Reichstag Building

This guide to the Reichstag Building in Berlin traces the marks left on its walls by the people who passed through it: a Dutch drifter named Marinus van der Lubbe, found here in 1933 with firelighters that gave Hitler his excuse to suspend civil liberties, and the Soviet soldiers who fought room by room to take the ruined building in May 1945, scratching names, jokes and hometowns into the smoke-stained stone. One soldier signed his message from Moscow to Berlin; a listening tip is to look closely at the stone walls around you as you go.