Well, would you look at that!
The S-Bahn bridge on Leibnizstraße, in Charlottenburg, is surely one of the best examples of still-visible battle damage in Berlin.
And why’s that? Well, because of the bloody shell-hole in one of the supporting beams!
Peter Graham, from @berlinbattledamage, reckons this is evidence of an armour-piercing tank shell from a Soviet T34/85 tank (the hole itself is 85mm wide).
The shell was most likely fired between April 30th/May 1st when a German breakout group got into a firefight with Soviet troops whilst they were attempting to flee the Red Army’s encirclement of the city…
I won’t spoil how the breakout went (you’ll have to listen to the Europe At War podcast to hear about the fortunes of the various breakout attempts), but what struck me today when walking under the bridge today was how these epic examples of battle damage were there in plain-sight for all to see…but were going unnoticed by everyone who passed by.
In the short 5 mins I was there, a school group of teenagers walked by, half a dozen pizza deliver bikers rode past, a couple of old Berliner women stood on the pavement to have a good old gossip, and just when I started taking photos a film crew (with actors) turned up to shoot a daytime soap opera scene in-front of an ATM machine…
It’s truly bizarre sometimes to live in a city like Berlin, where the brutal scars of the past are so easy to see…but which go overlooked and ignored by most people.
It’s not a depressing thought. If anything, it’s just proof that “life finds a way.”
Still, epic Spang eh?