The Podbielski Oak

The only tree standing anywhere on the Olympiastadion's 810 by 320 metre grounds carries the name of a Prussian cavalry general. In 1914 organisers at the old Deutsches Stadion marked Victor von Podbielski's seventieth birthday by naming an oak there after him. What happened to that oak is disputed. Berlin's own account of the stadium describes today's tree as roughly 200 years old, its name simply carried forward when the Nazi-era Olympiastadion replaced the earlier ground for the 1936 Games. A local history site tells a harder story, that the original Podbielski oak was felled along with the old stadium, and a replacement planted in 1936 to carry the name into the new arena. Both readings agree on what stands there now, a protected oak behind the Preussenturm at the Osttor, alone on a site built for 100,000 spectators and otherwise stripped of trees. It has stood through the 1936 Olympics, the Second World War and everything the stadium has hosted since, a scrap of green on concrete built for propaganda. It is free to see from outside the stadium fence, or reachable at the trunk with a stadium ticket.