Jacksons Berlin Tours

26/10/2021

It was today at Checkpoint Charlie in 1961, that the world stood on the brink.... Berlin Crisis

30/09/2021

Election Update: The right wing AFD party fell for a spoof organised by the Centre for Political Beauty activists, they set up a fake flyer printing and distribution company and then dumped 11 tonnes of nasty propaganda in a skip....
https://www.bz-berlin.de/berlin/mitte/afd-fiel-auf-falsche-werbefirma-rein-elf-tonnen-fake-flyer-in-mitte-aufgetaucht

Das Künstlerkollektiv „Zentrum für Politische Schönheit“ (ZPS) provoziert immer wieder mit schrägen Aktionen. Aktueller Coup: die Zerstörung von tonnenweise AfD-Werbematerial.

25/09/2021

Artist Arno Brekker worked on many N**i projects. He had a studio constructed in SW Berlin that still stands today. Post war renovation unearthed this unfinished piece - one of two - that had been buried in the studio garden. It probably based on the striking face of a Romany model he worked with in Paris.

12/09/2021

Blessed day…first Museum Tour post Corona

13/07/2021

Inside Infamous Berlin N**i Brothel 'Salon Kitty' today

https://youtu.be/yS6uXEgEwgc

From 1939 until the building was bombed in 1943, the N**i regime ran a high end brothel under Madam Kitty Schmidt. Its name was Salon Kitty. As infamous Na...

22/06/2021

Operation Barbarossa was launched, read on...
https://jacksonsberlintours.com/barbarossa-bullets-and-other-connections/

On this day in 1941 Hi**er's Operation Barbarossa was launched against the Soviet Union. This would become the beginning of the end of WWII in Europe, but for me there are other connections...

13/06/2021

THE MAN THAT MADE HI**ER.

Attempts to answer the great, universal questions can be provided by two disciplines – science and religion. The former produces a list of details on ‘how’, the latter offers theoretical options on ‘why’, in which one can place one’s faith. Or not.

The same can be said about historians and the questions of the Third Reich. The ‘why’ is still both debated and often obscene. But there is a forgotten ‘how’. And his name is Franz Gürtner.

Gürtner enabled Hi**er, at several crucial junctures on his road to power, to survive. Without him, Hi**er would not have become Hi**er.

Hindsight history is full of ‘if only’. If only more back-bone had been shown against N**i Germany’s risky aggression during the reoccupation of the Rhineland in 1936. If only Stauffenberg’s bomb had killed Hi**er in 1944 and so on. Surrounding all these hypotheticals are explanations, provisions of context and mitigating circumstances, even caveats of what futures these events might have produced had the ‘right’ thing been done at the time. All this adds to the merry-go-round of historical debate.

These examples look back and identify alternative courses of action that would have produced a better world. But at the time, there was already a mechanism that could have kept the name Hi**er to just a footnote of history. It was the state institution that collates rules to regulate society, behaviour and punishment for the good of the whole: The Law. If it’s clear statutes had been followed in the 1920s, Hi**er would have sunk with little trace.

But in those turbulent years of Hi**er’s early political career, the law wasn’t obeyed. By 1933 it was too late. Soon after Hi**er’s appointment as Chancellor, Germany became a county where the fair rule of law ceased to apply. Swathes of citizens whose choice of political views, or simply their ethnic background, clashed with the N**is views, now fell outside its protection.

The law was now subject to Hi**er’s whim. In August 1940, the German Minister for Justice himself said, in response to a local judge objecting to what was simply illegal, government sanctioned mass murder: "If you cannot recognise the will of the Führer as a source of law, then you cannot remain a judge”. This minister’s name was Franz Gürtner, the mass murder the N**i Euthanasia program that began in September of 1939.

