Gedenkstätte Berliner Mauer
Map: Berlin Wall Memorial Area
1 Visitors Center (Bezucherzentrum)
2 3-D Map of the Former Neighborhood
3 The “Death Strip” (Section A)
5 The Wall
6 Documentation Center (Dokumentationszentrum Berliner Mauer)
7 Escapes from Border Strip Buildings (Section B)
8 The Chapel of Reconciliation (Kapelle der Versöhnung)
Nowhere in Berlin is the Cold War division between East and West clearer than at the Berlin Wall Memorial. The Memorial is located along the former “death strip”—the no-man’s-land between East and West. For decades, it was strewn with barbed wire and patrolled by guards with itchy trigger fingers. Today it’s a long, narrow, poignant park, running for nearly a mile alongside the most complete surviving stretch of the Wall in Berlin. The park is dotted with thought-provoking memorials and information-packed displays. There’s even a small stretch of Wall that’s been preserved with its original double-walled construction, heavy fortifications, and an intimidating guard tower. Along the way, you can visit two different museums with excellent films, photos, and exhibits on this turbulent chapter of human history.
(See “Berlin Wall Memorial Area” map, here.)
Cost: Free.
Hours: Outdoor areas accessible 24 hours daily; Visitors Center and Documentation Center open Tue-Sun 10:00-18:00, closed Mon, memorial chapel closes at 17:00.
Information: Tel. 030/4679-86666, www.berliner-mauer-gedenkstaette.de.
When to Go: To really pack your day with sightseeing, this tour could be done in the evening, after other museum visits. But if you’d like to enter the two indoor exhibits, be mindful of the 18:00 closing time.
Getting There: Our tour begins right next to the Nordbahnhof S-Bahn station. In fact, the station itself is a Cold War sight (see the sidebar on here). Take the S-Bahn (line S1, S2, or S25) to Nordbahnhof. Exit by following signs for Bernauer Strasse—you’ll pop out across the street from a long chunk of Wall and kitty-corner from the Visitors Center. You can also get there on tram #12 or #M10 (from near Prenzlauer Berg hotels).
Getting Oriented: The Visitors Center hands out free brochures with maps and information on the Memorial. These point out many “incident markers” of events that occurred here, such as escape attempts. Note that there are four different brochures for the four sections of the park (A, B, C, D), so be sure to pick up all you’ll need. My tour covers Sections A and B in depth, with a basic overview of the rest.
Length of This Tour: Allow about one hour for a quick visit. Add another 30 minutes to watch both movies at the Visitors Center, and another 30-45 minutes to walk the entire length of the memorial (Sections C and D) to Mauerpark.
Services: The Visitors Center and Documentation Center both have free WCs.
Cuisine Art/Eateries: There’s a small bakery/café at the Documentation Center.
Starring: The Berlin Wall, the “death strip,” and the irrepressible human spirit.
This particular stretch of the Wall (running right along Bernauer Strasse) was long the focus of the world’s attention—something of a poster-child for Berlin’s division, and for the Cold War in general. That’s because, in a grotesquely literal symbol for a divided city, apartment buildings were incorporated into the structure of the Wall itself. Film footage and photographs from the early 1960s show Berliners worriedly watching workmen seal off these buildings from the West, brick by brick. Some people attempted to leap to freedom from upper-story windows, with mixed results. It was here that international news crews came to document the dramatic escape attempts, the bleak no-man’s-land, the anti-Soviet protests, and the makeshift memorials to fallen victims. As you visit the park, you’ll learn about how the Wall went up, the brutal methods used to keep Easterners in, and the brave stories of people who risked everything to be free.
West Berlin was a 185-square-mile island of capitalism entirely surrounded by East Germany. Between establishment of the DDR (East Germany) in 1949 and construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961, an estimated three million East Germans emigrated (fled) to freedom. To stanch their population loss, the DDR erected the 96-mile-long “Anti-Fascist Protective Rampart” almost overnight, beginning on August 13, 1961. They claimed the Wall was to keep bourgeois West Berliners safely at bay. Of course, its real purpose was the opposite: to keep East Berliners from leaving.
