Berlin House History Finder: Which Record Covers the Year You Want
Type a year and see which Berlin records still know who lived in your building: address books, phone books, aerial photos, building files and Stolpersteine, in the order to try them.
Start with the free records. The building file comes last, and it is the only one that dates the house itself.
Type a year, then say whether your building still stands.
What the tool shows
Berlin kept good lists of its tenants until 1943, then the trail breaks, and after 1991 there is no public list at all. Type a year and the timeline shows which records cover it: the address books, the West Berlin city directory, the phone books, the aerial photographs, the building files and the Stolpersteine database. The cards below put them in the order I would try them, with what each costs.
How to use it
Type the year you care about, use the minus 10 and plus 10 buttons, or tap the year on the chart.
Say whether the building still stands. If it is gone, the building file usually sits at the Landesarchiv, not the district office.
Say whether you are the tenant or the owner. Tenants need the owner’s written authority to see the building file.
Records that do not cover your year are listed underneath, faded out.
Where the facts come from
Coverage years come from the Zentral- und Landesbibliothek Berlin digital collection (address books 1799 to 1943, phone books West 1954 to 1991 and East 1955 to 1989), Berlin Open Data (aerial photographs), the Landesarchiv Berlin card index page (building files of demolished buildings) and stolpersteine-berlin.de. The building file fees and access rules come from the Service Berlin page for the Bauaktenarchiv. Checked on 8 November 2026.