Ghost Station Oranienburger Strasse

There's an S-Bahn station under your feet that didn't exist between 1961 and 1990. It wasn't on any East Berlin map, it had no street-level entrance, and the East Berliners who walked over it every day knew nothing about it. It was a ghost station, a Geisterbahnhof. There are a few photos in the app showing what these stations looked like back then, with the empty platforms and the guards waiting in their booths.

When the Wall went up in 1961, the GDR had a complicated problem on its hands. Three West Berlin metro and S-Bahn lines ran through tunnels under East Berlin, with stations along the way. The trains came in from West Berlin, dipped under the border, and surfaced again in West Berlin somewhere else. The GDR couldn't stop them, because that would have caused a diplomatic crisis. But they couldn't let them stop on East German territory either, because then anyone could just step on board and walk out of the country.

The solution was to make the stations effectively disappear. Stairwells were bricked up, entrances were taken out of the streetscape, and the names were wiped off the maps. The trains still rolled through, but slowly and without stopping. West Berlin passengers looked out of their windows at deserted, dimly lit platforms where armed GDR border guards stared back at them from sealed booths. Westerners started calling them Geisterbahnhöfe.

The security was heavy. Barbed wire under the platforms. Alarm systems that went off at the slightest touch. The guards always worked in pairs, with names chosen so the two of them didn't know each other. Even there, no trust was allowed to take root.

The station you're standing above reopened in 1990, and the first passenger to step on at rush hour was probably surprised to find anyone on the platform.

We're heading a few hundred metres further now, to a building that tens of thousands of East Berliners called home.