The Parliament of Trees

The Lessing Theater was a theatre in the Mitte district of Berlin, Germany. It opened in 1888 and was destroyed in April 1945 in a bombing raid; its ruins were demolished after World War II. The construction of the theatre, for around 900,000 Mark, was especially notable since it was the first new theatre built in Berlin since the construction of the Wallner Theater in 1864; in between only renovations of old theatres and existing spaces had taken place. By order of director Oscar Blumenthal, the building, designed in a Renaissance Revival style by the architects Hermann von der Hude and Julius Hennicke, was constructed in less than a year, between October 1887 and September 1888. The theatre opened on 11 September 1888, staging Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's drama Nathan the Wise.

White Crosses (in German: Weiße Kreuze) is a memorial for those who died during the Cold War at the Berlin Wall. It is located at the shore of the river Spree in Berlin next to the Reichstag building, which houses the German parliament. Established by the private group Berliner Bürger-Verein on the 10th anniversary of the Berlin Wall in 1971 it was first located east of the Reichstag on a fence directly in front of the wall. After the German reunification in 1990 it kept its location until construction of the new government buildings next to the Reichstag was started at the end of that century – Berlin was chosen to be the new capital of Germany.During construction the memorial was moved to a location south of the Reichstag next to the Tiergarten. On the 50th anniversary of the Uprising of 1953 in East Germany a second set of crosses was erected on the riverbank, which is slightly north-west of the original location. The opening speech was given by then President of the Bundestag Wolfgang Thierse.

The Crown Prince Bridge (German: Kronprinzenbrücke) is a road bridge over the River Spree in the city of Berlin. It links the Berlin quarters of Mitte and Tiergarten with the parliamentary quarter within the borough of Bezirk Mitte. The structure carries Konrad-Adenauer-Straße – the continuation of Reinhardtstraße – which has two vehicle lanes as well as cycleways and footpaths on both carriageways. Immediately on the western end of the bridge is the children's nursery of the German Bundestag and the Spreebogenpark.

The Naturschutzbund Deutschland e.V. ("Nature and Biodiversity Conservation Union") or NABU is a German non-governmental organisation (NGO) dedicated to conservation at home and abroad, including the protection of rivers, forests and individual species of animals.

The Embassy of the Philippines in Berlin is the diplomatic mission of the Republic of the Philippines to the Federal Republic of Germany. First opened in 1955 as the mission to West Germany, it is currently located in the Mitte locality of central Berlin, just beyond the periphery of the Reichstag complex and near the Charité. In addition to the current embassy, the Philippines also maintained an embassy in East Germany, which opened in 1979 in East Berlin and closed after German reunification.

The Rudolf Virchow Monument (German: Rudolf-Virchow-Denkmal) is an outdoor monument to Rudolf Virchow, who was a pathologist, archaeologist, politician and public-health reformer. The monument was created by Fritz Klimsch from 1906 to 1910, and is located on Karlplatz in Berlin-Mitte, Germany.

