Berlin by train:Berlin & Sachsenhausen Camp(Lunch)

Take a short walk from the ship to the exclusively chartered train from Warnemünde to Berlin, a journey that lasts approximately 2.5-3 hours. During your transfer to Berlin, your escort will provide you with general information and a refreshment as well as a light evening snack on the way back to Warnemünde. Upon arrival in Berlin, your local guide will take you to the infinitely more somber, and one of the most chilling destinations, the former Nazi Concentration Camp at Sachsenhausen – a memorial near Oranienburg, just north of Berlin. Sachsenhausen, conceived by SS architects as the ideal concentration camp giving architectural expression and subjugating prisoners to the absolute power of the SS. You will be shown the entrance to the camp that is still haunted with the slogan Arbeit Macht Frei (Work Makes You Free), the parade grounds and Station Z where prisoners were held and perished. Once back in Berlin, you will pass the Bebel Platz where below the ground level lies the Empty Library – to commemorate authors whose books were burned on this sight by students and Nazis in 1933. Then, stop at Brandenburger Tor (Brandenburg Gate), which symbolizes the German and European unification and is known as the border between East and West Germany. Next, see Berliner Mauer (Berlin Wall), the Reichstag, Check-Point Charlie, the Berliner Dome, and Berlin’s Protestant Cathedral with its Neo-Baroque interior and massive dome. Pass the Gendarmenmarkt, the most harmonious square in Berlin. It is an ensemble of the theatre, the German Dome and the French Dome. See the New Synagogue, Berlin’s most prominent Jewish landmark, which was rebuilt at the site of the original synagogue – deliberately left as a memorial to what was damaged by Nazi flames and finished off by war time bombs. Pass by the Haeckesche Hoefe, built by Jewish idealists in 1906-1907 with elegant ceramic facades which today symbolizes Berlin’s new ‘Mitte’ (center) that survived two wars. Today, it has shops, galleries, theatres, cabarets, cafes, restaurants and cinemas. The Holocast Memorial designed by New Yorker Peter Eisenman, is a central place for remembrance. Enjoy a typical, pub-style German lunch (included) in a local Berlin restaurant before you continue your exploration of Berlin and return to the ship by train.