945](https://berlinfographics.com/soviet-weapons-berlin/): On 16 April 1945 the 1st Belorussian Front’s breakthrough sectors on the Oder held 270 to 290 guns and mortars to every kilometre.
- [The Race to Berlin, 16 April – 2 May 1945](https://berlinfographics.com/race-to-berlin/): Three Soviet fronts opened the Berlin Offensive before dawn on 16 April 1945, from start lines on the Oder and the Neisse. On the seventeenth day the city surrendered.
- [Tiger II and IS-2 in the Battle of Berlin, 1945](https://berlinfographics.com/german-tanks-berlin/): The two heaviest tanks of the Battle of Berlin, cut open and drawn at one scale. Plate against plate, the comparison is usually given to the Tiger II.

## Cold War Berlin

Blockade, Wall and spies in the divided city, 1945–90. Topic page: https://berlinfographics.com/topics/cold-war/

- [The Berlin Airlift, 1948–49](https://berlinfographics.com/berlin-airlift/): On 24 June 1948 the Soviet Union blockaded the western sectors of Berlin and the over two million people who lived in them. For 322 days their coal, their food and their medicine came by air — 278,228 flights in all.
- [Berlin’s ghost stations, 1961–1992](https://berlinfographics.com/ghost-stations/): When the Wall went up, three West Berlin lines still crossed beneath East Berlin. The East walled up their stations there and posted guards on the platforms. The trains slowed, and never halted.
- [Häftlingsfreikauf: West Germany buys East Germany's political prisoners, 1962–1990](https://berlinfographics.com/haftlingsfreikauf/): From 1963 to 1989 Bonn paid 3.4–3.5 billion DM, mostly in oil, copper, coffee and other goods, for them and for about 250,000 family reunifications. By 1977 one prisoner cost 95,847 DM.
- [JFK in Berlin, 26 June 1963](https://berlinfographics.com/jfk-berlin-1963/): On 26 June 1963 Air Force One landed at Tegel at 09:45 and left for Ireland at 17:15.
- [Marshall vs Morgenthau: what Washington planned for Germany, 1944–1952](https://berlinfographics.com/marshall-vs-morgenthau/): In September 1944 the US Treasury put fourteen measures for a defeated Germany to the President. Roosevelt disowned them within three weeks. But the army’s directive of April 1945 repeated the Treasury’s words, and closed every school in the American zone.
- [Operation Gold: the Berlin spy tunnel, 1953–56](https://berlinfographics.com/operation-gold-tunnel/): In 1954 the CIA and Britain’s SIS began a tunnel about 450 metres long from Rudow, in the American sector, to three Soviet army cables in Altglienicke. A British officer in the planning meetings, George Blake, had already told the KGB.
- [RAF Gatow: the field with four owners, 1935–1995](https://berlinfographics.com/raf-gatow-cold-war/): The field in Spandau changed hands three times without moving an inch: Luftwaffe, Red Army, Royal Air Force, Bundeswehr. The Luftwaffe trained off grass. The British laid steel, then concrete, fifteen months before the Soviet blockade of West Berlin began.
- [Spandau: the Allied prison and its seven Nazi war criminals, 1947–1987](https://berlinfographics.com/spandau-prison-war-criminals/): Seven of Hitler’s ministers and commanders, convicted at Nuremberg, served their sentences in the Allied prison at Spandau. From 1 October 1966 only Rudolf Hess was left.
- [The Berlin border strip in cross-section](https://berlinfographics.com/berlin-wall-cross-section/): From West Berlin it was one concrete wall, 3.60 m high. From the East, as the border troops drew it in 1984, it was the 9th barrier of a strip between 15 and more than 150 metres deep — and all of it stood on East German ground.
- [The Berlin Wall, from wire to rubble, 1961–1990](https://berlinfographics.com/wall-construction/): It began as barbed wire on 13 August 1961 and ended as a border system 155 km long around West Berlin. At 18:53 on 9 November 1989, Günter Schabowski read out new travel rules. At about 23:30 the gate at Bornholmer Straße opened.
- [The Bridge of Spies, 1962–1986](https://berlinfographics.com/glienicke-bridge/): Five Cold War exchanges at the bridge between Wannsee in West Berlin and Potsdam-Babelsberg in the GDR, 1962–1986. The first was one man for one man.
- [The dead of the Berlin Wall, 1961–1989](https://berlinfographics.com/wall-casualties/): The deadliest year was 1962, when 22 died, among them Peter Fechter, 18, who bled to death in Zimmerstraße in full view of the West. After 1966 the toll never again reached double figures.
- [The East German exodus before the Wall, 1949–1961](https://berlinfographics.com/east-german-exodus/): West Germany registered 2,738,566 of them between 1949 and 1961. About half went through West Berlin. In the last 24 hours before the border closed, about 2,400 more registered at Marienfelde.
- [The stolen carrier: Wolfgang Engels at Heidelberger Straße, 1963](https://berlinfographics.com/engels-stolen-apc/): On the evening of 17 April 1963 he took an army SPW-152 from a barracks yard in East Berlin and crossed the city to Heidelberger Straße. A border guard shot him through the lung. He lived.
- [The West Berlin S-Bahn boycott, 1961–1984](https://berlinfographics.com/sbahn-boycott-1980/): The S-Bahn in West Berlin belonged to the Deutsche Reichsbahn, East Germany’s state railway. When the Wall went up, West Berliners were asked to stop paying for it, and riders fell from about 500,000 a day to under 100,000.
- [US Troops in Germany, 1945–2024](https://berlinfographics.com/us-troops-germany/): In 1989 the United States had 248,621 active-duty troops in West Germany. By 1995 there were 73,280 in a united Germany. In September 2024 there were 34,738.
- [Where they died: the dead of the Berlin Wall](https://berlinfographics.com/wall-deaths/): Between 2005 and 2009 the ZZF Potsdam and the Stiftung Berliner Mauer checked every death and suspected death at the Wall against archives, court files and the testimony of families.
- [Four years, twenty-one months, six months — all ended on one February morning](https://berlinfographics.com/glienicke-five/): On 10 February 1962 three men held for four years, twenty-one months and six months were freed on the same morning: Abel and Powers on the Glienicke Bridge, Pryor at Checkpoint Charlie.

