page_title: Berlin Friedrichstraße station
section_title: Border crossing during the Cold War
hierarchical_section_title: Berlin Friedrichstraße station / History / Border crossing during the Cold War
caption_attribution_description: For documentary purposes the German Federal Archive often retained the original image captions, which may be erroneous, biased, obsolete or politically extreme. Zentralbild Spremberg 31.10.1964 Vertrag zum Passierscheinabkommen 1964 Zügig und ohne Wartezeiten... verlief am Vormittag des 31. Oktober 1964 die Abfertigung der Westberliner Besucher am Grenzübergang Bahnhof Friedrichstrasse. Auf unserem Bild die aufgestellten Abfertigungshäuschen der Grenzkontrollorgane.
context_page_description: Berlin Friedrichstraße is a railway station in the German capital Berlin. It is located on the Friedrichstraße, a major north-south street in the Mitte district of Berlin, adjacent to the point where the street crosses the river Spree. Underneath the station is the U-Bahn station Friedrichstraße.
  Due to its central location in Berlin and its proximity to attractions such as the Unter den Linden boulevard, the Brandenburg Gate and the Reichstag, the station is a favorite destination for tourists. At the same time, it is the main junction for regional traffic in Berlin, measured by the number of passengers.
  During the Cold War, Friedrichstraße became famous for being a station that was located entirely in East Berlin, yet continued to be served by S-Bahn and U-Bahn trains from West Berlin as well as long distance trains from countries west of the Iron Curtain. The station also was a major border crossing between East and West Berlin.
context_section_description: During the onset of the Cold War and its tensions between the Western and the Soviet-occupied sectors of Berlin, the Friedrichstrasse station played an important role for citizens of Berlin to reach their friends and relatives in other sectors of Berlin. At the end of 1946, the Soviet Military Administration in Germany had created an East German border police tasked with preventing Republikflucht (escape from the East German republic). With the erection of the Inner German border in 1952, East Germany was to a large degree sealed off from the west. However, Berlin, and in particular the public transport system that criss-crossed between the western Allied and Soviet sectors was still a hole in that Iron Curtain. Accordingly, Berlin became the main route by which East Germans left for the West. The 3.5 million East Germans that had left by 1961 totaled approximately 20% of the entire East German population, many using the Friedrichstrasse station with its bustling traffic as the starting point for their escape. During the Uprising of 1953 in East Germany and East Berlin, the Reichsbahn national railway stopped S-Bahn transport between 17 June and 9 July 1953.
  When the East German government erected the Berlin Wall on 13 August 1961, it also severed the U-Bahn, S-Bahn and long distance train connections that criss-crossed through Berlin. The district of Berlin Mitte, where the Friedrichstrasse station is located, was surrounded in the northerly, westerly, and southerly directions by Western Sectors: For the S-Bahn at the Friedrichstrasse station, the next station to the west was across the wall in West Berlin, to the north were three more stops in the Soviet sector and only two to the south. The situation was similar for the U6 metro underneath the Friedrichstrasse, which had three stations to the north and two stations to the south before crossing the wall.
  Therefore, despite their being wholly located in East Berlin, all of the station's underground facilities, namely the S-Bahn platform of the North-South tunnel and the underground station, were only  accessible for passengers from the western sectors as a transfer station, or to access the border crossing at the ground level.
  The facilities above ground, on the arches of the Stadtbahn, were separated along the platforms:
  Platform A was used for long distance trains. This included the so-called Interzonenzüge, trains running non-stop from Berlin through East German territory to West Germany. For those trains the Friedrichstrasse station was a terminus. This platform was also a stop for trains with international destinations such as Copenhagen, Stockholm (using the ferry connection between Sassnitz and Trelleborg), Zürich, Vienna, and the legendary Paris - Moscow express. The latter could not be boarded by East German passengers at this station; they could only board the train at its next stop Berlin Ostbahnhof.
  Platform B became the terminus for the Stadtbahn arriving from West Berlin to and from Wannsee and Staaken. Passengers were able to transfer to the underground lines of the S-Bahn and the U-Bahn, or to long distance trains without entering East Germany.
  Platform C in the smaller train shed on the north side was used by traffic going to East Berlin and East Germany, which became now the terminus for the Stadtbahn lines to Erkner, Königs Wusterhausen, Strausberg Nord, Ahrensfelde, Wartenberg, and to the Berlin-Schönefeld airport.
  Between the platforms B and C was a metal-glass barrier that practically fulfilled the same function as the Berlin Wall: East German border troops separated the station into two completely isolated areas, both fully under armed control, one for people within East Berlin and the other for transit travellers, persons switching between the different westbound train lines, and the few Easterners with a hard-to-obtain exit visa, all within one station building with a maze of connecting hallways, barriers, numerous cameras, armed guards with sniffer dogs, plain-clothes agents, and a loggia under the roof for surveillance by armed border patrol a
caption: Border crossing at the station in 1964
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