The Berlin Wall (Berliner Mauer) was actually two walls. The outer was a 12-foot-high concrete barrier topped with barbed wire and a rounded, pipe-like surface to discourage grappling hooks. The inner wall was lower-profile. Sandwiched between the walls was a no-man’s-land (or “death strip”) between 30 and 160 feet wide.
The boundaries of West Berlin—and the outline of the Berlin Wall—were anything but a straight line. Because the Soviet sector included the historic core of the city (Mitte), East Berlin took a big bite out of the West. Train tracks between West Berlin stations cut underneath the East, creating “ghost stations” where trains would pass through but never stop—their passengers seeing only cobwebs and DDR border guards.
There were eight points where you could legally cross between West and East Berlin, the most famous of which were Checkpoint Charlie (see here) and the Friedrichstrasse train station, with its so-called “Palace of Tears” (see here). In general, Westerners could temporarily enter the East, but not vice-versa.
Even after the Wall went up, people didn’t stop trying to escape. On their way into the death strip, would-be escapees would trip a silent alarm, which alerted sharpshooters. According to documents, border guards fired a total of nearly 1,700 times and made more than 3,000 arrests. During the Wall’s 28 years, there were about 5,000 documented successful escapes—and 565 of those were East German guards. An estimated 136 people were killed at the Wall while trying to escape.
Meanwhile, living in West Berlin—surrounded by concrete, barbed wire, and enemy soldiers armed to the teeth—was no picnic. The West German government offered generous tax incentives to encourage people to live here. It also waived compulsory military service for men—which is partly why West Berlin attracted many draft-dodging, alternative-lifestyle punks and hippies.
The Berlin Wall came to symbolize the larger Cold War between East and West. President John F. Kennedy gave a speech of solidarity in West Berlin, declaring, “Ich bin ein Berliner”—I am a Berliner. A generation later, President Ronald Reagan stood directly in front of the Brandenburg Gate and demanded of his Soviet counterpart, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.”
Finally, one November night in 1989, the Berlin Wall came down, as suddenly as it went up. For that story, see here.
(See “Berlin Wall Memorial Area” map, here.)
Our walk laces together several scattered sights associated with the Memorial. First stop: the Visitors Center, with its introductory films. Then comes the Memorial park. Along the way, we’ll stop into the Documentation Center, a museum about the Wall’s history.
• Start your visit at the Visitors Center, the rust-colored, blocky building located kitty-corner from the Nordbahnhof (at the far west end of the long Memorial park, at Bernauer Strasse 119).
At this modern, cube-shaped building, you’ll find a helpful staff, a number of maps and info brochures, a handy WC, and a few vending machines. Check the next showtimes for the two 15-minute introductory films. (If you’re in a hurry, don’t wait for the English versions—the German ones have subtitles and easy-to-follow graphics.)
The film entitled The Berlin Wall covers the four-decade history of the Wall. First, it shows the events leading up to the Wall, as the Cold War gradually turned Berlin into a flashpoint between communism and the West. It chronicles the postwar division into Allied and Soviet sectors (1945), the Soviet Blockade and Allied Airlift (1949), and the democratic uprising crushed by Soviet tanks (1953). Then, in 1961, the Soviets told the East Germans to close the border entirely and erect the Wall. You’ll hear about frantic escape attempts. Finally, there’s the gradual thawing of the Cold War, and the eventual tearing down of the Wall in 1989.
The other film, Walled In!, is even more helpful. With computer graphics, it makes a 3-D re-creation of the former death strip, helping you visualize what it is you’re about to walk through.
Now, exit the Visitors Center, cross Bernauer Strasse, and enter the Memorial park. You’re leaving former West Berlin and entering the no-man’s-land that stood between East and West Berlin.
• Once in the park, find the rusty rectangular monument with a 3-D map.
