The Anhalter Bahnhof is a former railway terminus in Berlin, Germany, approximately southeast of Potsdamer Platz. Once one of Berlin's most important railway stations, it was severely damaged in World War II, and finally closed for traffic in 1952, when the GDR-owned Deutsche Reichsbahn rerouted all railway traffic between Berlin and places in the GDR avoiding the West Berlin area. The station's name lives on in the Berlin S-Bahn station of the same name, opened in October 1939 as part of the North-South S-Bahn link.
Construction
Work to build the Anhalter Bahnhof began on 15 April 1839. As the Berlin terminus, of what become known as the Anhalt Railway, it opened on 1 July 1841 as far as Jüterbog (the inaugural train being hauled by the very first Borsig locomotive), and extended to Dessau, Köthen and beyond at later dates. It became known as the "Anhalt line" because it ran through the historical state of Anhalt, which in turn gave the new Berlin terminus its name. The network quickly grew to serve train services between Leipzig, Frankfurt am Main and Munich.
The front façade faced Askanischer Platz, which was basically a widened section of a street that at that time was known as Hirschelstraße (later Königgrätzer Straße, Stresemannstraße, Saarlandstraße and today back again to Stresemannstraße), then a fairly ramshackle thoroughfare linking Askanischer Platz with Potsdamer Platz (and the Potsdamer Bahnhof), and with Berlin's old customs or excise wall () running down its centre. At the time of the Anhalter Bahnhof's construction there was no opening in the customs wall at this location, and so one was clearly needed so that travellers could get from city to station and vice versa. And so the Anhalter Gate was created in 1839–40, and bore a strong resemblance to architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel's Potsdam Gate up the road. A new thoroughfare, Anhalter Straße, led from the gate into the city. The Anhalter Gate was one of four extra ones provided in the years after the customs wall's original erection, increasing the total number of gates around the city from 14 to 18. The customs wall eventually became redundant and was demolished in 1866–67, which allowed Hirschelstraße (newly renamed Königgrätzer Straße), to be developed into a proper street for the first time.
Expansion
Like nearby Potsdamer Bahnhof, the Anhalter Bahnhof opened as a fairly modest building (behind administration block); the platform was just wide. However, as the German rail network expanded throughout the 19th century so did the Anhalter Bahnhof to handle the growth.
In 1872, architect Franz Heinrich Schwechten (1841-1924) designed the vast new station that would also be the biggest in Germany and at the time the biggest in Continental Europe, though it was later surpassed. A temporary station was opened in 1874; the old one was demolished in 1875 and the new one begun in 1876. On 15 June 1880, the new terminus was opened by Kaiser Wilhelm I and Chancellor Otto von Bismarck. The new façade was 101 m across and embellished with zinc sculptures titled Day and Night by Ludwig Brunow (1843-1913), positioned on either side of the clock above the main entrance. Emil Hundrieser (1846-1911) was responsible for a sculpture on the very top of the façade called The International Traffic. Inside the building was a lavish and spacious booking hall with separate waiting rooms and facilities for no fewer than four classes of ticket holders. A separate entrance and reception area were provided for visiting royalty, and these saw frequent use. Behind all this, the huge iron and glass train-shed roof by writer and engineer Heinrich Seidel (1842-1906) measured 171 m long by 62 m wide (covering 10,600 m2, under which 40,000 people could stand), and rose to 34 m in height along its centre line. The Anhalter Güterbahnhof (goods station), also opened, south of the Landwehr Canal on the same date as the passenger station.
Initially the rebuilt terminus was still handling train services mainly to and from Leipzig, Frankfurt am Main and Munich, over the old Anhalter route. However, two years later it inherited a whole new range of services with the closure of the Dresdner Bahnhof. This terminus had opened on 17 June 1875, with trains to Dresden (over the so-called "Dresdener line"), Prague and Vienna, but was small and inconveniently sited some distance from the centre of the city, south of the Landwehr Canal. The Anhalter Bahnhof was more than capable of handling these services as well, and so on 15 October 1882 they were switched, and the Dresdner Bahnhof closed (its building actually still exists, next to the present Gleisdreieck U-Bahn station, having for many years served as part of a major mail-handling facility, itself since closed, called the Postbahnhof). This move was the key to establishing the Anhalter Bahnhof's ultimate importance, as the terminus became Berlin's “Gateway to the South,” with services via Dresden not only to Prague and Vienna, but to places as far away as Rome, Naples and Athens.
Next to the passenger terminus, was the Anhalter Güterbahnhof (goods station). The building, which had also been built by Franz Heinrich Schwechten, was located on the south bank of the Landwehr Canal immediately to the east of the parallel passenger lines. This artistic representation is Schwechten's own front elevation, showing the twin administration blocks linked by an attractive bridge structure, with three arches through which road vehicles passed into the so-called "ladestrasse" (loading road), wide. On either side were covered goods-handling areas some in length, with the railway sidings on the other side, to enable efficient movement of goods from railway wagons to road vehicles or vice versa.
