Volkspark Friedrichshain

This guide to Volkspark Friedrichshain in Berlin opens with a fire that tore through a Nazi flak tower here on 6 May 1945, destroying hundreds of paintings the Gemäldegalerie had stored inside for safekeeping. It traces the pair of towers built in 1941, one bristling with anti-aircraft guns and the other sheltering tens of thousands of Berliners during air raids, through the week of house-to-house fighting that ended the war in the city. You'll also hear about the Red Army's 1946 attempt to blow the ruins apart with forty thousand kilograms of explosives, and what Berliners did once that failed.