## Nazi Berlin

The capital of the Third Reich, 1933–45. Topic page: https://berlinfographics.com/topics/nazi-berlin/

- [Georg Kolbe and the Nazi state](https://berlinfographics.com/georg-kolbe-sculptor-berlin/): Kolbe made Berlin his home in 1904 and became one of the great sculptors of the Weimar Republic. After 1933, two of his monuments came down — and Hitler and a Reich minister each paid 18,000 Reichsmark for one of his nudes.
- [The 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin: 3.77 million spectators and a false picture of tolerance](https://berlinfographics.com/olympic-berlin-1936/): The organisers counted 3,769,892 spectators at the events, 3,161,249 of them on bought seats, while the regime temporarily took down most of its anti-Jewish signs for foreign visitors.
- [Bebelplatz, 10 May 1933: the book burning and the writers it named](https://berlinfographics.com/bebelplatz-book-burning/): The Deutsche Studentenschaft circulated nine „fire oaths“ on 9 May 1933, one to be shouted as each armful of books went into the flames. Between them they named fifteen writers.
- [From the V-2 to the Saturn V, 1928–1969](https://berlinfographics.com/v-weapons-to-saturn-v/): The line from a Berlin rocket-car stunt in 1928 to Pad 39A in 1969 runs through one man, Wernher von Braun, one team of engineers, and the tunnels of Mittelbau-Dora, where at least 20,000 prisoners died.
- [Germania: the capital Hitler never built, 1937–1943](https://berlinfographics.com/germania-plan/): Hitler’s Germania was to centre on a Great Hall and a triumphal arch, facing each other along an avenue 120 metres wide. Neither monument got beyond demolition and a test block.
- [Nollendorfplatz and Paragraph 175: the law that outlived Hitler](https://berlinfographics.com/nollendorfplatz-lgbtq-history/): Paragraph 175 dates from 1871. In 1935 the Nazis widened it, and convictions rose ten times over. The Federal Republic kept the Nazis’ text, unchanged, until 31 August 1969.
- [SA vs SS: the smaller organisation took the power, 1921–1946](https://berlinfographics.com/sa-vs-ss/): At every date the archives count both, the Sturmabteilung was the larger organisation — four million men to the SS's two hundred thousand. On 30 June 1934 the SS killed the SA's leadership, and twenty days later stepped out from under its command.
- [The 20 July plot, 1944](https://berlinfographics.com/twenty-july-plotters/): Stauffenberg’s bomb went off at the Wolfsschanze at 12:42. In Berlin the coup was not crushed by Major Remer’s soldiers, as Remer claimed after the war.
- [The Tiergarten felled and replanted, 1945–1959](https://berlinfographics.com/tiergarten-1945-reconstruction/): The war damaged the Tiergarten; the cold finished it. Through the postwar winters Berliners felled their great park for fuel and dug its ground into some 2,550 vegetable plots. From 1949, cities across West Germany sent saplings to plant it back.
- [The Reichstag Building Went 57 Years Without a Plenary Sitting](https://berlinfographics.com/reichstag-seven-regimes/): After the fire of February 1933 no parliament sat in the Reichstag chamber for 57 years, until the all-German Bundestag met there on 4 October 1990.
- [Ten days from Hitler’s last public appearance to suicide](https://berlinfographics.com/hitler-final-ten-days/): Hitler's last ten days, from his last public appearance on his 56th birthday to the shot at about 15:30 on 30 April 1945, day by day, with the witnesses' conflicting times shown as ranges.

## Persecution & the Holocaust

Deportation, murder and memory, 1933–45. Topic page: https://berlinfographics.com/topics/persecution/

- [Deported from Berlin, 1941–45](https://berlinfographics.com/berlin-deportations/): Between 18 October 1941 and 27 March 1945 the Gestapo sent 184 transports out of the city: 61 east, to the ghettos, the shooting sites and Auschwitz, and 123 to the ghetto at Theresienstadt. They left from Berlin’s own railway stations.
- [Expelled: the purge of Germany’s universities, 1933–45](https://berlinfographics.com/jewish-exiled-laureates/): From 1933 to 1945 the 23 German universities dismissed 1,199 of the 6,140 people who had taught there in the winter of 1932–33. Fewer than a third of them belonged to a Jewish community: the regime’s own racial category decided who went.
- [Hidden Berliners: the Jews who went under, 1941–45](https://berlinfographics.com/hidden-berliners-uboote/): About 6,500 Berlin Jews refused their deportation and disappeared into the city — into cellars, allotment sheds, spare rooms and forged names. They were called U-Boote, “submarines”. Roughly 1,700 were still alive in May 1945.

## Weimar Berlin

Democracy, culture and crisis, 1918–33. Topic page: https://berlinfographics.com/topics/weimar/

