Wednesday, February 18, 2015

Chinese in Berlin?

My airbnb host in Berlin told me an interesting story that I have not had time to confirm. He said that there were four countries that were to divvy up Berlin after WWII: Russia, US, Britain,  and China! For some reason, France was not included since they had already "lost." Since China was so far away and didn't want to have to administer an area on another continent, they said Russia could have their region, just give them money. This was why Russia had half of Berlin, and the Allies had the other half. I said that I hadn't heard of that, and he said "if you dig deeply enough on the internet, you'll find it." I took that to mean that he was into conspiracies, you could probably find some whacko espousing this view, but it wasn't true. So far, I haven't been able to find out anything about this.

But the map of Berlin is interesting. It shows the city divided almost exactly in half along a north-south line, except for the city center, the Mitte, cut out and given to the Soviets. This was where my airbnb apartment was, just off of Alexanderplatz, along Alexandrestraße. The BrandenburgerTor is at the west end of this cutout, just inside the Soviet zone.

Map of Berlin from the Berlin Wall Memorial, showing the Berlin Wall in red.

Map of the German occupations zones. From Wikipedia.

As can be seen from the entire map of postwar Germany, the US occupation zone included Bavaria. And if you look closely at the photos of the town of Garmisch here, you can barely see barracks that are part of a US installation, one of the few remaining in Germany.

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