The map shows what this neighborhood looked like back in the Wall’s heyday. Find where you are on the map: the shiny metal dot. If you were standing here 50 years ago, you’d be right at the division between East and West Berlin—specifically, in the narrow no-man’s-land between two sets of walls. One of those Walls is still standing—there it is, stretching along Bernauer Strasse. As you gaze down the long park, West Berlin would be to your left (on the north side of Bernauer Strasse), and East Berlin to your right.
Now find the Nordbahnhof, both on the map and in real life—the entrance is directly across Gartenstrasse street. While the Wall stood, the Nordbahnhof station straddled both East and West. (For more on its curious predicament, see the sidebar.)
• Stroll slowly along the path through this first section of the park (“Section A”). Along the way are a number of small sights, remembrances, and exhibits you could stop at, either now or later. As you stroll, you’re walking through...
Today’s grassy park with a pleasant path through it was once the notorious “death strip” (Todesstreifen). If someone was trying to escape from the East, they’d have to scale one wall (a smaller one, to your right), cross this narrow strip of land, and climb the main Wall (to your left, along Bernauer Strasse). The death strip was an obstacle course of barbed wire, tire-spike strips to stop cars, and other diabolical devices. It was continually patrolled by East German soldiers leading German Shepherds. Armed guards looked down from watchtowers, with orders to shoot to kill. At night, the area was harshly lit by streetlamps—four originals remain standing (just up ahead). Before it was the no-man’s-land between the walls, this area was the parish graveyard for a nearby church; ironically, DDR officials had to move a thousand graves from here to create a “death strip.”
• About midway through this section of the park, find the freestanding rusted-iron wall filled with photos of people.
The semitransparent photos are of people who died trying to escape East Berlin. You’ll see their faces, names, and dates of death (displayed chronologically).
Find Otfried Reck, just 17 years old (first panel, top row). On November 27, 1962, he and a friend pried open a ventilation shaft at the boarded-up Nordbahnhof, and descended to the tracks, where they hoped to flag down a passing westbound train. The police discovered them, and Reck was shot in the back. There’s a memorial to him now directly across from the Visitors Center.
Ernst Mundt (just left of Otfried) died directly behind you, at the cemetery wall. On September 4, 1962, he rode his bike to the cemetery, which—because of its location near the Wall—was constantly patrolled by guards. He climbed the death strip’s inner wall and ran across the top, headed in the direction of the Nordbahnhof and freedom. He was shot in the head, and his hat (the one in the picture) flew off. He died, age 40.
Across the path from the Wall of Remembrance is a row of overgrown, graffiti-covered, discarded Wall panels. We’ll see an intact version soon.
This S-Bahn station was one of the “ghost stations” of Cold War Berlin. It was built in 1926, closed in 1961 (although trains kept passing through), and opened again in 1989. When the Wall went up, the station was boarded up by East Germany. West Berlin subway trains had permission to zip through on the underground tracks, but they couldn’t stop here, and no one was allowed to get on or off.
Today, the station keeps reminders of its haunted past. Inside, photos posted on the walls compare 1989 with 2009. As the displays explain, East German border guards, who were stationed here to ensure that nobody got on or off those trains, were themselves locked into their surveillance rooms to prevent their escape. (But one subway employee and his family used the tunnels to walk to the West and freedom.)
At the station’s exit to Bernauer Strasse, note the plaques (at the top and bottom of the stairs) that say Sperrmauer 1961-1989—“Barrier wall.” Back in the 20th century, this exit was blocked—a bricked-off no-man’s-land.
Continue walking through Section A. You’re now walking along the original, preserved asphalt patrol path. You pass by those four original streetlamps. You’ll also pass a cross marking the Sophien Parish Cemetery. The church cemetery still exists (it’s to your right), but the cross marks a section of graves they had to dig up in 1961 to build the death strip.
• Now, walk across the grass and find a place to get a good close-up look at...
The Wall here is typical of the whole system: about 12 feet tall, made of concrete and rebar, and capped by a rounded pipe that made it tough for escapees to get a grip. The top would have been further adorned with coils of barbed wire.
