East from Devil's Mountain

b Chris Froome 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 Teufelsberg, 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 remaining 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 dumping 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 West Berlin, 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. 92 93 Chris Froome b Profile In 1961 the partition of the German capital became permanent with the creation of the Berlin wall. 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 Germany. 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 95 b Chris Froome Profile In 1961 Americans from the National Security Agency (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 military communications between the Warsaw pact 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 population 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 East Germany.

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