Walking through the streets of Schöneberg you might stumble across one of the most bizarre objects in the entire city, the Schwerbelastungskörper or heavy load bearing body which is just behind me.

Like where are we and and what can we see on this photograph? Alright, uhm. this is the model built by Albert Speer. Adolf Hitler and Albert Speer wanted to redesign the city of Berlin and they wanted to demonstrate their power and to show the world that Berlin isgoing to be the new world capital. Insane.

The Schwerbelastungskörper could be translated into heavy load bearing structure or body and this is what we see here. It's a big concrete cylinder and and the weight is approximately 12,000
tonnes and it was built to study the ground the sandy ground, uh, because the architects and engineers wanted to know if the ground is solid enough to to bear the big buildings. So they had small rooms to check the instruments down here and then in the middle and on the zero level another room, uhm, to control if the heavy load bearing body sinks and how many centimeter it
sinks and they stopped studying ,uhm, in 1944, because the Second World War became too expensive and they didn't have the resources anymore and and not the manpower to control
the instruments and so on. It was a approximately 90 centimetres that the building sinked and this was too much.

Here in the middle of the building, ehm, we have one of the rooms where the scientists checked the instruments and we are now under 12,000 tonnes.