This was part of a 96-mile-long Wall that encircled West Berlin, making it an island of democracy in communist East Germany. The West Berlin side of the Wall was typically covered with colorful graffiti by free-spirited West Berliners. A few bits of graffiti remain here.
Reach out and touch the Wall...go ahead. Fondle an exposed bit of rebar. Think of the lives lost. Lives wasted. You’re touching history.
• Now, exit the park through the hole in the Wall, turn right along Bernauer Strasse, and make your way a short distance to the crosswalk. Across Bernauer Strasse is a modern grey building with a view terrace, located at #119 (labeled Gedenkstätte Berliner Mauer). This is the Berlin Wall Memorial’s...
This excellent museum is geared to a new generation of Berliners who can hardly imagine their hometown split so brutally in two. The ground floor (1961-1988) has photos and displays to explain the logistics of the city’s division and its effects. Have a seat and listen to the riveting personal accounts of escapees—and of the border guards armed with machine guns and tasked with stopping them. The next floor up gives the historical and political context behind the Wall’s construction and eventual destruction. Immediately, there was a push to preserve that history with a memorial like this. Photos let you track the changes here from 1965 to 1990 (look for the photo of a church being toppled by DDR dynamite—we’ll see its successor soon).
At the back of the room, take seven minutes to watch the powerful film Peaceful Revolution, which traces the process that led to the Wall’s collapse: the 1989 protests in Hungary, Leipzig, Prague, Berlin, and Dresden; the press conference where a bumbling bureaucrat accidentally announced the opening of the Wall “immediately”; the massing of desperate East Berliners at the Bornholmer Strasse crossing of the Wall that very night—and the guards finally shrugging at each other and simply opening the checkpoint; crowds rushing through the Wall, embracing loved ones, climbing up top, and chipping off a chunk; and an awe-filled, wide-eyed East Berliner wandering along the Ku’damm, saying, “Me! In West Berlin!”
Now climb the stairs or take the elevator to the top floor, the Tower (Turm). From this high viewpoint, you can look across Bernauer Strasse, and down at Berlin’s last preserved stretch of the death strip with the original guard tower. More than 100 sentry towers like this one kept a close eye on the Wall. (Full disclosure: This particular guard tower came from a different part of the Wall. It was actually purchased on that great capitalist invention, eBay. Somewhere, Stalin spins in his grave.) In the far distance, the communist-built TV Tower overlooks the scene like Big Brother.
• The Documentation Center has a simple café and WCs. Exit and continue on. Cross Bernauer Strasse (where it intersects with Ackerstrasse) and enter the next section of the Memorial park...
At the intersection of cobbled Ackerstrasse and Bernauer Strasse, notice the rectangular markings in the ground (a thin, double strip of metal). These trace the footprint of buildings that stood here along the south side of Bernauer Strasse as the Wall began to go up.
Nearby you’ll see a group of information panels—some with text and photos, other with audio and video clips. These are the first of many such information points, which stretch the entire length of the Memorial.
The panels tell the story of what happened right here: On August 13, 1961, the East German government officially closed the border. A sense of dread spread among East Germans, as they feared being permanently trapped under Soviet control. People began fleeing to the parts of Berlin controlled by other European powers—like the French, who held the neighborhood on the north side of Bernauer Strasse.
Over the next few weeks and months, bit by bit, the border hardened. Ackerstrasse was closed to traffic, as East German soldiers laid down rows of barbed wire. They began to evacuate the residents living on the border strip. They bricked up the buildings’ street-side entrances so no one could flee. People were suddenly separated from their West Berlin neighbors just across the street.
During this brief window of time (summer of ’61 to early ’62), there were many escape attempts. (For more on these events and exactly where they happened, read your free Visitors Center brochure on Section B.)
A man stepped out his upper-story window and slid down a rope to Bernauer Strasse, fleeing across the street to freedom (see #B333 in the Visitors Center brochure). In another case, the rope broke, and the escapee was injured...but limped away a free man (#B366). Another man drove his VW bug up Ackerstrasse at high speed. The barbed wire barriers snared the car, but it skidded to a stop in West Berlin territory, and he was free (#B340). Others tried to climb down a manhole on Ackerstrasse and escape through the sewer tunnel, but were caught by border guards (#B376).
