Bombing of Berlin

[Rene Nijrolder]

Hello, Mike Kelly wrote this: " Berlin had three massive flak towers with twelve twin 128mm flak guns firing a barrage up to 45,000 feet every ninety seconds, the exploding shells threw out shrapnel in 100 metre radius "

Today one off the huge towers, apart from the many guns there were six story's where in total around 20.000 people could shelter during the ongoing bombardments, is open for a visit.

https://www.berliner-unterwelten.de/...of-debris.html

Very interesting and from an unbelieveble scale. The guided tour which I did in March 2008 was very informative about the towers and living in wartime Berlin. One statement from the very well informed guide was that all 3 the towers together with their very large guns during the whole war didn't take down a single bomber out over Berlin ! (Disruptive sure, but no "kills")
The shelter of people in the undestructable inner of the bunker (70x70 meter and 42 meter high) during the whole war and a limmited use as anti tank guns during the final stage from the battle of Berlin, are the only real achievments of those massive and very costly buildings.

It was overall a nice trip to Berlin, there were (and are) a lot of signs from WW2 still to be found and visited. Flying to Berlin and landing on Tempelhof (it would be closed in October off that year) made it extra special.

René.

[Mike K]

The massive Flak tower in the Berlin Zoo park was in The British occupation zone and it took them over ten years of work before they managed to demolish it all. The remains of the tower which Rene visited, is in the old French occupation zone of Berlin . The French tried to blow the tower up with explosives three times .

I think the Americans were not keen on daylight bombing of Berlin because of the projected losses , they had just suffered heavy losses with raids on other German targets and they were in a rebuilding phase.