Gürtner was Bavarian civil servant who initially worked in the state’s Justice Ministry. In his early 30s he served with distinction in the German army during WWI. Upon his demobilization, he was absorbed back into the Justice Ministry in Munich. The political aftermath of WWII here was chaotic. His nationalist sympathies saw him become a member of the German National Peoples Party, the DNVP. Revolution in Bavaria in 1919 produced the ‘Republic of the councils’, a short lived left-wing government. This was violently over thrown by an independent army of ‘freikorps’ forces. One of the common soldiers supporting the left-wing regime was in reality a stool pigeon, who betrayed his comrades in the aftermath of the right-wing take over. This soldiers name was Adolf Hi**er.

For many like Gürtner and Hi**er, WWI didn’t end in 1918/19. The war continued against the young democracy - the Weimar Republic. Brutalised ex-soldiers with nothing to lose perpetrated murder after murder in their struggle against what they saw as the betrayers of Germany. The 1922 drive-by shooting of Foreign Minister Rathenow in a wealthy Berlin suburb was perhaps the most well-known of these assassinations. These crimes could not go unpunished. So, in Bavaria, an official was commissioned to investigate the murders, and in a secret protocol told not to solve them. The murderers would go unpunished. This officials name was Franz Gürtner.

Hi**er’s role during this chaos was as a local political celebrity, agitator and provocateur of violence. Many times, after Hi**er spoke, people died. Often he had been called to account by the Bavarian state wanting to censure him for his law breaking. Hi**er would grab second chances by swearing he would stop illegal activities. The dilemma was that Hi**er’s party represented views that were broadly shared by the anti-democratic ‘secret army’ of demobilized soldiers now serving in positions of power in Bavaria. It was these same men that had deliberately failed to mete out justice for the political murders they silently supported.

In 1924 they had another important court case to judge in Munich, following an event that had left 16 men dead.

In 1923, the traumas of the lost war and inflation were finally subsiding. Foreign financial investment was to produce several ‘good’ years. Hi**er, desperate to grab a chance to increase the fear and chaos on which he thrived politically, launched his ill-fated coup d’état in Munich in November 1923.

It failed, and as the shooting started Hi**er was the first to run away. He was arrested. During the trial the prosecution had trouble looking the treasonous defendants in the eye. This is because they knew each other, worked together and supported each other. The result was a lenient sentence for Hi**er. Five years. And no deportation from Germany - a fate that would have befallen any other foreigner who had behaved as Hi**er had done in the years before.

The name of the man who allowed Hi**er to take over the trial with his defence, and whose gavel sealed his light sentence, was Franz Gürtner.

Nine months later, Hi**er was released. Whilst in prison he had become forgotten by most of his colleagues, and his movement had disintegrated. The N**i party had been outlawed and Hi**er had been banned from public speaking. But by 1926 both these bans too had been lifted. Working behind the scenes to lift both of these prohibitions, successfully, was Bavarian Justice Minister, Franz Gürtner.

By 1932 both Gürtner’s and Hi**er’s stars had risen. Gürtner was now national Minister for Justice, a positon he retained when Hi**er became chancellor in January 1933. He was instrumental in creating the sweeping laws for dictatorial power after the Reichstag fire, and in 1935 the infamous racial/legal code known as the Nuremberg laws. Though he did eventually attempt to mitigate against the most embarrassing and obvious N**i perversions of law, he served in his position until his death in 1941.

Gürtner and many others believed that Germany could alleviate the shame of defeat in 1918 and reassert its destiny as a world power by ridding itself of ‘weak’ democracy and replacing it with a strong dictatorship to correct the national course. To achieve this quickly they were prepared that the law, something they had studied and represented, might have to be bent in the short term.

Alas, it was this deal that Gürtner and millions of other Germans were prepared to accept to assuage their adolescent rage at the realities resulting from national hubris and stupidity before and after WWI. Even though Gürtner died before witnessing the full harvest of what he had helped sow, he must have realized that the bargain had turned sour. WWII itself was part of this deal. It was during this phase that Gürtner’s actions led to his country and huge swathes of the world being turned into a charred hell-scape, where millions died.