The entirety of Germany was occupied and administered by the Allies of World War II from the Berlin Declaration on 5 June 1945 to the establishment of West Germany on 23 May 1949. Unlike occupied Japan, Germany was stripped of its sovereignty and former state: after Nazi Germany surrendered on 8 May 1945, four countries representing the Allies (the United States, United Kingdom, Soviet Union, and France) asserted joint authority and sovereignty through the Allied Control Council (ACC) under the Berlin Declaration of 5 June 1945 that led to the fall of the German Reich. At first, Allied-occupied Germany was defined as all territories of Germany before the 1938 Nazi annexation of Austria; the Potsdam Agreement on 2 August 1945 defined the new eastern German border by giving Poland and the Soviet Union all regions of Germany east of the Oder–Neisse line (eastern parts of Pomerania, Neumark, Posen-West Prussia, East-Prussia and almost Silesia) and divided the remaining "Germany as a whole" into four occupation zones, each administered by one of the Allies.All territories annexed by Germany before the war from Austria and Czechoslovakia were returned to these countries. The Memel Territory, annexed by Germany from Lithuania before the war, was annexed by the Soviet Union in 1945 and transferred to the Lithuanian SSR. All territories annexed by Germany during the war from Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, Poland and Yugoslavia were returned to their respective countries. Deviating from the occupation zones planned according to the London Protocol in 1944, at Potsdam, the United States, United Kingdom and the Soviet Union approved the detachment from Germany of the territories east of the Oder–Neisse line, with the exact line of the boundary to be determined in a final German peace treaty. This treaty was expected to confirm the shifting westward of Poland's borders, as the United Kingdom and United States committed themselves to support the permanent incorporation of eastern Germany into Poland and the Soviet Union. From March 1945 to July 1945, these former eastern territories of Germany had been administered under Soviet military occupation authorities, but following the Potsdam Agreement they were handed over to Soviet and Polish civilian administrations and ceased to constitute part of Allied-occupied Germany. In the closing weeks of fighting in Europe, United States forces had pushed beyond the agreed boundaries for the future zones of occupation, in some places by as much as 320 km (200 miles). The so-called line of contact between Soviet and U.S. forces at the end of hostilities, mostly lying eastward of the July 1945-established inner German border, was temporary. After two months in which they had held areas that had been assigned to the Soviet zone, U.S. forces withdrew in the first days of July 1945. Some have concluded that this was a crucial move that persuaded the Soviet Union to allow American, British and French forces into their designated sectors in Berlin, which occurred at roughly the same time, although the need for intelligence gathering (Operation Paperclip) may also have been a factor. On 20 March 1948, the Soviets withdrew from the Allied Control Council; later leading to the establishment of the two German states in East and West both in 1949.

The Paul Löbe House (PLH; German: Paul-Löbe-Haus) is an office building of the German Bundestag in Berlin's government district. It is located on the site of the former Alsenviertel district on the southern edge of Spreebogenpark. It is named after Paul Löbe, a Social Democratic Party (SPD) politician, who was President of the Reichstag and oldest member of the first German Bundestag. The main entrance is on Konrad-Adenauer-Straße, which runs to the west. Another entrance is on Paul-Löbe-Allee.

The Reichstag Bloodbath (German: Blutbad vor dem Reichstag) occurred on January 13, 1920, in front of the Reichstag building in Berlin during negotiation by the Weimar National Assembly on the Works Councils Act (Betriebsrätegesetz). The number of people killed and injured is controversial, but it is certainly the bloodiest demonstration in German history. The event was a historic event that was overshadowed two months later by the Kapp Putsch but remained in Berlin's labour movement and security forces' collective memory.

The Reichstag fire (German: Reichstagsbrand, pronounced [ˈʁaɪçstaːksˌbʁant] ) was an arson attack on the Reichstag building, home of the German parliament in Berlin, on Monday, 27 February 1933, precisely four weeks after Adolf Hitler was sworn in as Chancellor of Germany. Marinus van der Lubbe, a Dutch council communist, was said to be the culprit; the Nazis attributed the fire to a group of Communist agitators, used it as a pretext to claim that Communists were plotting against the German government, and induced President Paul von Hindenburg to issue the Reichstag Fire Decree suspending civil liberties and pursue a "ruthless confrontation" with the Communists. This made the fire pivotal in the establishment of Nazi rule in Germany. The first report of the fire came shortly after 9:00 p.m., when a Berlin fire station received an alarm call. By the time police and firefighters arrived, the structure was engulfed in flames. The police conducted a thorough search inside the building and found Van der Lubbe, who was arrested. After the Fire Decree was issued, the police – now controlled by Hitler's Nazi Party – made mass arrests of communists, including all of the communist Reichstag delegates. This severely crippled communist participation in the 5 March elections. After the 5 March elections, the absence of the communists allowed the Nazi Party to expand their plurality in the Reichstag, greatly assisting the Nazi seizure of total power. On 9 March 1933 the Prussian state police arrested Bulgarians Georgi Dimitrov, Vasil Tanev, and Blagoy Popov, who were known Comintern operatives (though the police did not know it then, Dimitrov was head of all Comintern operations in Western Europe). Ernst Torgler, head of the Communist Party, had surrendered to police on 28 February. Van der Lubbe and the four communists were the defendants in a trial that started in September 1933. It ended in the acquittal of the four communists and the conviction of Van der Lubbe, who was then executed. In 2008, Germany posthumously pardoned Van der Lubbe under a law introduced in 1998 to lift unjust verdicts from the Nazi era. The responsibility for the Reichstag fire remains a topic of debate, as while Van der Lubbe was found guilty, it is unclear whether he acted alone. The consensus amongst historians is the Reichstag was set ablaze by Van der Lubbe; some consider it to have been a part of a Nazi plot, a view Richard J. Evans labels a conspiracy theory.

