Qualla: Spandau Citadel

Spandau Citadel: Introduction

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Rolf Dietrich Brecher from Germany, CC BY-SA 2.0. In the last days of April 1945, with the Red Army fighting street by street through Berlin, Soviet commanders arrived at the edge of an island where the Havel meets the Spree and looked at Spandau Citadel. It was three and a half centuries old. It was also low, thick, and cut into four arrowhead bastions arranged so that every approach could be swept by fire from two directions at once, and the arithmetic of taking it by assault was terrible. So they surrounded it and talked instead. Just after three in the afternoon on 1 May the commander surrendered to Lieutenant-General Perkhorovich's 47th Army, and a fortress designed by Italian engineers in the 1550s saved, at the very end of its working life, both itself and everyone inside it.

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Image: Rolf Dietrich Brecher from Germany | CC BY-SA 2.0

Spandau Citadel: Angles Instead of Height

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Lienhard Schulz, CC BY-SA 3.0. There has been something defensive on this island since 1157, when Albert the Bear planted a frontier fort here; by the middle of the fifteenth century it was the seat of government for the Margraves of Brandenburg. Then gunpowder made tall stone walls obsolete, and in 1560 Joach...

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Image: Lienhard Schulz | CC BY-SA 3.0

Spandau Citadel: The Tower That Names a Budget Surplus

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. The oldest thing standing inside the walls is the Julius Tower, built as a keep and used at times as a residence, its castellated crown added by Karl Friedrich Schinkel in 1838. After the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, part of the indemnity France paid Germany - 120 million mark...

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Image: Public domain

Spandau Citadel: Prisoners, Napoleon, and the Laboratory

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Goiken, CC BY-SA 3.0. The citadel spent most of its career not fighting. Swedish troops besieged it in 1675. In 1806 its garrison surrendered to Napoleon's army without firing a shot; Prussian and Russian forces took it back in 1813, wrecking the ramparts in the process and requiring years of restorat...

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Image: Goiken | CC BY-SA 3.0

Spandau Citadel: Winter Tenants in the Casemates

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Alupus, CC BY-SA 3.0. The casemates were built to keep cannonballs out, which incidentally makes them close to perfect for something else. They are dark, damp, cold without freezing, and almost never disturbed - exactly the conditions bats need to get through a winter without burning the fat they will...

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Image: Alupus | CC BY-SA 3.0

Spandau Citadel: What Berlin Took Down

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Graccem, CC BY-SA 3.0. The citadel now works as a museum, and its permanent exhibition is a strange, well-executed idea: it collects the public monuments Berlin decided, at various points, it no longer wanted to look at. Twenty-six statues and forty busts from the Siegesallee, that avenue of Hohenzolle...

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Image: Graccem | CC BY-SA 3.0