I was just flicking through some more shots from my recent trip to Berlin and I had totally forgotten that on the last day, we had visited Grünewald – a large expanse of forest on the edge of the city. At one edge of the forest, there is an area called Teufelsberg, which is mainly a hill rising about 80m above the forest.

What spurred me to post it here, was that the hill was designed and purpose-built by the Allies after WWII from the rubble of Berlin’s battle-torn buildings. Some estimates say that hill is made from the rubble of over 400,000 buildings! Somewhere buried underneath the hill is an Albert Speer-designed Nazi technical college, that withstood the demolitions explosives of the Allies. They just gave up and buried the bugger.

As another strange twist of fate, the NSA (National Security Agency) built a huge radar/listening station at the top. Although in the British sector, it gave the Allies a huge advantage over Cold War transmissions coming from the Soviet side. A seasonal ferris wheel also acted as a rudimentary transistor to improve the quality of the signals! At the fall of the wall it was left to decay and the buildings and radar domes are still standing for the inquisitive (and brave) to creep around.

There is also a sort of small and eerie housing development for the affluent that never got finished. The whole place resonates with grey Cold War paranoia, but if you have an extra day in Berlin, head up and try to find one of the holes in the fence. I saw plenty of folk wandering around in there.