The Trains That Did Not Stop: Where It Happened, Episode 1
Updated: Oct 29
Episode 1 of Where It Happened, my weekly Berlin story podcast, is about the trains that did not stop. From 13 August 1961, three underground and rail lines kept running beneath East Berlin, and their trains passed the sealed stations without stopping. Start at Nordbahnhof, where an exhibition on those stations sits above a platform the trains still use.
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In this episode
0:00 The train that did not stop
4:17 Under Bernauer Straße
8:20 Friedrichstraße
11:15 The dark stations
13:31 Reopening
Where to stand today
Four places from the episode are open to visit today.
Nordbahnhof, Mitte. The exhibition on the three lines and the sealed stations is on the mezzanine, above a platform where the trains still stop. It is free to visit, and twenty minutes is enough.
Bernauer Straße, Mitte. The U8 station of the same name reopened in part in April 1990. The outdoor memorial on this street is run by the Stiftung Berliner Mauer. Stand on the pavement and picture tunnel 57, which began in a cellar at number 97.
Jannowitzbrücke, Mitte. This is the U8 platform with the emergency lights and the guards from the opening scene. The station reopened in 1989, and today it is a U8 and S-Bahn change.
Friedrichstraße and the Tränenpalast, Mitte. The Tränenpalast, the former border exit building beside the station, has an exhibition on the division of Germany. Go there after the platform, so the map of the lines makes sense.
The mezzanine at Nordbahnhof, where the exhibition is. Photo credit in the image credits at the end.
Read the full guide
The episode tells the story. My written guide adds the full list of all 15 stations, what happened at each one, and the one that is closed again. Read it here: Berlin Ghost Stations: The 15 Stops Trains Passed Without Stopping.
Transcript (text)
The train that did not stop
The driver brings the train down before the station, because he has to. Thomas Alber, a U-Bahn driver, remembered the figure in a taz interview from 2005: about 25 kilometers an hour, the speed you had to brake to as you came into the stretch under East Berlin. Ahead, at Jannowitzbrücke, emergency lights glow along a platform that no passenger will use. Two soldiers with submachine guns patrol it. The train does not stop, and it goes through without a pause. You are on that train now, and the next station is not yours.
That scene belongs to 13 August 1961, when the border was closed and the Wall began to go up. The building of the Wall that day divided the city, and it cut the U-Bahn and S-Bahn networks along with it. Three connections kept running anyway. Today they are the U6 and the U8 of the U-Bahn and the north-south tunnel of the S-Bahn. Each one started and ended in West Berlin, and in between it ran beneath the East. The exhibition text puts it in one plain sentence: the trains did not stop at the stations in East Berlin.
Along the U6, the stations under the East were Stadion der Weltjugend, which is now Schwartzkopffstraße, Nordbahnhof, Oranienburger Tor, Französische Straße and Stadtmitte. On the U8 they were Bernauer Straße, Rosenthaler Platz, Weinmeisterstraße, Jannowitzbrücke and Heinrich-Heine-Straße, and the platform at Alexanderplatz was walled off. The north-south S-Bahn passed Oranienburger Straße, Nordbahnhof, Unter den Linden and Potsdamer Platz without a stop. Some of those names will come back, because several of those stations are still there for you to visit.
The stations became what people called ghost stations, Geisterbahnhöfe in German. Their platforms were darkened, and armed GDR guard posts stood on them, the exhibition at Nordbahnhof says. Numerous entrances were walled up and signs were taken down, to erase these connections from public awareness. The trains did not stop. The exhibition calls the passage slow, and Thomas Alber remembered braking to about 25 kilometers an hour. The exhibition also records a loudspeaker announcement made before a train passed through: last station in West Berlin.
Start at Nordbahnhof, in Mitte, because the division is still on display there. This S-Bahn station, at Am Nordbahnhof, has a mezzanine above its platforms, and on it the exhibition Grenz- und Geisterbahnhöfe im geteilten Berlin lays out the three lines, the stations and the guards. The station itself was one of the so-called ghost stations during the division, and it is still an S-Bahn station today. You can see the exhibition during the S-Bahn's operating hours, and entry is free. The guards were not for show. On the darkened platforms, armed GDR guard posts stood on duty. Berlin's official Mauerweg text says border soldiers guarded the darkened platforms between Nordbahnhof and Potsdamer Platz, and no passenger could get off at the East Berlin stations the trains passed without stopping.
Thomas Alber drove those trains. Before the Wende, as the taz puts it, he drove U-Bahn trains through the ghost stations. The taz interviewed him in October 2005, when he was 42, and he remembered Jannowitzbrücke with its emergency lighting and its two soldiers with submachine guns. He said the drivers saw the same guards twenty or thirty times a day, and never once waved. Small details like these show how ordinary the line became for the people who worked it. If the trains never stopped and the platforms were guarded, how did anyone get out of this line?
