Chris Froome b Profile

ithin minutes of striking north from the station towards the end of S-bahn line seven the first planes appear in the distance. East Their engines whine as they plunge downwards, locked together in a spiralling dogfight. The cloudless sky gives no indications of scale and it takes a moment to Wconnect the men standing at the edge of the scrubland, from staring intently upwards, with the planes darting through the still afternoon air. Situated south-west of Berlin, on the edge of the Grunewald forest, the Teltow plateau commands a complete view over the sprawling city. It’s a popular spot with model Devil's aeroplane enthusiasts and anyone else seeking escape from the metropolis without the need to spend more than the cost of an S-bahn ticket. Standing a further 260ft above the surrounding area is the , or Devil’s Mountain. Ap- parent despite a dense shroud of tree cover, the uniformity of Mountain its steeply angled sides marks it out as an unnatural addition America’s abandoned listening to the landscape. Scrabbling towards the summit through the undergrowth eager feet quickly dislodge chunks from the station is an echochamber for hillside, sending them skittering downwards. Just beneath the Berlin’s jumbled post-war history surface and held together by the vegetation that’s colonised the slopes is a mishmash of broken tiles, pipes, crockery and Words & Photography JOSEPH DELVES masonry along with other more personal effects, the remains of thousands and thousands of pulverised buildings. P

90 Chris Froome b Profile When order was finally restored, the survivors emerged to find a city in abject ruins and almost devoid of German men.

P In the autumn of 1945 as the Russians encircled Berlin the remaining population, largely women and those too young or infirm to have yet been sent to die sought shelter in the base- ments and tunnels of their ruined city. Many of the troops now laying siege to the city had survived the German invasion of Russia before marching through the east, seeing firsthand the horrors the Nazis had visited upon the territory they con- quered. Fed a steady diet of anti-soviet propaganda the remain- ing citizens of Berlin were in no doubt what Russian occupation would entail, leading many to hope that by some miracle the British and Americans would outrun the Russians to reach Berlin first. It wasn’t to be. Urging their soldiers onwards into Berlin the Russian generals made clear they expected the men to extract revenge on the city’s population. There’s a longstanding myth that the wine cellars of the remaining hotels and restaurants were deliberately left well-stocked and unsecured by the retreating Nazis in order to slow the Russian advance. It would have made little difference anyway; regardless the fall of the city prefigured a near total breakdown of discipline that saw weeks of rape and murder visited upon the surviving population. When a semblance of order was eventually restored, the survivors emerged to find a city in abject ruins and almost devoid of German men. In their absence it fell to the city’s women to clear and make safe what remained of Berlin. Work- ing in teams they dragged out the corpses and broke apart the ruins, cleaning and sorting the building materials that could be re-used and piling those which couldn’t into great mounds.P

TEUFELSBERG TIMELINE How a piece of Hitler’s Germania came to be buried beneath the ruins of Berlin. 1937 1945 1947 1948 1948 1950 1961 1963 1972 1989

Mobile listening The fall of the Berlin Hitler lays the Divided between units begin opera- When the site Wall renders the foundation stone As the war comes the Soviets and Although the tions on Teufels- was finally American listen- of the Military- to a close the In June the West the Allies, separate Military-Technical berg, having sur- closed to dump- ing post obsolete Technical College Russians encircle The Berlin Block- Berlin Magistrate parliaments are College was only veyed various other Construction of a ing it contained almost overnight. as part of his plan to Berlin. Occupa- ade, and attendant decides to open a formed for East ever half built locales throughout permanent facility approximately After the listen- refashion Berlin as tion by the Soviet airlift halts removal new rubble disposal and , the Allies fail to West Berlin in a begins. 26,000,000 m3 ing equipment Germania, capital of army sees female of rubble from the on the site of the ending much of demolish the search for the best of debris, forming is removed it’s the Reich. Building inhabitants suffer ruined city. half destroyed the cooperation existing building vantage point for a hill of over 120 abandoned and is halted when war widespread sexual Military-Technical between the using explosives. listening to Soviet metres in height. suffers widespread breaks out. violence. College. former partners. military traffic. vandalism.

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In 1961 the partition of the German capital became permanent with the creation of the .

