Where can you still see bullet holes in Berlin?

The easiest place is the Kolonnadenhof on Museum Island, and you do not need a ticket for it. The colonnades between the Alte Nationalgalerie and the Neues Museum carry scattered pocks, mostly below three metres. Within a few hundred metres you also have the Neues Museum walls, the Alte Nationalgalerie, the embankment stone at Friedrichsbrücke and the Pergamonmuseum pillars. Beyond the island, the front facade of the Museum für Naturkunde on Invalidenstraße, the archways under Friedrichstraße station, the Sophienkirche walls on Große Hamburger Straße, the outside of the Gropius Bau and the brickwork of the AEG works on Gustav-Meyer-Allee all still show it.

How do you tell a bullet hole from other damage on an old building?

Look at the pattern, not the single hole. Rifle and machine-gun fire leaves small round pocks in loose clusters, concentrated at the height a person stands or lies. A bursting shell leaves splinter marks that fan outward from one point, so the marks get sparser the further they are from the centre. Heavy weapons leave something you cannot mistake: craters the width of a plate at the Humboldthain flak tower, gouges cut by tank tracks in the walls under the Prellerweg bridge, and a hole punched clean through a steel column at the S-Bahn bridge on Leibnizstraße. Ordinary weathering is even and follows the run of the stone; damage does not.

Why has Berlin never repaired the damage?

Two different reasons, and they look different on the wall. Some of it was simply never worth patching, which is most of the colonnades, the station arches and the industrial brickwork. Some of it was kept as a decision. The Neues Museum is the clearest case: the restoration finished in 2009 left the ruins, the bomb holes and the bullet marks in place and rebuilt the missing parts in plain brick and concrete, so the join is legible from the pavement. The Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church and the Anhalter Bahnhof portico are the same idea at building scale. The Anhalter portal survived demolition in 1959 only because people protested, and it is now a listed monument, restored between 2003 and 2005.

When was the damage done?

Two separate periods, and it is worth knowing which you are looking at. Bombing did the first part: the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church was wrecked in the raid of the night of 22 to 23 November 1943, and the east wing of the Museum für Naturkunde came down in an American daylight raid on 3 February 1945. Ground fighting did the rest, and it was compressed into about ten days. Soviet units reached the Sophienkirche quarter on 24 April 1945, the AEG works and the Humboldthain flak tower on 26 April, the Gestapo block next to the Gropius Bau on 29 April, and the Stadtbahn viaduct at Friedrichstraße on 30 April and 1 May.

Can you see the Soviet inscriptions inside the Reichstag?

Yes, but not by turning up. Soldiers wrote names, home towns and dates on the interior walls from May 1945 onward. The writing was covered over in the 1960s and reappeared during Norman Foster’s conversion at the end of the 1990s, and it was deliberately kept. Seeing it means a registered visit, which is free but has to be arranged in advance. Everything else on this list is on a public street, with two qualifications: the Neues Museum, the Alte Nationalgalerie and the Museum für Naturkunde only need a ticket for the inside, and the Pergamonmuseum plot is a building site until at least 4 June 2027.

Is any of this signposted?

Almost none of it. A few places carry their own explanation, mostly the ones that were preserved on purpose: the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, the Anhalter portico as a listed monument, and the Museum für Naturkunde, which documents the damage on its own building pages. The rest is simply there. That is why the pattern matters more than a plaque: once you can tell a pock from splinter, you start noticing it on ordinary buildings all over the eastern half of the centre, without anyone having to point it out.

Berlin War Damage Still Visible: The Walls That Were Never Repaired

Yusuf Ucuz

6 days ago

7 min read

There is a moment on almost every tour when somebody stops walking. I bring the group through the colonnades on Museum Island, everybody is looking up at the ceiling coffers, and then one person leans in towards a column and puts a finger near the stone. Those little craters are not weathering. They are bullet strikes from the last week of April 1945, and nobody has ever filled them in.

Berlin does not label most of this. There is no plaque, no sign, no railing. The marks are simply on the wall at the height of a person, in a courtyard that thousands of people cross every day on the way to see Nefertiti.

The rear of the ruined portico of the Anhalter Bahnhof in Berlin-Kreuzberg, its brick arches open to the sky with modern office towers behind

The back of the Anhalter Bahnhof portico at Askanischer Platz. Everything behind those arches burned out in February 1945, and the fragment was kept.