After the border-strip buildings were completely evacuated, they were used as escape routes. Two men leap-frogged across several adjoining rooftops and lowered themselves down to Bernauer Strasse (#B354). An East German border guard slipped away from his post, broke into a boarded-up building, and escaped through the window (#B358).
The people of West Berlin did all they could to help people escape. West German first responders were at the ready. A woman called out of the window for the fire department, which came with a ladder to bring her down to freedom (#B377). A man jumped down into the waiting rescue net of firefighters (#B365). A desperate man simply fell three stories from the rooftop onto the pavement of Bernauer Strasse. He was badly injured, but a West Berlin ambulance was there to whisk him to the hospital...and freedom (#B363). Another man slid down a rope to safety as West Berlin police blinded the East German guards with their floodlights. More people escaped as the West Berlin police brandished their weapons while the fire department raised their ladders (#B357).
Most of these escape attempts were in those first few months. By 1962, the residents had been evicted, the buildings demolished, and the formidable Wall was going up. People kept trying to flee, but most later attempts from here ended in arrests (#B383 and #B343). Not everyone survived. On August 22, 1961, Ida Siekmann fell to her death as she jumped from her third-floor apartment at Bernauer Strasse 48, and became the first casualty of the Berlin Wall.
• Keep going up the path through Section B, to the round building up ahead.
This modern “Chapel of Reconciliation” stands on the site of the old Church of Reconciliation. Built in 1894, that old Gothic-style church served the neighborhood parish. When the Wall went up, it found itself stranded in the death strip. The congregation had to find another place to worship, and the church was abandoned. Border guards used the steeple as a watchtower. The church became famous in the West as a symbol of how the godless commies had driven out religion and turned a once-great culture into a bleak wasteland. The church itself was finally blown up by the East Germans in 1985, ostensibly because it got in the way of the border guards’ sight lines. (In fact, it was one of several churches demolished around this time, to send a message to troublesome Christian protestors.) Little remains of the original church. You can see its footprint traced in the ground around the chapel. The church bells and twisted iron cross are displayed a few paces away. The church was gone, but people on both sides of the Wall continued hoping that someday there’d be a “reconciliation” between East and West.
After the Wall came down, this chapel was built to remember the troubled past and try to heal the memory. Inside the church, the carved wooden altarpiece was saved from the original structure. The chapel hosts daily prayer services for the victims of the Wall.
• Continue past the chapel into the second portion of Section B.
Walk up the mild incline, then bear left to a large open-air display under a canopy (amid the ruins of a destroyed Bernauer Strasse home). Photos, info boards, and press-the-button audio clips explain what it was like to live here, so close to the front line of the Cold War. They paint a stark picture of daily life under oppressive communist rule.
History is all around you. Just steps from where you stand, a man who was attempting to escape was arrested (#B364). Nearby, a family slid down a makeshift rope to safety (#B335). Two more families jumped into fire department nets (#B351 and #B371). Another family barely escaped in the nick of time, fleeing their home just before it was to be bricked up (#B344).
There’s also history under your feet: Two escape tunnels were dug near here. Tunnels were one of the many ingenious ways people tried to escape. During the Wall’s existence, about 300 people escaped via tunnel.
Head back up to the main path, turn left, and continue. You’ll pass two parallel rows of metal slabs, labeled Fluchttunnel 1964. This marks the route of the most famous tunnel of all: 9 Tunnel 57 (named after the 57 people who escaped through it). Its location is marked by rows of metal plates embedded in the ground.
In the spring of 1963, a group of grad students in West Berlin hatched a wild plot to free their friends in the East. They set up their operation in an abandoned West Berlin bakery north of Bernauer Strasse. There they cut a hole in the floor and started tunneling toward the East. They went down 35 feet, then across—under Bernauer Strasse, under the Wall, and under the death strip. After five months of hard labor, they’d hollowed out a tunnel stretching more than 150 yards. Fortunately, when they surfaced, they found themselves safely behind a nondescript building on Streitzler Strasse—about 75 yards south of today’s park. The students alerted their friends to get ready to escape.
