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. It is open 24/7.
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 was also a major border crossing between East and West Berlin.
History
The original station
In 1878, the first station was built after plans by Johannes Vollmer between the Friedrichstraße and the river Spree as part of the Berlin Stadtbahn construction. The architect was working on the neighbouring Hackescher Markt station at the same time. Just as the elevated viaduct the station is integrated into, the station rests on large arches built with masonry. The station had two platforms each with two tracks, covered by a large, curved train shed which rested on steel trusses of different lengths to cover the curvature of the viaduct underneath. The main entrance was on the northern side, the pick-up point for horse carriages on the south side. The station was officially opened on 7 February 1882, as part of the ceremonial opening of the Berlin Stadtbahn. Long-distance trains began running on 15 May the same year.]
Extensions and remodeling
Due to the large amounts of traffic passing through the station even before World War I, plans were made in 1914 to extend the station. There was a new, slightly elevated platform on the northern side for the S-Bahn, and the existing platforms had been made slightly narrower, leaving one platform for the S-Bahn, and two platforms for long-distance trains. The steel-truss, double-arched train shed was built between 1919 and 1925, featuring large glass fronts. On the northern side of the building, two entry halls in expressionist style were built, and the whole northern side was covered by characteristic dark tiles. The southern façade was only plastered until the last renovation in 1999, when it was also covered by tiles.
In 1923, the Friedrichstraße underground station for line C (today's U6 and southeastern U7) was finished, creating the first part of the underground maze the station still has today.
At the beginning of the 1930s, construction began again at the Friedrichstraße station, as the North-South tunnel of the S-Bahn was driven under the station. A long pedestrian tunnel connected to the underground station of the same name Berlin U-Bahn was also driven under the northern end of the station, and that underground station received the characteristic yellow tiles still featured today. On 27 July 1936, just before the 1936 Summer Olympics, the underground S-Bahn station was opened.
After the events of "Kristallnacht", starting on 1 December 1938, thousands of Jewish children started from or passed through the station to leave Germany as part of the Refugee Children Movement.
The station was bombed by the Polish sabotage and diversionary squad "Zagra-Lin" in early 1943, with 14 people dead and 27 wounded.
The station escaped major damage during the bombing of Berlin in World War II. The U-Bahn and S-Bahn ceased operations on 23 and 25 April 1945, respectively, due to electricity power cuts. During the morning of 2 May 1945, the day the Berlin garrison surrendered to the Soviet Red Army, a detonation in the North-South tunnel under the Landwehrkanal caused the flooding of the tunnel, including Friedrichstraße's below-ground S-Bahn station, along with a large part of the Berlin underground system via the connecting tunnel between the S-Bahn and the Berlin U-Bahn at their respective Friedrichstraße stations.See History of the Berlin U-Bahn#World War II
Reconstruction started in 1945. Trains first returned to the facilities above ground. By the end of May and early June 1945 the BVG, the operator of Berlin's U-Bahn, had sealed up the pedestrian tunnel between the tunnel of the S-Bahn and U-Bahn stations to stop water flooding into the tunnel. Reichsbahn, the operator of the S-Bahn, declared that it lacked the means to plug the tunnel leaks. On 4 June 1945, BVG started to drain the underground system of water ingress. On 12 July 1945, the underground reopened at Friedrichstraße station for two one-track shuttle operations, one from the north and one from the south meeting there, and regular two-track traffic restarted on 5 December 1945. Reichsbahn drained its North-South tunnel only later and restarted below-ground S-Bahn services on 2 June 1946. On 1 December 1946, the North-South tunnel and Friedrichstraße below-ground S-Bahn station shut again for an extensive refurbishment which lasted until 16 October 1947, when the North-South tunnel was again fully operational.
Border crossing during the Cold War
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 force, 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 extent 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 amounted to 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 East German uprising of 1953, the East German Deutsche Reichsbahn 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 passing through Berlin. The district of Berlin-Mitte, where the Friedrichstraße station is located, was surrounded in the northerly, westerly, and southerly directions by the 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 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 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 now became the terminus for the Stadtbahn lines to Erkner, Königs Wusterhausen, Strausberg Nord, Ahrensfelde, Wartenberg, and to the Berlin-Schönefeld airport.
Between 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 and Stasi officers.
Tracks between the western and eastern systems were, aside from the long-distance tracks, completely separated. S-Bahn trains using the heavily guarded passing track west of platform C required permission from the commander of the border guard detail. An exchange of rolling stock between the divided S-Bahn segments of Berlin was only possible via the long-distance tracks on platform A. These tracks were equipped with derailers to prevent escape attempts.
At ground level, between the elevated and the underground parts of the station, were facilities for crossing into East Berlin. This included three individual passport checks, a customs control, waiting rooms (since the crossing could take anywhere from 15 minutes to several hours), interrogation rooms, holding cells, offices to register and record people crossing the border, and a counter for visa fees and the (mandatory) currency exchange.
Due to its location in central Berlin, with its many shops, offices, official buildings, embassies, hotels, as well as cultural and entertainment (Friedrichstadtpalast, Metropol theatre house, opera house, Museum Island), as well as being a border checkpoint, the volume of traffic in the station was enormous. In the beginning after the wall was built, both eastbound and westbound border traffic was controlled at ground level. These rather constrained circumstances, compounded by the traffic in and around the station, led to the construction of a building on the square north of the station, which was connected to the main station. This new building was used for westbound border crossings, with separate checkpoints for West Berliners, West Germans, foreigners and diplomats, transit travelers, and the small number of East Germans with exit visas. On the door was a guard station to separate people permitted to cross the border from those who were ineligible, leading to many tearful goodbyes in front of the building. This gave the building the moniker Tränenpalast ("Palace of Tears").