Dusing the Cold War, nearly all highway travel to Berlin ran through Checkpoint Bravo outside Potsdam.
My interest in Germany started when the Army sent me there during the late 1960s. Recently, I’d read that much of the checkpoint infrastructure I used to drive through on the way to Berlin had disappeared, and I wanted to see how well my memories fitted with what was left.
Berlin by car meant going through checkpoints on the East German and Allied sides of the East Germany-West Berlin border, with maybe a pause at a bright red rest-stop restaurant. That ended when East Germany and West Germany reunited at the start of the 1990s.
In general, traffic from across West Germany was funneled to Helmstedt on the border with East Germany. From there, the A2 autobahn and a couple of connectors took you more than 100 miles through the communist East to the divided city — and back.
The Helmstedt transit highway wasn’t the only way to Berlin, but it was by far the most heavily used. Once over the border, Allied military personnel weren’t allowed to stop or get out of the car (although civilians could use a rest stop). If military personnel had a breakdown, they waited for help.
Coming from the West, when you got to the Potsdam area, you took the Berlin ring road to what today is the A115 north. You reached the East German checkpoint with its watchtower first and farther along the Allied Checkpoint Bravo.
The less rigorous seeming Allied checkpoint was mainly staffed by U.S. military police; civilian traffic was handled by West Berlin police and customs.
The checkpoint had been a place to connect with the young Germans that American troops lived among. Hitchhiking students and others with hand-lettered destination signs massed at the checkpoint and were quick to jump in the car to get to the West.
I wasn’t sure, if I drove, whether I’d be able to leave the highway to check my memories at the three sites, so I decided to approach them on foot from the back. My objectives were the funny looking red restaurant, the former Allied Checkpoint Bravo and the East German watchtower.
Google Maps said to leave the Wannsee train station from the south, go into the Düppler Forst woods and walk along the old highway to the new autobahn. The new highway had resulted from the East Germans’ “realigning” a loop out of the old highway for security reasons.
There were no direction signs in the woods; that’s more important than it seems. Many paths in the woods go nowhere. They just stop. Those paths, which sometimes go back hundreds of years, are “spur” trails cleared to move wood out of the woods in logging operations. Web advice was to look for a path as wide as a highway or for blacktop or other signs that the path had been a roadway.
For probably a mile, I shared the path with walkers, bikers and other Sunday hikers.
I knew I was on track when I sighted cars through the trees on the new highway.
Then the old rest-stop restaurant peeked out from behind the trees. Still bright red.
A news item said the restaurant, which opened in the early 1970s and closed after German reunification, had been sold to a car dealer. It was to reopen in 2025 as a showroom, restaurant and event space, but it was still closed when I stopped by. The parking area around it was fenced and full of autos.
A little farther down the wooded trail, the old Allied checkpoint appeared.
The former Checkpoint Bravo still extended across the highway, but signs said it now was being used by German customs officials. It was Sunday and the offices were dark, but the Web said tourists weren’t allowed to view the old MP offices anyway.
Much of the checkpoint area, such as inspection stations, was still “retired”.
The old East German watchtower was another 10 minutes away on a corner of a flourishing business park. The building was maintained by volunteers and open to tourists on Sunday roughly from late May to early November.
The tower actually was a squat two-story building with wide windows on all sides of the second floor. Outside the “tower” were a series of rust-colored steel columns with photos and text about the checkpoints and the East German-West Berlin border.
Inside the watchtower, a mannequin on duty at the bottom of the second-floor stairs wore the uniform of the East German military personnel who worked here.
The second floor was nearly naked. But the windows used to give a good view of the eastern side of the old checkpoint area.
Today, the view is of tech companies at neighboring Europarc. Tenant lists have included eBay, PayPal, business software giant SAP, Google and others.
On the other side of the highway, a Soviet T-34 tank on a pedestal used to memorialize tank crews who died on the advance to Berlin in 1945. I’d planned to cross over to see it until I got to the watchtower.
In the lobby of the tower, a book for sale detailed how the tank memorial had changed. The Soviets removed the tank in 1990. The old pedestal now contains a piece of Soviet snow-removal equipment — painted pink. The artist said it was to commemorate the Peaceful Revolution of 1989 that led to German reunification in 1990.
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