On Sunday evening, October 3, 1964, the East Berliners began making their way as nonchalantly as possible to the address they’d been given. They gave the password—“Tokyo”—and were ushered inside by the West Berliners, who led them to the tunnel entrance. One by one they went into the narrow, pitch-dark tunnel, crawling on their hands and knees. As the night wore on, suspicions were aroused. East German police descended on Streitzler Strasse. Shots were fired. An East German guard was killed. The West German helpers beat a hasty retreat through the tunnel to safety.
The tunnel was immediately destroyed by the communist authorities. But it had served its purpose—saving 57 lives. Years later, one of the helpers, Reinhard Furrer, look back and reflected on the whole experience. He could view it from a unique perspective—200 miles up, as he orbited the earth on Spacelab (he’d survived the Wall to become an astronaut).
Before you move on, check out the row of modern apartment buildings that abut the south edge of the park. With their bright colors and kids’ bikes parked out front, it’s clear that the bleak past is fading, and regeneration is well underway.
• The main part of our walk is done. To experience more of the Memorial, you could continue through Sections C and D, where you’ll find more open-air exhibits similar to what we’ve already seen (explained next).
But if you’re ready to leave the area, the Bernauer Strasse U-Bahn station is just a block further up Bernauer Strasse. Or you can backtrack to the Nordbahnhof. And tram #M10 follows Bernauer Strasse all the way to Eberswalder Strasse, in the heart of Prenzlauer Berg.
The last two sections of the Berlin Wall Memorial—with periodic information points—stretch along Bernauer Strasse another four blocks (about two-thirds of a mile) all the way to the Mauerpark. You can easily skip ahead to the Mauerpark—or other sections of the memorial—by hopping on tram #M10 (which runs along Bernauer Strasse, tracing the path of the Memorial; the Friedrich-Ludwig-Jahn-Sportpark stop is right at the Mauerpark).
If you walk, here’s what you’ll see:
Section C focuses on the building of the Wall: the gradual beefing up of the fortifications; surveillance over the death strip; and metal markings showing the path of two additional escape tunnels. At the end of this section (at the intersection with Brunnenstrasse, and the Bernauer Strasse U-Bahn stop), one of the most iconic Berlin Wall escape photographs fills the entire wall of a building: teenaged DDR border guard Conrad Schumann, in full uniform and carrying his weapon, running full-tilt and leaping over barbed wire to freedom in the West. He dropped his gun, hopped into a waiting car, and was whisked to safety. This was taken on August 14, 1961—the day after the Wall officially went up—during a narrow window of time when an improvised escape like this was possible. Schumann became a minor celebrity and moved to Bavaria, but always felt conflicted about leaving his parents and siblings behind in East Germany. He committed suicide in 1998.
Finally, Section D is nearly as long as the first three sections combined. Here the path cuts a half-block inland, to a strip between buildings that mostly follows an old patrol road (jog right as you cross Brunnenstrasse and look for signs). The theme of this area is everyday life in the shadow of the Berlin Wall, including exhibits about how West Berlin was affected; those who dug tunnels and carried out other activities to help escapees; the soldiers who guarded the Wall; the politics of the Wall (look for the photo of Martin Luther King, Jr. at Bernauer Strasse in 1964); and how the media were used as a tool and a weapon during the Cold War. You’ll emerge at Schwedter Strasse, where a building-size photograph shows the people who amassed here on the night of November 9, 1989, eagerly anticipating the opening of the Wall.
The story of Schwedter Strasse—and the Mauerpark across the street—is explained at the end of the 
Prenzlauer Berg Walk (see here).
• From Mauerpark, you can walk two blocks (or ride tram #M10 one stop) to the Eberswalder Strasse U-Bahn stop. In the opposite direction, tram #M10 goes all the way back the way you came, to the Nordbahnhof S-Bahn station.