- [Berlin’s Reichstag elections, 1920–1933](https://berlinfographics.com/berlin-weimar-elections/): On 31 July 1932, at the Nazi Party’s national peak, it took 37.3% of the vote across Germany and 28.6% in Berlin. The SPD and the KPD won 54.7% of the city’s vote between them.
- [Six women artists of Weimar Berlin](https://berlinfographics.com/weimar-berlin-women-artists/): She was Käthe Kollwitz, one of six women who drew, cut, painted, carved and photographed Weimar Berlin. Hannah Höch was denounced as a “cultural Bolshevik”. Jeanne Mammen lost the magazines she drew for.
- [Carl von Ossietzky: the editor convicted for printing a secret, 1929–1938](https://berlinfographics.com/carl-von-ossietzky-berlin/): Carl von Ossietzky edited Die Weltbühne from Kantstraße in Charlottenburg. On 12 March 1929 the paper carried an article on the air force Germany was forbidden to have and was building anyway.
- [The Gloria-Palast on the Kurfürstendamm](https://berlinfographics.com/gloria-palast-cinema/): The Gloria-Palast opened on the Kurfürstendamm on 26 January 1926 with 1,200 seats, hidden inside a building whose protected facade it was barely allowed to advertise on. The film record names 140 premieres there by title and date.

## Prussia & the Kaiserreich

Royal and imperial Berlin, and the painters who drew it. Topic page: https://berlinfographics.com/topics/prussia/