Gürtner and others were familiar, I’m sure, with the work of enlightenment philosopher John Locke. He wrote: ‘Wherever Law ends, Tyranny begins’. Men like Gürtners willingness, particularly those that represented the law and the Justice Ministry of the German government, to ‘work towards the Fuhrer’ after 1933, bear a special responsibility for the horrors that they went out of their way to enable. No Hi**er – no Holocaust. No Gürtner – No Hi**er.

11/06/2021

Lockdown is easing, read here about Berlin's first beer garden...

https://jacksonsberlintours.com/park-life-unlocked-rediscovering-berlins-tiergarten/

During Lockdown many Berliners rediscovered the city parks. The most famous is the Tiergarten. There are still some forgotten corners worth discovering.

02/06/2021

Time to put this to bed...

https://jacksonsberlintours.com/killing-hitler-an-historical-error-at-the-wolfs-lair/

Some brave people attempted to stop Hi**er. But there is an error in the story of the attempt that came closest, in 1944, at the Wolf's Lair.

28/05/2021

Today the German Government acknowledged responsibility for the Namibian Genocide from 1904, and Berlin laid the foundation stone for the 'House of One'. They can be connected together in another strange story from Berlin.

https://jacksonsberlintours.com/namibian-genocide-and-himmler/

Today Germany has acknowledged responsibility for the genocide of the Herero in Namibia in 1904. There is a dark connection between this and Heinrich Himmler, laughable if it wasn't so disgusting.

27/05/2021

Art & reality combine to create a near miss.....

https://jacksonsberlintours.com/blog-copy-copy-copy/

This is a bronze sculpture showing some Berlin battle field damage from 1945. The real shell hole it depicts exists, but there's a slight problem...

24/05/2021

Read this - a short but odd tale of anti-semitism, cancel culture and grave stone damage in Berlin
https://jacksonsberlintours.com/blog-copy/

07/05/2021

16/04/2021

Today in 1945, before dawn, the Battle of Berlin began just east of Berlin. It would end war in the European theatre just over 2 weeks later. But the battle began on the shores of the Volga at the city then called Stalingrad, where the 'sword of vengeance' was raised, to be finally lowered in the Berlin Treptower Park Soviet Memorial.

11/04/2021

A slice of Berlin history for your Sunday
https://youtu.be/Nt85X2wz3rU

A Berlin Virtual Tour - in 1944 the Stauffenberg Bomb Plot came closest to killing Hi**er. It was one of many attempts to be made on Hi**er's life. Those c...

19/03/2021

A little something for the weekend - Our new playlist 'Berlin Snapshots' is up!

https://youtu.be/CDfRB7YJMp8

This virtual Berlin tour of the city deals with Berlin Battlefield Damage from 1945. Even today Berlin still bears the scars of the intense 2 week Battle of...

11/03/2021

I know you've all been waiting - Virtual Tour Berlin Flak towers Part 2 is out!
https://youtu.be/yYdUqtjHooM

Part 2 of a Virtual Berlin Tour of Berlin's wartime anti aircraft towers. In documentary Part 1 we explored the Towers at Zoo in West Berlin - now we move on...

04/03/2021

Berlin flak towers then and now!
https://youtu.be/7QZ3AcOspRA

A Virtual Berlin Tour of Berlin's wartime anti aircraft towers. Built between 1940 and 1942, explore the story of the 3 x massive towers that dominated the ...

23/02/2021

Escape from your day for 20mins through a Berlin Wall escape tunnel!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lz1xbWgVO6w

AMAZING story of 2 escape tunnels under the Berlin Wall on the famous Bernauer Strs. Tunnel 29 and Tunnel 57. These were the first and most successful tunne...

14/02/2021

Bit of Sunday viewing for you!
https://youtu.be/Bkylj60HRUQ

Look what I found! Berlin Archaeology Treasure https://virtualberlintours.com