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© PSD by J.Genovard
Teufelsberg

The Spy Listening Station

Teufelsberg in German for Devil’s Mountain, it is a listening station on a hill in West Berlin. The Hill rises about 80 meters above the surrounding Brandenburgplain, more precisely the north of Berlin’s Grunewald forest. It is an artificial hill with a curious history: it was built by the Allies after the Second World War from the rubble of Berlin during the following twenty years as the city was rebuilt. One estimate for the amount of rubble is about 12 million cubic meters, or about 400,000 buildings. It is as high as the highest natural hill “Großer Müggelberg”  in the Berlin area.

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Teufelsberg: The Abandoned Spy Listening Station
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Spy Listening Station

Teufelsberg

The Listening station, the US National Security Agency NSA, built one of the largest listening stations on the top of the hill, rumoured to be part of the global intelligence gathering network, ECHELON. The Hill, as it was known colloquially by many American soldiers who worked there around the clock and who commuted there from their quarters in the American Sector, was located in the British Sector. Prior to establishing the first permanent buildings there in the very late 1950s, Mobile Allied listening units had driven to various other locales throughout West Berlin hoping to gain the best vantage point for listening to Soviet, East German, and other Warsaw Pact nations military traffic.

One such unit drove to the top of Teufelsberg and discovered a marked improvement in listening ability. This discovery eventually led to a large structure being built a top the hill, which would come to be run by the NSA. At the request of US government, the ski lifts were removed because they allegedly disturbed the signals. The station continued to work until the fall of East Germany and the Berlin Wall, but after that the station was closed and the equipment removed. The buildings and radar domes still remain in place from 1992 but the tower dome has been renewed in 1999 to house a airspace control radar.

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