- [Eduard Gaertner’s Berlin, from a church roof](https://berlinfographics.com/eduard-gaertner-painter/): For a summer he painted almost every day in a hut on the roof of Schinkel’s new Friedrichswerdersche Kirche — and went back up the day after his daughter was born. The result: six panels, 91 cm high and about six metres round.
- [Lesser Ury's Berlin at night](https://berlinfographics.com/lesser-ury-berlin-painter/): He settled in Berlin in 1887 and did something new: he moved its street scenes into the night — wet roads, lamps and their reflections. Max Liebermann’s circle shut him out, and the Nationalgalerie took its first Ury pictures only in 1923.
- [Painters to the Prussian court, 1711–1915](https://berlinfographics.com/berlin-court-painters/): He was the Kaiserreich’s “Hofmaler” — a title that, the Neue Deutsche Biographie notes, did not officially exist. The first, Antoine Pesne, was appointed on 6 May 1711 to a post paid 1,200 thaler.
- [The Berlin Trade Exhibition, 1896](https://berlinfographics.com/gewerbeausstellung-1896/): From 1 May – 15 October 1896, Treptower Park was one of the largest exhibition grounds on earth. Every calculation behind it assumed 55,000 visitors a day. The official count came to 41,000.
- [Alexandrowka, Potsdam’s Russian Village](https://berlinfographics.com/alexandrowka-colony/): They came to Potsdam as prisoners of war in October 1812, 62 Russian soldiers. Friedrich Wilhelm III made a choir of them.
- [Lichterfelde's Electric Tram, 1881](https://berlinfographics.com/berlin-first-electric-tram-1881/): On 16 May 1881 Siemens & Halske began a timetabled passenger service from Lichterfelde station to the Prussian cadet academy: about 2.5 km, 180 volts through the running rails, 20 pfennigs a ride. The suburb has been part of Berlin since 1920.
- [Schinkel’s Friedrichswerdersche Kirche](https://berlinfographics.com/friedrichwerder-church-schinkel/): A king chose it from a sheet of four designs. Since its dedication in 1831 the Friedrichswerdersche Kirche has been a parish church, a war ruin for 42 years, a sculpture museum, and a cracked building site shut for seven more.
- [A Reformed court over a Lutheran country, 1613–1817](https://berlinfographics.com/luther-vs-calvin-brandenburg/): Elector Johann Sigismund took communion by the Reformed rite at Christmas 1613; his subjects stayed Lutheran. The divide lasted until Friedrich Wilhelm III joined both churches in the Prussian Union of 1817.
- [Adolph Menzel paints Berlin](https://berlinfographics.com/adolph-menzel-painter-berlin/): Adolph Menzel came to Berlin in 1830 and painted it for 75 years: a railway at the city’s edge, a king leaving for war, a court ball, and a rolling mill a banker bought for 11,000 thaler and sold to the Nationalgalerie for 30,000 thaler.
- [Berlin’s Huguenots, 1685–1809](https://berlinfographics.com/berlin-huguenots/): Berlin had 28,500 inhabitants. Between 5,000 and 6,000 of them were Huguenots — Protestants who had fled Louis XIV’s France after an edict signed at Potsdam invited them in.
- [Berlin’s population, 1871–2024](https://berlinfographics.com/berlin-population/): The census of 17 May 1939 counted 4,338,756 Berliners — more than at any count before or since. Six years later a third of them were gone. The official count for 31 December 2024 is 3,685,265: the city has still not made up what the war took.
- [City Gates of Potsdam](https://berlinfographics.com/potsdam-city-gates/): Potsdam’s Brandenburger Tor went up in 1770–71, eighteen years before Langhans began Berlin’s in 1788. The Jägertor of 1733 is the oldest of the town’s three surviving gates; the neo-Gothic Nauener Tor followed in 1755.
