John Lennon and Beatles sites in Germany

Germany holds two separate Beatles stories. The first is Hamburg from 1960 to 1962, when an unknown band played long nights in St. Pauli. They started at the Indra on Große Freiheit on 17 August 1960, moved to the Kaiserkeller that October, spent 92 nights at the Top Ten Club in 1961 and played the Star-Club in 1962. The Indra and the Kaiserkeller still run as clubs. Beatles-Platz, opened in 2008, is the city's purpose-built memorial.

The second story is the band's only German tour, the Bravo-Beatles-Blitztournee of June 1966. It opened with two shows at Munich's Circus-Krone-Bau on 24 June, moved to the Grugahalle in Essen on 25 June and ended at Hamburg's Ernst-Merck-Halle on 26 June. The Munich and Essen halls still stand, with no Beatles marker. The Hamburg hall was demolished in 1986.

Two sites fall outside that pattern. In September 1966 Lennon filmed scenes for How I Won the War at Mühlentor in Verden an der Aller, where three concrete steles by Uwe Blaschke, the John-Lennon-Denkmal, were unveiled on 5 April 2008. In Halle, Rainer Moers moved his collection, begun in 1964, into a 1708 Baroque house that opened as the Beatles Museum on 8 April 2000.