Under Bernauer Straße
There was a way, and it went under the street. Under Bernauer Straße, people dug their own way out. Tunnel 57 began in the cellar of an empty bakery at Bernauer Straße 97, on the West Berlin side, and it came up in a disused outhouse in the courtyard at Strelitzer Straße 55, in East Berlin. The diggers worked from April to October 1964 and drove about 145 meters beneath the border, the same length the Chronicle of the Berlin Wall gives. Between the third and the fourth of October 1964, 57 people came through it from East Berlin into the West, and the tunnel is named after them.
On the second night, shots were fired in the courtyard at Strelitzer Straße 55, where the tunnel came up in the East. Two Stasi officers in plain clothes came to the entrance, and border guards were sent to check suspicious people at that address. The Chronicle says they were not told the real purpose, which was an escape operation. Egon Schultz was 21, a border guard and a reservist on duty that night. On 4 October 1964 he had been assigned as a reserve to the command post at Arkonaplatz, the Chronicle says. He was shot in the courtyard, and he died on the way to hospital, in the night of 4 to 5 October 1964. He should be remembered by name, not as a footnote to the tunnel story.
The Chronicle of the Berlin Wall, a project with the Stiftung Berliner Mauer among its partners, records how he died. It says the fatal shot came from a border soldier's rifle, and not from the people escaping. That detail matters, because the story of the tunnel is often told as a story about the escapers and the guards alone. The guards were also people who had been sent into the dark. Its biographies include Egon Schultz, a border soldier who died at the Wall. You can read the full entry online, and it is worth doing before you go.
Another tunnel, number 29, took 29 people out of East Berlin on 14 and 15 September 1962. The Stiftung Berliner Mauer marks its site on Schönholzer Straße, with an information board on the spot. The Berliner Zeitung places the tunnel at a Bernauer Straße site where new buildings were planned, and says the name comes from the 29 people who got out through it. Across those years many people tried to get past the barriers, the exhibition at Nordbahnhof says, but only a few succeeded. Tunnel 29 and tunnel 57 are two of those few.
If you want to stand where these stories took place, go to Bernauer Straße. The outdoor memorial there is run by the Stiftung Berliner Mauer, according to the Berliner Zeitung. The U8 station of the same name is on this street. The Wall closed it on 13 August 1961, and part of it reopened on 12 April 1990. Stand on the pavement and picture tunnel 57 starting in a cellar at number 97, on the West Berlin side. Of all the stations on these lines, one stands apart. Friedrichstraße was the exception: trains stopped there, and hundreds of travelers crossed the border every day. What was it like to change trains there, and what did it take to cross?
Friedrichstraße
That station was Friedrichstraße, and it was not a ghost station. It served as the transfer point between the U6 and several S-Bahn lines, and the trains halted there in East Berlin, unlike the other stations on these lines. Passengers could change between those lines without ever leaving the station or having to show papers. Westerners with the right visas could also enter East Berlin there. The station was an exception on the map, and a building next to it, on the East side, turned the border check into a story of its own.
Next to the station, on the East side, stood a building that Germans called the Tränenpalast, the Palace of Tears. It was built in 1962 as the exit hall of the border crossing at the station, and the German name came from the farewells that took place inside. Leaving the East meant border clearance, and the Stiftung Berliner Mauer describes the building as used for exactly that. The Haus der Geschichte says hundreds of travelers crossed the border each day, by train or by S-Bahn. The Berlin.de museum listing says the hall served the SED dictatorship for departures from the GDR until 1990. The border at the station opened on 9 November 1989, and the first direct S-Bahn trip from East to West through it ran on 2 July 1990, the Berlin.de listing says. The building still stands at Reichstagufer 17.
The Haus der Geschichte's own text puts it most plainly. The Stiftung Berliner Mauer says the name refers to the countless farewells the building witnessed until 1989. Often people did not know if they would ever see each other again, and tears flowed freely. The exhibition covers contemporary witnesses who describe how they escaped, documents and secret photographs smuggled across the border, letters and parcels, and protests against the travel ban. The guided visits last about an hour, and they are free of charge.
Today the Tränenpalast is a site of the Haus der Geschichte, under the title Site of German Division. Admission is free. You can walk through the original passport control booth, which is still there to see. Stand in the booth for a minute and picture the people who stood in line before you. The Berlin.de listing says the original booth gives an idea of how the clearance worked. The listing gives opening hours that differ between weekdays and weekends, so check them before you go. Then walk back toward the station and think about the trains that passed the stations on either side of it without stopping.
The dark stations
Stadtmitte, on the U6, was one of the dark stations on the same line, and the trains had passed through without stopping since 13 August 1961. Its platform lay empty while the trains went through. Only the U6 station was closed, while the U2 platform stayed in use. The U6 station reopened on 1 July 1990, together with the other U6 and U8 stations that had been waiting in the dark. The ghost years at Stadtmitte lasted almost thirty years, the same as the rest of the line. For that whole stretch, a train could pass Stadtmitte and never stop for a passenger there.
Potsdamer Platz was a different kind of ghost. The north-south S-Bahn had stopped there before the Wall. After the Wall went up, its platforms lay empty for more than thirty years, while the trains ran on beneath the square without stopping. The reopening came on 3 March 1992, after an extensive restoration of the whole north-south tunnel, and it was the last of the ghost stations to reopen. Like Stadtmitte, it was a station where no passenger could get off in those years. Keep that date in mind for the end of this story.