The Battle of Berlin, designated as the Berlin Strategic Offensive Operation by the Soviet Union, and also known as the Fall of Berlin, was one of the last major offensives of the European theatre of World War II.After the Vistula–Oder Offensive of January–February 1945, the Red Army had temporarily halted on a line 60 km (37 mi) east of Berlin. On 9 March, Germany established its defence plan for the city with Operation Clausewitz. The first defensive preparations at the outskirts of Berlin were made on 20 March, under the newly appointed commander of Army Group Vistula, General Gotthard Heinrici. When the Soviet offensive resumed on 16 April, two Soviet fronts (army groups) attacked Berlin from the east and south, while a third overran German forces positioned north of Berlin. Before the main battle in Berlin commenced, the Red Army encircled the city after successful battles of the Seelow Heights and Halbe. On 20 April 1945, Hitler's birthday, the 1st Belorussian Front led by Marshal Georgy Zhukov, advancing from the east and north, started shelling Berlin's city centre, while Marshal Ivan Konev's 1st Ukrainian Front broke through Army Group Centre and advanced towards the southern suburbs of Berlin. On 23 April General Helmuth Weidling assumed command of the forces within Berlin. The garrison consisted of several depleted and disorganised Army and Waffen-SS divisions, along with poorly trained Volkssturm and Hitler Youth members. Over the course of the next week, the Red Army gradually took the entire city. On 30 April, Hitler committed suicide (with several of his officials also dying by suicide shortly afterwards). The city's garrison surrendered on 2 May but fighting continued to the north-west, west, and south-west of the city until the end of the war in Europe on 8 May (9 May in the Soviet Union) as some German units fought westward so that they could surrender to the Western Allies rather than to the Soviets.

German Reich (lit. 'German Empire' or 'German Realm', from German: Deutsches Reich) was the constitutional name for the German nation state that existed from 1871 to 1945. The Reich became understood as deriving its authority and sovereignty entirely from a continuing unitary German Volk ("national people"), with that authority and sovereignty being exercised at any one time over a unitary German "state territory" with variable boundaries and extent. Although commonly translated as "German Empire", the word Reich here better translates as "realm" or territorial "reach", in that the term does not in itself have monarchical connotations. The name "German Reich" was officially proclaimed on 18 January 1871 at the Palace of Versailles by Otto von Bismarck and Wilhelm I of Prussia. After the annexation of Austria to Germany on 12–13 March 1938, the name "Greater German Reich" (German: Großdeutsches Reich) began to be used along with the official name "German Reich". According to the decree of the Chief of the Reich Chancellery Hans Lammers of 26 June 1943, the name "Greater German Reich" became mandatory in official documents. The German Reich collapsed de facto with the death of Adolf Hitler on 30 April 1945, when the Allies decided not to recognise Karl Dönitz as the Reich President and to grant no legitimacy to the Flensburg Government he had formed. On 5 June 1945, the Allies signed the Berlin Declaration concerning the defeat of Germany, by which they established the Allied Control Council and assumed supreme authority over German territory. The Federal Republic of Germany asserted, following its establishment on 23 May 1949, that within its boundaries it was the sole legal continuation of the German Reich, and consequently not a successor state. Nevertheless, the Federal Republic did not maintain the specific title German Reich, and so consistently replaced the prefix Reichs- in all official titles and designations with Bundes- ("Federal"). Hence, for instance, the office of the Reichskanzler became the Bundeskanzler. Following German reunification on 3 October 1990, the expanded Federal Republic describes itself as "United Germany", emphasizing that it does not now recognize any territories once included in the former German Reich outside its boundaries as having a valid claim to be a part of Germany as a whole.