- [Prussia’s nine kings, 1701–1918](https://berlinfographics.com/prussian-monarchs-1701-1918/): It began with a man crowning himself at Königsberg on 18 January 1701. It ended on 9 November 1918, when Max von Baden announced in Berlin that the Kaiser had abdicated, without the Kaiser’s consent.
- [Schinkel, Persius, Stüler](https://berlinfographics.com/schinkel-persius-stueler/): Friedrich Wilhelm IV drew his buildings himself and gave the sketches to his architects. Schinkel was already ill when the king came to the throne in 1840 and died the year after. His pupil Persius died of typhoid at 42, in 1845.
- [The 99-Day Emperor](https://berlinfographics.com/frederick-iii-99-days/): Friedrich III became Crown Prince of Prussia on 2 January 1861. When his father died on 9 March 1888, a tracheotomy at San Remo had already taken his voice. He died on 15 June 1888 in the Neues Palais at Potsdam — the palace where he was born.
- [The Berlin March Revolution, 1848](https://berlinfographics.com/berlin-march-revolution-1848/): At about 14:30 two shots went off outside the Berlin palace. Within a few hours barricades stood across the city centre — over 900 in all. At 10:30 the next morning Friedrich Wilhelm IV gave in and pulled his troops back. More than 250 people were dead.
- [The Captain of Köpenick, 1906](https://berlinfographics.com/hauptmann-von-koepenick/): On 16 October 1906 Wilhelm Voigt, 57, out of prison since February after a 15-year sentence and banned from Berlin, stopped ten or eleven guardsmen in the street and took them by train to Köpenick. He arrested the mayor and walked off with the town’s cash.
- [The Hohenzollern crypt under the Berliner Dom](https://berlinfographics.com/berliner-dom-crypt/): The dynasty brought its dead here from the end of the 16th century to the beginning of the 20th: electors, kings, queens, and children, in almost 40 per cent of the coffins, the epd reported in 2020.
- [The Hohenzollerns, five titles in five centuries, 1417–1918](https://berlinfographics.com/hohenzollern-five-centuries/): One family climbed five titles, from a fief granted at the Council of Constance on 18 April 1417 to 9 November 1918, when the chancellor announced the last emperor’s abdication without his consent.
- [The Hohenzollerns, from Elector to Kaiser](https://berlinfographics.com/hohenzollern-dynasty/): Ten Hohenzollerns ruled in 278 years, turning an electorate occupied in the Thirty Years’ War into a kingdom and then an empire. On 9 November 1918 the Chancellor announced the last Kaiser’s abdication before he had agreed to it.
- [The Potato King](https://berlinfographics.com/potato-king/): On 9 April 1746 the king ordered potatoes grown in Pomerania, where a famine was raging. People who had never seen the tubers met them with wonder and rejection, and threw them to the dogs, which would not eat them either.
- [The Seven Years’ War, 1756–1763](https://berlinfographics.com/seven-years-war/): Frederick II invaded Saxony on 29 August 1756. By the autumn of 1757 he was at war with Austria, France, Russia and Sweden at once. Then, on 5 January 1762, Tsarina Elizabeth died.
- [Wilhelm II and the family on nine thrones, 1914](https://berlinfographics.com/wilhelm-ii-last-kaiser/): All but two were grandchildren of Queen Victoria or of Christian IX of Denmark. Wilhelm II, the last German Emperor, and George V of Britain were first cousins. Within a week of 1 August 1914 their countries were at war.
- [For 28 years, Berlin’s defining gate was made inaccessible](https://berlinfographics.com/brandenburger-tor-narrative/): For 28 years, from 14 August 1961 to 22 December 1989, nobody could pass through the Brandenburg Gate.

