IT IS NOT WHAT YOU THINK: KIDS BATHING AT THE REICHSTAG

1945 in Berlin

Kids bathing near the Reichstag by Boris Pushkin, via Deutscher Bundestag and German History Museum, Berlin.

Online and in the press, this great photo is re-living a period of great popularity - with the celebration of the 80th anniversary of the end of the Second World War already underway (this year in Berlin a whole week is devoted to the historic event), no wonder at all.

However, the caption you often see underneath - “Children bathing in the Spree at the Reichstag in 1945” - contains four facts and one misconception. Here is why.

When in 1945 Boris Pushkin, Soviet photographer, took this picture it was not the Spree that his camera captured. Those girls and boys were swimming not in the river but in a massive basin that was created between the river and Königsplatz (now Platz der Republik) before the Reichstag building. It served as a tank barrier and was in fact, a flooded U-Bahn (Berlin Tube or Subway) tunnel of line which had been planned still before the war but was never built.

Here you can see in Hein Gorny's photo (Gorny was a brilliant self-taught German photographer, by the way, whose Neue Sachlichkeit - New Subjectivity - images are worth looking up online).

In this photo the arrow is pointing at the Reichstag building. South of the basin you can exactly see the flooded line of the never-built underground railway line.

Tank-barrier at the Reichstag and the flooded never-completed U-Bahn tunnel. Image via Historical Imagery Google Earth.