Berlin war damage still visible: begin in the Kolonnadenhof

The Kolonnadenhof is the courtyard between the Alte Nationalgalerie and the Neues Museum, off Bodestraße. It is open, paved, free, and it is the single best place in the city to learn what you are looking for, because the damage there is dense and it sits at a readable height.

Stand about two metres from a column and look along its surface rather than straight at it. Raking light makes the pocks jump out. They run in loose clusters, mostly below three metres, which is roughly the height of a standing or kneeling person. That distribution is the tell: bombs do not aim at knee height, and people do.

From there you can walk the rest of the cluster in ten minutes:

The Neues Museum, whose north and east walls carry pocked sandstone next to flat brick panels that mark what was gone.
The Alte Nationalgalerie, where the wall at the base of the outside staircase carries splinter marks fanning away from a few impact points.
The embankment wall at Friedrichsbrücke. Lean on the parapet and look down at the stone facing near the water. People fired along the river, so the strikes sit low.
The Pergamonmuseum pillars, which you can only look across at. The museum has been shut for refurbishment since 23 October 2023, the north wing is due back on 4 June 2027, and the south wing is not expected until around 2037.

The colonnade walk of the Kolonnadenhof on Museum Island in Berlin, tall stone columns running into the distance beside a lawn

The Kolonnadenhof between the Alte Nationalgalerie and the Neues Museum. The columns are the easiest surface in Berlin to read for small-arms damage.

How to tell what made the mark

Once you can name three patterns, you stop needing anyone to point them out.

Bullet pocks are small, round and clustered, and they concentrate at human height. In stone they look like shallow scoops. In brick they take the face off and leave a bright inner edge.
Shell splinter fans outward from a single point. The marks thin out the further they get from the centre, so the pattern has a direction to it.
Heavy weapon damage is not subtle. Craters the width of a dinner plate on the Humboldthain flak tower, gouges cut by tank tracks into the wall under the railway bridge on Prellerweg, a hole punched clean through a steel column at the S-Bahn bridge on Leibnizstraße in Charlottenburg.

The control is ordinary weathering. Erosion is even, it follows the run of the stone, and it softens edges everywhere at the same rate. Damage does not. It arrives in patches, it ignores the grain of the material, and it usually leaves one edge sharper than the other.

A close-up of a red brick wall with clearly visible bullet holes punched into individual bricks

Bullet damage in brick, photographed at the former Patzenhofer-Schultheiß brewery administration building in Friedrichshain. The face of the brick is gone and the inner edge is still bright.

The map below carries seventeen places where these marks are still there to find, from the five that sit within 200 metres of each other on Museum Island out to a railway bridge in Schöneberg. Switch off the kinds you are not interested in, and the list reorders itself by distance from the island, so you can see at a glance what is a walk and what is a train ride.

Kept on purpose, or simply never worth repairing

Both things are true across the city, and they look different once you know the difference.

Most of what you see was never patched because nobody thought it was worth the money. That covers the colonnades, the archways under Friedrichstraße station, the brickwork of the AEG works on Gustav-Meyer-Allee in Wedding, and the walls of the Sophienkirche on Große Hamburger Straße.

Then there is the other kind, where somebody argued about it and decided to leave it. The clearest case is the Neues Museum. David Chipperfield's restoration, finished in 2009, left the ruins, the bomb holes and the bullet marks where they were and rebuilt the missing parts in plain brick and concrete. The join is legible from the pavement, which is the point. It won the Mies van der Rohe Award in 2011.

The same decision at building scale gave Berlin the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, wrecked in the raid on the night of 22 to 23 November 1943 and kept as a stump about 70 metres high, and the Anhalter Bahnhof portico. Franz Schwechten's station of 1880 burned out in February 1945. Demolition started in 1959, public protest stopped it, and the portal fragment is now a listed monument, restored between 2003 and 2005.

The stair hall of the Neues Museum in Berlin after reconstruction, a plain white staircase standing inside bare damaged brick walls

The Neues Museum stair hall in March 2009. The new stair sits inside the bare brick shell that the war left, with no attempt to disguise the difference.

The museum that documents its own damage

The Museum für Naturkunde on Invalidenstraße is the one place on this list where the building tells you the story itself, on its own building pages.

Three things to look at, from the pavement, before you buy a ticket:

The front facade carries bullet holes, and the museum says so plainly.
The east wing is a reading exercise. Incendiaries hit the collections in November 1943, then an American daylight raid on 3 February 1945 brought the east wing down to basement level. The surviving stone was completed in flat grey concrete cast to the old pattern, so you can see exactly where the original wall ended. The wing reopened to the public in 2010.
The main dome is missing, and it was never rebuilt. What you see on the roofline is the shape the war left.