## Architecture & the built city

How Berlin was planned, built, bombed and rebuilt. Topic page: https://berlinfographics.com/topics/architecture/

- [Alfred Grenander, the U-Bahn’s architect](https://berlinfographics.com/alfred-grenander-ubahn-architect/): Berlin’s city authorities wanted the plain ironwork of the first elevated railway broken up with stone, so in 1900 the Hochbahngesellschaft called in a Swedish architect.
- [Karstadt am Hermannplatz](https://berlinfographics.com/karstadt-hermannplatz/): Philipp Schaefer’s Karstadt opened on the Hermannplatz on 21 June 1929 as the largest and most modern department store in Europe, with 70,000 m² of floor and 37,000 m² of it selling floor. The SS destroyed it on 25 April 1945.
- [The Bundeskanzleramt, Berlin’s Federal Chancellery](https://berlinfographics.com/berlin-kanzleramt-federal/): The city’s tourism board calls the Bundeskanzleramt the largest government headquarters in the world. Measure its floor against the White House and the multiple is 10.2, not eight.
- [The Märkisches Museum, Berlin](https://berlinfographics.com/markisches-museum-stadtgeschichte/): One of Europe’s fastest-growing cities had little medieval fabric left to show for itself.
- [The Märkisches Viertel, West Berlin’s first large estate](https://berlinfographics.com/maerkisches-viertel/): The Märkisches Viertel was West Berlin’s first large new estate, built on former marshland in Reinickendorf from 1963 to spring 1974. Its landlord, GESOBAU, says that here “the walled city showed what the modern housing estate of the future should look like”.
- [Wallot’s Reichstag and its dome, 1882–1999](https://berlinfographics.com/reichstag-wallot-construction/): In 1882, 189 designs competed to house the parliament of the new German Empire. Paul Wallot won with a stone dome 85 metres above the chamber. It was never raised: the walls could not take its thrust.
- [Hobrecht's Radial Sewers, 1873–1909](https://berlinfographics.com/hobrecht-radialsystem-sewage/): Cholera killed one Berliner in every five who died in 1866. The city’s answer was twelve wedges of sewer, each falling by gravity to its own steam pumping station, each pumped out to farmland beyond the city: south onto the Teltow from the left bank, north…
- [Riehmers Hofgarten, Kreuzberg](https://berlinfographics.com/riehmers-hofgarten/): The smallest courtyard a Berlin house could have was the space a horse-drawn fire pump needed to turn in: 5.34 × 5.34 m.
- [Wedding and Gesundbrunnen, 1709–2001](https://berlinfographics.com/gesundbrunnen-district/): The two villages north of the Berlin city wall were an estate’s farmland, a mill and a spa.
- [The Reichstag in five acts, 1894–1999](https://berlinfographics.com/reichstag-five-acts/): Built for the Kaiser’s empire, burned in 1933, stormed in 1945, wrapped in 1995 and crowned with Norman Foster’s dome in 1999: one building, five acts, 105 years.

