Tour 2 – From the Flak Towers to the Mounts of Debris

This afternoon at 13 o'clock I made my third and last Berliner Unterwelten tour, this time in the remains of the Flak Turm in Humboldthaim park, of which I wrote about in an earlier post.
The tour only explores a very small part of the building, which is the upper part of the northern part of the Turm.
There is another, more extensive ("Extrem") tour which explores a lot more and requires some decent climbing and flashlighting, but that tour is sold out for the rest of the year.

The tour of today explored the upper two levels, which were cleared of all the rubble and where stairs and railings have been restored or made. Some very impressive sights like deep stairwells (the building being 40 metres high, and we entering at top), enormous blocks of concrete thrown around by the force of the demolition explosions, huge concrete structures bent, moved, shifted - part of the wall actually moved outwards and is now a famous climbing wall on the outside. Lots of steel reinforcement visible as well, some rods at least 3 cm in diameter.
Loads of information about how the building was used and how it was built with many pictures. For some of the pictures on show in the tour and a lot of information (although in German), check out this article on the BU website.
Also check out the page on the Humboldthain-Extrem tour, which has some more pictures from deeper in the structure.

The guide was the same person as of the cold war bunker tour I took last week, and did a good job again, telling about the cleaning and restoration efforts in the flak tower as well.

The images are all property of Berliner Unterwelten again, as you are not allowed to take pictures inside. The last picture shows the pile of rubble which is beginning to form around the rest of the tower.

Funny detail: the tower is now a big wintersleep location for bats, so the tours are discontinued in the winter.