Inside, the museum keeps damaged specimens in their damaged state, including the quagga, one of the very few mounted examples of an extinct animal anywhere. That is a deliberate choice about what a collection is for, and it is the same instinct as the Neues Museum's brickwork.

The main entrance front of the Museum für Naturkunde on Invalidenstrasse in Berlin, framed by trees

The Invalidenstraße front of the Museum für Naturkunde. This is the facade the museum itself describes as still carrying bullet holes.

The marks that were made by hand

One entry on the map is different from all the others, because a person wrote it.

From May 1945, Soviet soldiers covered the interior walls of the Reichstag in names, home towns and dates. Most of it was painted over in the 1960s. When Norman Foster converted the building at the end of the 1990s the writing came back to light, and the decision was taken to keep it. It is still on the corridor walls, in Cyrillic and in other alphabets from across the Soviet Union.

This one is indoors, so it needs a booked visit, which costs nothing but has to be arranged in advance. If you are already planning that trip, it fits neatly alongside the Reichstag dome.

Soviet soldiers' inscriptions in Cyrillic preserved on a stone interior wall of the Reichstag in Berlin

Inscriptions left by Soviet soldiers on an interior wall of the Reichstag, preserved during the conversion of the building in the 1990s.

Most of it happened in about ten days

The bombing damage and the ground-fighting damage are separated by more than a year, and it is worth knowing which one you are standing in front of.

The air raids run from 1943. The Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church went in the night of 22 to 23 November 1943. The Museum für Naturkunde east wing went on 3 February 1945. Both of those are the work of aircraft, and they take out roofs, upper floors and whole wings.

The ground fighting is compressed into the end of April 1945, and it is what put the marks at head height:

24 April 1945. Soviet units of the 7th Corps fight through the Spandauer Vorstadt, past the Sophienkirche.
26 April 1945. The AEG works in Wedding, and the flak tower in the Volkspark Humboldthain, worked over by 203mm howitzers that barely marked the concrete.
29 April 1945. The assault on the Gestapo headquarters block on what is now Niederkirchnerstraße. The Gropius Bau next door caught the return fire, and several figures in its facade decoration are snapped off at the edges.
30 April to 1 May 1945. The Stadtbahn viaduct at Friedrichstraße. Go under the arches, look at the brick and stone, then follow the viaduct east on foot and watch the scarring carry on for blocks.

For what the same places looked like immediately afterwards, the before and after photographs of Museum Island are worth ten minutes before you go.

The move I would make with an afternoon

Do not try to see all seventeen. The two ends of this map are seven kilometres apart and the day turns into transport.

Pick the Museum Island cluster and give it forty minutes. Five of the seventeen sit inside 200 metres of each other there, they are all free and outdoors, and once your eye is trained on the colonnades you will start finding the same marks by yourself for the rest of the trip: on the arches at Friedrichstraße, on the walls in Große Hamburger Straße, on the corner of a perfectly ordinary apartment building in Prenzlauer Berg that nobody has ever written about.

That is the real reward here. Not a checklist of sites, but a way of reading walls that stays with you after you leave.

My free walking tour goes straight through the middle of this. It starts at the World Clock on Alexanderplatz, runs about two hours through 11 stops and 16 places, and crosses Museum Island and the Lustgarten on the way to Hackescher Markt, which puts you within a few steps of the colonnades with someone to point at the stone. You can check the dates and book a place whenever your trip is settled.

Image credits

Source and licence details for the 6 photographs used in this article.

The rear of the Anhalter Bahnhof portico at Askanischer Platz in Berlin-Kreuzberg: Ansgar Koreng, CC BY-SA 3.0 DE, via Wikimedia Commons.

The Kolonnadenhof colonnades on Museum Island in Berlin: Yair Haklai, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Bullet damage in the brickwork of the former Patzenhofer-Schultheiss brewery in Berlin-Friedrichshain: Angela Monika Arnold, Berlin, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The stair hall of the Neues Museum in Berlin after reconstruction: Lenie Beutler, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The Invalidenstrasse front of the Museum fuer Naturkunde in Berlin: Rüdiger, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Soviet inscriptions preserved on an interior wall of the Reichstag in Berlin: Soul Train, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.