Happy Veterans Day to all the US military veterans, especially the ones who were stationed in Berlin anytime from 1945 through 1994.

Photo source: www.blogs.va.gov

Day 3 of the 2018 Welcome Home tour was organized by the Bundeswehr Command Center. The Berlin U.S. military vets and their guides were invited to the Command Center of the German Army located in Schwielowsee, outside of Berlin. Picked up by a special bus and two Bundeswehr officers in charge of that day’s program, the group made their way down a now familiar looking federal highway A115 leading to Potsdam -- and passing the site of the former Checkpoint Bravo -- before arriving at their destination in der Henning-von-Tresckow-Kaserne.

At the Command Center, the tour participants were first given a presentation about the missions of the Germany military forces in the most recent decades before moving outside. There they were taken through the Grove of Remembrance (Wald der Erinnerung), a memorial site commemorating all the casualties that the German military forces have sustained in the foreign missions of the most recent decades. The somber walk took the group pass several steles with names of the fallen men and women, who died of various reasons while in the military service, and up to an open-air chapel where the group held still in a moment of silence.

Although the Grove of Remembrance is not a burial place, it is a place of special significance for the families, friends, and colleagues of the fallen servicemen and servicewomen. Many graves are decorated with little tokens, such as pins, toys etc, that add a personal note to the different memorial sites located in the Grove. This place of remembrance is open to public and has received several thousands of visitors in the recent years.

The trip to the Command Center was finished with a lunch at the officer’s club on the premises of the Command Center. The group enjoyed a typical meal of curry wurst and fries before boarding the bus back to Berlin.

Day 2 of the 2018 Welcome Home tour began with visiting the Allied Museum of Berlin and exploring the neighboring housing area on Hüttenweg which used to house many U.S. military personnel and their families. We stopped by the former Gen. Lucius D. Clay Headquaters on Clayallee, and also walked through the site of the former McNair Barracks, once the home of several battalions of the Berlin Brigade. Several members of this year’s tour lived and/or worked here and were moved to visit their old stomping grounds. Most buildings on this site are now occupied by the German Federal Archives (German: Bundesarchiv).

After a tasty lunch at a canteen located in the City Hall of Schöneberg -- one of the capital’s districts -- which was one of the stops on the U.S. President J.F. Kennedy’s 1963 visit to Berlin, the tour continued through parts of the former West Berlin. One of the stops was at the famous Olympic Stadium, the site of the 1936 Summer Olympics. The final item on the agenda for the day was a guided tour through the historic Reichstag Building, the current home of the German Parliament, the Bundestag.