The Cold War in Berlin

1. Glienicke Bridge (Glienicker Brücke)

   Between Berlin and Potsdam

   The bridge links Berlin with Potsdam. After 1949 it was a border crossing into West Berlin, and once the Wall went up it became completely impassable. Spies were exchanged here three times: on 10 February 1962 Francis Gary Powers for Rudolf Abel; on 11 June 1985 four Eastern Bloc agents, among them Marian Zacharski, for more than twenty people held in the East; and on 11 February 1986, in the last exchange, the Soviet dissident Anatoly Shcharansky was among those freed. The bridge has been open again since 10 November 1989.^1,2,3,4,5

2. Checkpoint Charlie

   Friedrichstraße and Zimmerstraße, Berlin-Mitte

   The border crossing at the corner of Friedrichstraße and Zimmerstraße. Allied guards registered American, British and French service personnel here before they travelled to East Berlin; on the GDR side the crossing handled foreigners, staff of the West German Permanent Representation and GDR officials, not ordinary visitors. In the last days of October 1961 American and Soviet tanks faced each other here. Today’s guard hut is a replica.^6,7

3. The Berlin Tunnel: Rudow and Altglienicke

   Berlin-Neukölln (Rudow) and Berlin-Treptow (Altglienicke)

   In 1954–1955 the CIA and the British SIS dug a tunnel from the Rudow district in the American sector to Altglienicke in the Soviet sector to tap the communication cables of the Soviet forces. The cover was a site posing as a US Air Force radar station and warehouse. The CIA history gives a length of 1,476 feet (about 450 m); the AlliiertenMuseum gives about 430 m. The taps ran from May 1955 to April 1956.^8,9,10,11

4. AlliiertenMuseum: a section of the tunnel

   Clayallee 135, Berlin-Dahlem

   The museum of the Western Allies in Berlin shows a restored section of the tunnel in its permanent exhibition. The museum excavated a roughly 7-metre stretch on the western side in 1997; further sections were found in a forest near Pasewalk, recovered in December 2012 and brought to Berlin in 2013.^10,12

5. Teufelsberg: the NSA and GCHQ listening station

   Teufelsseechaussee 10, Berlin-Grunewald

   On the summit of Teufelsberg, an artificial hill built from Second World War rubble, the American NSA and the British GCHQ ran a listening station (Field Station) from 1962 to 1992. At its peak some 1,000–1,200 Americans and 200–300 Britons worked here in shifts – linguists, mathematicians and analysts among them – and the telephone and radio traffic they intercepted reached deep into the Eastern Bloc (see SIGINT). The site has been a listed monument since 30 October 2018.^13,14

6. Stasi headquarters at Normannenstraße

   Ruschestraße 103, Berlin-Lichtenberg

   The complex bounded by Ruschestraße, Normannenstraße, Magdalenenstraße and Frankfurter Allee was the headquarters of the GDR Ministry for State Security. From 1962 the minister, Erich Mielke, had his office in House 1. On 15 January 1990 the occupation of the headquarters by thousands of demonstrators began at the Ruschestraße gate. Today the site is the ‘Campus for Democracy’: House 1 holds the Stasimuseum, and House 8 stores a large part of the Stasi files.¹⁵

7. The Stasi remand prison at Hohenschönhausen

   Genslerstraße 66, Berlin-Hohenschönhausen

   In 1945 the Soviet occupying authorities set up an internment camp here, and from 1947 the Soviet secret service ran a remand prison in the basement. In 1951 it was handed over to the Stasi, which in 1960 built a new prison on the site – until 1989 the central remand prison for political prisoners. The memorial has been here since 1994.¹⁶

The history of these places is told in the operation card The Berlin Tunnel.