Thomas Alber's interview adds the everyday side that the exhibitions leave out. The taz printed his recollections in October 2005, in its series on unification. East Berliners, he said, went west by U-Bahn with their food in cloth bags. After Hertha matches, drunk fans had sometimes torn a train door open and shouted out. A second crew member boarded before the zone as a precaution. He also said no train of his ever stalled in the zone. So what did those stations look like when they came back to life in November 1989?
Reopening
On 9 November 1989 the border opened. Two days later, on 11 November, a ghost station was open again. It was Jannowitzbrücke, on the U8, and it reopened as a border crossing point on the mezzanine between the U-Bahn and the S-Bahn. Alber's taz interview, from the driver you heard earlier, calls it the first station in the East to reopen. English Wikipedia's photo caption calls it the first of the ghost stations to be reopened after the Fall of the Wall. Stand on that platform today and you are standing where the emergency lights had glowed for years. Jannowitzbrücke is still a place where the U8 meets the S-Bahn, and you can change between the two.
Rosenthaler Platz followed on 22 December 1989, six weeks after the border opened. The station is also on the U8, one of the stations the trains had passed without stopping since 1961. Rosenthaler Platz is a crossroads in Mitte, not a square, according to English Wikipedia, and the station reopened with a similar provisional checkpoint. Ride the U8 today and you can get off there without a second thought. The station that once had trains rolling through without a pause now lets people off and on like any other, and that is what reopening meant in practice. Stand on the platform for a minute and notice how ordinary the arrival of a train looks now.
Bernauer Straße came back in two stages. It reopened in part on 12 April 1990, and the eastern exit followed on 1 July 1990, after renovation. That is the same summer when the rest of the old stretch came back as well. The station is named for the street, and the street is where tunnel 57 began. The reopened station and the memorial stand on the same street, so the two stories can be read side by side, one under your feet and one at the surface. Walk the open ground slowly, and let the station names from earlier come back to you.
On 1 July 1990 the remaining U6 and U8 stations reopened. Among them were Stadtmitte, Oranienburger Tor, Französische Straße, Schwartzkopffstraße, Weinmeisterstraße, Heinrich-Heine-Straße and Alexanderplatz. A BVG archive caption, printed by the Berliner Kurier, dates the reopening of the Alexanderplatz station to that day, and the taz recalls that Heinrich-Heine-Straße could be stopped at again only in early July 1990, after renovation. It was also the day the D-Mark came to the GDR in the currency union, according to the Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung. The reopening ran in stages, and the first station to reopen was Jannowitzbrücke, in November 1989. The last was Potsdamer Platz, in March 1992. Check the list against a current map if you want to follow the route yourself.
Note: Französische Straße station has been closed since 3 December 2020, when the last trains called there. The new Unter den Linden station opened the next day as the U5 and U6 interchange.
The north-south S-Bahn came back in its own order. Oranienburger Straße reopened first, on 2 July 1990, as the first ghost station on that line to reopen. Unter den Linden, today's Brandenburger Tor station, and Nordbahnhof followed on 1 September 1990, after reconstruction works. Nordbahnhof is the station where the exhibition is, and it is still an S-Bahn station today. For almost thirty years, the trains had passed it without a stop. That tunnel is the same one the trains used before 1961, and today its trains stop at Nordbahnhof.
Potsdamer Platz came last. Its S-Bahn station opened again on 3 March 1992, after an extensive restoration of the whole north-south tunnel, and it is the last of the ghost stations to reopen. The station had opened in 1939 as a regular stop on that line. Its platforms were guarded like the rest of the line. Before 1961 the trains stopped there, and after 1961 they passed under the square without a pause for more than thirty years. Stand on the platform and picture the years when the trains passed under the square without a stop.
What is left today is more than most people expect. You can read the exhibition panels on the mezzanine at Nordbahnhof, which cover the three lines and the armed guard posts. You can stand on the outdoor memorial ground at Bernauer Straße, which the Stiftung Berliner Mauer runs. The Tränenpalast still has its original passport control booth, which you can walk through. Each of these is a single spot you can reach by train. Take the time to read the panels when you are not rushed, because they cover more than one station.
If you choose one place to stand, make it Nordbahnhof. Go during the S-Bahn's operating hours, climb to the mezzanine and read the panels first, so you know what the trains were doing under your feet. Then go down to the platform and wait for the next train. Bring the time, because a quiet platform is easier to picture when nothing else is asking for your attention. When the train pulls in and stops, notice that it stops. For nearly thirty years, the trains did not stop at this station, and that is the whole story in one moment. Afterward, look at the U-Bahn map and find the names from this story.
Sources
The podcast is narrated with an AI voice; the short breaks are read in my own voice.
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Image credits
Source and licence details for the photograph used on this page.
Nordbahnhof mezzanine, 1 July 2024: photo by Platte, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Resized for the web; no other changes.