## Culture, science & society

The people and institutions that made Berlin. Topic page: https://berlinfographics.com/topics/culture/

- [Berlin’s currywurst: the count, the claim and the rivals](https://berlinfographics.com/currywurst/): Herta Heuwer said she first poured her curry sauce over a sausage at her Charlottenburg snack stand on 4 September 1949. The earliest paper behind that story is a trademark for “Chillup”, applied for in 1958 — never a patent — and the recipe died with her.
- [Café Kranzler, from Unter den Linden to the Kurfürstendamm](https://berlinfographics.com/cafe-kranzler/): The story usually told is that the bombs sent Kranzler to the Kurfürstendamm. They did not.
- [Five Berlin women, five institutions](https://berlinfographics.com/berlin-women-reformers-1890/): Berlin’s first two women doctors had to qualify in Zurich. The police closed Emma Ihrer’s association for working women as “political” after fourteen months.
- [One majority in 21 elections: the CDU/CSU in the Bundestag, 1949–2025](https://berlinfographics.com/bundestag-seat-shares/): Germans have elected a new Bundestag twenty-one times since 1949. Just once, in 1957, did one group take more than half the seats: 270 of 497 seats, 54.3%. Every other result left the largest group needing partners.
- [The Berlin Marathon, 1974–2026](https://berlinfographics.com/berlin-marathon-results/): Günter Hallas won the first race, around the Grunewald, in 2:44:53. In 2022 Eliud Kipchoge won in 2:01:09, still the course record after the September 2026 race. The world record has moved on: Sabastian Sawe ran 1:59:30 in London in April 2026.
- [Berlin’s four universities, 1696–2024](https://berlinfographics.com/universities/): The Free University was founded in 1948 by students and academics who left the university in the Soviet sector.
- [German Nobel laureates: the forty years Germany led the science prizes, 1901–2025](https://berlinfographics.com/german-nobel-laureates/): From 1901 to 1940 the laboratories of Berlin, Göttingen, Munich and Heidelberg produced more Nobel-winning physics, chemistry and medicine than those of any other country: 38 prizes, against 23 for the United Kingdom and 15 each for France and the United…
- [Germany’s federal chancellors, 1949–2026](https://berlinfographics.com/federal-chancellors/): Ten chancellors have led the Federal Republic since 15 September 1949, all of them from just two parties. Three of them governed for 46.2 years between them. The tenth, Friedrich Merz, took office on 6 May 2025.
- [Karlsruhe’s landmark rulings, 1956–2021](https://berlinfographics.com/constitutional-court-rulings/): Since it opened on 28 September 1951, the Bundesverfassungsgericht has concluded 266,588 proceedings. Someone had to bring every one: a government, a Land, a quarter of the Bundestag, a judge with doubts, or any citizen at all.

## Reunified Berlin

The city since 1990. Topic page: https://berlinfographics.com/topics/modern/

- [Twenty-Three into Twelve: Berlin’s District Reform](https://berlinfographics.com/berlin-bezirke/): On 1 January 2001, twenty old boroughs disappeared into nine new districts; only Neukölln, Reinickendorf and Spandau kept their borders. Mitte took in two boroughs of the old West, and Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg spanned the Spree, which the Wall had followed.
- [Berlin, District by District](https://berlinfographics.com/twelve-districts/): On 1 January 2001 the city folded its twenty-three boroughs into twelve. Here are the 3,662,381 people who lived in them on 31 December 2023, one dot for every 10,000, and what sets each district apart: the most crowded, the largest, the one where a third of…
- [Berlin's Unbuilt Cycle Network, 2016–2025](https://berlinfographics.com/berlin-bicycle-infrastructure/): In 2016 campaigners gathered 105,425 signatures in three and a half weeks. Two years later Berlin passed Germany’s first Mobilitätsgesetz, a mobility law, and its cycle plan gave the city until 2030 to build the network.

## Unusual facts

The strange, surprising and overlooked, measured. Topic page: https://berlinfographics.com/topics/unusual/

- [The Soviet Embassy on Unter den Linden](https://berlinfographics.com/soviet-embassy/): To make one front for its new embassy, the Soviet Union took in the neighbouring plots, the Hotel Bristol among them, and built across the Kleine Mauerstraße, a public street that stopped existing.