Teufelsberg: the spy station built on a hill of rubble

Teufelsberg is a hill that should not exist. It is made of the rubble of wartime Berlin, piled up in the Grunewald forest after the Second World War and topped, during the Cold War, by a listening station that spied on East Germany and the Soviet Union. When the Wall came down the station was abandoned, and its radar domes have been sitting on the summit ever since.

A hill made of a ruined city

After the war, Berlin was a city of rubble. Millions of tonnes of debris from bombed buildings had to go somewhere, and much of it was carted to the Grunewald and piled into a hill. Teufelsberg — ‘Devil’s Hill’ — rose about eighty metres above the surrounding forest, built on top of an unfinished Nazi military-technical college that the rubble buried.

The hill was never planned as a landmark; it was a dump. But it became one of the highest points in Berlin, and during the Cold War that made it valuable. From the top, you could see across the city and into the East.

Field Station Berlin

From the 1960s, the United States and its allies operated a signals-intelligence listening station on the summit, known as Field Station Berlin. Its arrays of antennas and radar domes were built to intercept Soviet and East German communications, and the station became one of the most important listening posts of the Cold War.

The station was manned around the clock, in a divided city, on a hill of rubble overlooking the Wall. It was secret, strange and, for the people who worked there, a posting like no other. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and the Cold War ended, the station lost its purpose, and it was closed and abandoned in the early 1990s.

A hill for the curious

The radar domes stayed. For years Teufelsberg was fenced off and left to decay, its white domes slowly peeling and its buildings filling with graffiti. It became one of Berlin’s best-known unofficial ruins, and visitors found ways in to see the strange, silent station on top of the hill.

Today the site is managed and open to the public for a fee, with guided tours and a viewing platform. It is a different kind of place from the Maunsell forts or the bunkers elsewhere in this archive: a monument not to a war that was fought but to one that was only ever watched for, on a hill built from the wreckage of the last one.

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Related places

If this one stayed with you, these entries sit in the same corner of the archive:

• The Maunsell Forts: wartime towers in the North Sea — United Kingdom
• Dülmen-Visbeck: the Cold War bunker under a quiet field — Germany
• Pripyat: the city that was evacuated in a day — Ukraine