What Burned — The Command Tower
4 stops · 45 min · 414 m
One hill, one building. Four stops over the buried command tower that aimed the guns of Friedrichshain's flak tower: the sirens and the queues for the shelter; how radar, range-finders and a room of mechanical computers found a bomber and sent the guns their aim; the strongroom where 434 paintings from Berlin's Gemäldegalerie — three Caravaggios, ten Rubens, canvases five metres wide — were kept because nothing in the city was harder to destroy, and burned anyway after the war ended, while some of the sculpture surfaced decades later in Moscow; and the last fortnight of the war, told across the road from the street blown up to clear the tower's field of fire. About 45 minutes, from either end.
Walk it either way
There is a station at each end, so this walk works in both directions — the guide reorders the route and retells the stops to match the way you are going.
- West side of the hill → Virchowstraße corner
- Virchowstraße corner → west side of the hill
Stops on this walk
- 1The sightline
- 2The instruments
- 3The strongroom
- 4The field of fire
How this walk works
Wanderful is an audio guide that knows where you are. Start this walk and it speaks as you reach each stop — no reading a map, no hunting for the next number on a sign. Put your phone in your pocket and listen.