P Having survived the Nazis regime, the siege of Berlin, a well within the Russian zone. Despite this the late arriving campaign of sustained sexual violence on the part of the Rus- Americans, French and British still gained administrative sian and frequently the deaths or internment of their sons and control of the western sectors of the city. Taking an increas- husbands, they laboured in the rubble with their bare hands. ingly antagonistic attitude towards each other, while the rubble Great masses of quietly toiling women became a common sight collected within the eastern half could be spread out over the across . Known as trummerfrau or rubble women, surrounding countryside communist officials wouldn’t let the they fastidiously began to put back in order what between them west of the city export its rubble. the Nazis and the Soviets had thrown into chaos. A decade earlier Hitler’s architect, Albert Speer had been Even as one war came to a close a second was beginning. As tasked with refashioning Berlin as ‘Germania’, the centre of the Stalin drove his armies unsparingly towards Berlin, the Allies new Reich. By the outbreak of war few of his grandiose projects, in an act of astounding naivety, had instead trundled eastward. with the exception of the Olympic Stadium had been realised. With the collapse of the Nazi regime wherever Russian troop His half finished Military-Technical college was to have been P stood came under their de facto control, leaving Berlin stranded located in the north of the city. Proving too robust to

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In 1961 Americans from the (NSA) set up a listening station on top of the rubble mountain on the sight of the Nazis’s former Military-Technical Academy. Finding it a particularly effective spot from which to eavesdrop on mili- tary communications between the countries, a permanent installation quickly sprung up. Consisting of several towers topped by geodesic domes housing an array of listening devices, security around the base was so tight that a series of outlandish rumours sprang up around it, including the belief that it housed a secret submarine base. While NATO sent troops to colonize this key forward posi- tion deep within the Eastern Bloc, Germany itself struggled to find people willing to make the captive city of West Berlin their home. Surrounded on all sides, its economy all but collapsed and the city was instead underwritten by it numerous politi- cal and military backers. To sure-up the dwindling popula- tion young Germans who settled in West Berlin were excused military service. It quickly became the centre of a burgeoning counter-cultural scene. In 1968 student protest swept across Europe. In Paris students built barricades in the street under the slogan ‘be rea- sonable demand the impossible’. The generational conflict that formed the heart of Western Europe’s 68 was largely played out with good humour. A month of rioting in Paris saw not a single fatality. Not so in Germany. When police allowed Iranian agents to assault demonstrators protesting a visit of the Shah of Iran to West Berlin in June 2, 1967 it resulted in the death of a young man, Behno Ohnesburg, shot dead in cold blood by a German Police officer. His death lit the touch paper on a confrontation between students and the authorities that would run hot for decades to come. Germany’s new generation, who had grown up without di- rect experience of the Nazi era were met with silence when they started to delve into their parent’s histories. Increasingly dis- posed to question the legitimacy of a state still largely adminis- tered by people complicit in Nazi era crimes, on a familial level young people began to ask what it was that their parents had done during the blackest years of Europe’s twentieth century. Widespread silence on the part of older Germans combined P demolish using explosives, having occupied Berlin the Al- of the German people who’d so enthusiastically supported the with a horror and desire to make a break with the Nazi past on lies decided instead to bury it, the site becoming the dumping Nazis, quietly disappeared. the part of the younger generation lent Germany’s intergenera- ground for the waste cleared from the western sector. When An anomaly An anomaly adrift deep within the GDR, West Berlin was a tional conflict a particularly violent aspect. the last rubble was deposited, 22 years later the hill was almost constant irritant to . A counterpoint, undermin- While older West Germans tended to see the Americans 400ft high. adrift deep ing the fantasy of a socialist utopia it became a drain as the as liberators, candy bombers and guarantors against Russian In 1961 the partition of the German capital became per- young and talented fled there from across Eastern Europe. It aggression some younger Germans increasingly saw them as manent with the creation of the Berlin wall. This not only within the GDR, was also a nest of spies, as NATO intelligence agents poured collaborating with an illegitimate regime of barely reformed formalised the division of Germany itself but split its people into the city. In an attempt to choke the West into submission Nazis and thanks to the wars in Korea and Vietnam, part of a into two camps, to the east, the anti-fascist, socialist GDR and West Berlin was a the Russians cut off road and rail access to Berlin through East continuation of the Fascist system itself. This conflict reached to the west the defenders of capitalist democracy, NATO’s front Germany, provoking one of the most dangerous moments of its zenith in the actions of the of the Red Army Faction whose line warriors in the new . Keen to shore up their eastern constant irritant the Cold War. Initially having contemplated driving an armed campaign of terror included the assassination of former Nazis flank the western powers didn’t seek to pry too deeply into the convoy across Russian controlled territory instead for 11 months along with the bombing of an American Service Personnel club history of their allies in . Eager for a stable and to socialist East an American orchestrated airlift saw all the cities needs deliv- in 1972 that resulted in the death of three people. malleable client the Russians were equally happy to leave much ered by plane. Colonel Gail Halvorsen tied tiny parachutes to In 1989 an unscripted remark by a GDR functionary led to of the state apparatus unexpunged, instead quickly unearth- Germany packages of sweets and sent them out the window of his C-54 the opening of the Berlin Wall and became the precursor to the ing a tradition of anti-Nazis resistance that formed the creation transport plane, earning him the nickname ‘the candy bomber’. collapse of the . Within months Germany was re- myth of the new East Germany, with any past indiscretions The refusal of the Americans to abandon Berlin not only sent a united and NATO troops were withdrawn. The listening station among its citizens serving as convenient leverage and a guaran- message to the Soviets but also emotionally bound the inhabit- on top of Teufelsberg was abandoned. Various plans totrans- tee of future loyalty. So the demographic, forming the majority ants of the city even closer to their American sponsors. form the site into a tourist attraction came to nothing P