Since the early 20th century, the area around the Anhalter Bahnhof was popular with industrialists looking for a suitable location to build a nationwide cartel headquarters. The most renowned cartel of these was the German potash syndicate.
Nazi Germany By the 1930s, trains left its six platforms every three to five minutes, carrying an average of 44,000 people daily (around 16 million a year, compared with barely 49,000 at Berlin Tempelhof Airport). Though still less busy than the Potsdamer Bahnhof up the road, the Anhalter Bahnhof was superior in its sheer scale, and in the opulence of its train services. Also by this time, the station was connected directly with a hotel which faced it across Askanischer Platz - the Hotel Excelsior, Europe's largest - by means of a tunnel, believed to be the longest of its kind in the world at 100 m, constructed in 1927–1928. The station had an underground arcade with five shops.
However, despite its size and passenger numbers, the station was earmarked for redevelopment as part of Adolf Hitler's grand plan to transform Berlin into the Welthauptstadt (World Capital) Germania. Under the Nazis’ plan, which was to be realised by Albert Speer, the building would have ceased to be a railway terminus because the new triumphal avenue known as the North-South Axis would have severed its tracks. All rail traffic arriving in Berlin would instead have been redirected to two vast new stations located on the Ringbahn. To the north of the city centre, would have been the Nordbahnhof (North Station) at Wedding and opposite to that would have been the Südbahnhof (South Station) in Südkreuz. According to Speer's plan, the Anhalter Bahnhof was earmarked to become a public swimming pool.
World War II
During World War II, the Anhalter Bahnhof was one of three stations used to deport about 55,000 Berlin Jews between 1941 and 1945, about a third of the city's entire Jewish population (as of 1933). From Anhalter Bahnhof, 9,600 Jews left in groups of 50 to 100 at a time using 116 trains. In contrast to other deportations which used freight wagons, Jews were taken away in ordinary passenger coaches which were coupled up to regular trains running according to the normal timetable. All deportations were to Theresienstadt in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia and from there to other concentration camps.
Anhalter Bahnhof, like most of Berlin, was devastated by British and American bombs and Soviet artillery shells. A massive bombing raid on the night of 23 November 1943 badly affected the station and caused so much damage to rail infrastructure further out that only a few local services could operate and no long-distance trains. Two further major raids on 3 February and 26 February 1945 left the terminus with large sections of its roof missing, the rest unsafe and tottering and no trains running at all. Many sections of the S-Bahn as well as the U-Bahn were also closed during the war due to enemy action and the section through Anhalter Bahnhof was no exception.
Post war A fragmentary train service resumed along the North-South Link on 2 June 1946 once massive repairs were well advanced (water had to be pumped out at the beginning). Full services recommenced on 16 November 1947, although repairs were not complete until May 1948. The services were extended further in 1951. Another interruption of services was caused by the uprising of 1953 in East Germany, no trains running between 17 June, the day of the uprising, and 9 July. Meanwhile, above ground, American servicemen had dismantled the surviving sections of the Anhalter Bahnhof's roof in March 1948, and a limited train service had begun operating again in August, with a few trains running out into the Saxony-Anhalt and Brandenburg regions, but it was not to last. The station's final demise was caused by the rapid collapse of relations between the Allied Occupying Powers which controlled Berlin and Germany as a whole. The Anhalter Bahnhof was served by trains arriving from places in Soviet-controlled East Germany but the terminus was in West Berlin.
Closure and demolition
Due to its location, the Soviets switched all remaining trains to the Ostbahnhof in the Soviet sector on 17 May 1952. With no services, the Anhalter Bahnhof was closed. Although detailed plans and an architect's model were drawn up to build a vast modern terminus on the site, nothing happened.
After lying derelict for more than eight years, with some tracks and signals still in situ, demolition was begun on 25 August 1960 and completed by 27 August despite considerable public outcry. Part of the centre portion of the façade was allowed to remain standing.
Redevelopment The area around Anhalter has been significantly redeveloped since the 1950s. There is a memorial display board honouring the Berlin Jews taken from here and elsewhere to their deaths by the Nazis during World War II.
The original "Day and Night" sculptures from the façade, photographed in 2003 in their new home, the German Museum of Technology. Day is on the right, gazing into the distance, while Night, on the left, is looking away.
This view shows the rear of the façade remnant in 2005. In the left background is Europahaus, an office block dating from the early 1930s, while in the right background is the 18-storey Excelsiorhaus, on the site of the former hotel. The tunnel that once linked the station with the hotel was demolished in the mid-1980s as part of roadworks. In the foreground is a large new synthetic playing surface for sports where the train shed once stood. Immediately south, directly behind the photographer, is the Tempodrom.
The Tempodrom, a major new concert and event venue opened on 8 December 2001, extends across the site of the terminus just south of the train shed's former location. Its innovative futuristic roof rises to a height of 37.5 m.
Further south still, extending down to the Landwehr Canal, is an area of woodland, recently tidied up and new paths laid, but amongst the trees and undergrowth, several crumbling sections of platforms are still clearly visible.