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Sitting in silence the station staff listened out across a divided city and into the east

P and it fell into a period of dereliction, during which it was by turns squatted, extensively vandalized and set alight. Skirting the perimeter of the site today it doesn’t take long to locate a break in the high metal fence. Approaching from the east a series of flooded, low level buildings contain nothing but miles of burnt out wiring, their floors long since collapsed. A series of barracks and mess halls, one containing a mural dedi- cated to the departed servicemen of the Military Police Corps lead to the centre of the complex and the buildings containing the central towers. Accessed via an external staircase topped by a heavy steel door, on the other side it becomes obvious that from a single panel that’s been carved out from its thick shell. absolutely everything of value has long since been stripped Designed as a place in which to intently listen and insulated away, that little which remains having been smashed several from the day outside the smallest noise is infinitely amplified. times over. Luckily despite missing several sections the con- Bouncing from surface to surface, sound focuses at the centre of crete flooring remains resolutely solid. Inside a central access the room, where a pivot indicates the listening apparatus once stair leads up to roof level. The deck of the building commands stood. The effect is uniquely disorientation, making it impos- an uninterrupted view eastwards over Berlin and as far as the sible to locate where any given voice is originating. Standing in Seelow Heights, where the Nazis made their last ditch defense the darkness it’s an uncomfortable place to be. of of the city. Like many of Berlin’s abandoned landmarks the Throughout the Cold War NSA staff worked for hours in this listening station has become one of the city’s unofficial and room, hidden from view in a tower perched on a pile of rubble, illegal historical attractions and a few kids sit around smoking, the remains of a city which gave birth to some of the worst drinking beer and enjoying the view. One of the huge geodesic events in human history. As the world's two super powers domes that housed the listening sits in the corner, the squared up they sat in silence and listened out across a divided wind crying through its tattered fabric shell. city and into the east. The secret signals they spied upon were The doors of the lift shaft that penetrates the centre of the usually little more than inane chatter but always haunted by the building have long since kicked in, peering over the edge into possibility that it could be the news of a new war, one from the darkness provide a frisson of terror, even if it only extends which almost certainly no inhabitant of Berlin, or Europe as far as the basement several hundred feet beneath, and not would survive. The domes at Teufelsberg were designed to pick down to the submarine base once rumoured to lie below. up on distant frequencies, focusing them and making them Circling it, a single flight of stairs leads upwards to the highest intelligible, even at a great distance. It’s impossible to tell if it’s point in the complex. Stepping out into the largest of the listen- just an acoustic trick but stand in the centre of the dome at the ing domes, compared to the rest of the site the sudden change top of Devil’s Mountain today and it’s as if you can still hear in atmosphere is disquieting. Rather than being confronted their reverberations ringing in your ears. ] with another ragged and flimsy fabric structure the final dome Joseph Delves is a freelance journalist, historian and occasional is dark, solid and resoundingly silent, the only light leaking in bicycle mechanic.

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