Top Secret - Teufelsberg Spy Station

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A film by Gabriele Denecke. The domed towers of the former “Field Station” on the Teufelsberg in the Grunewald forest dominate the skyline of Berlin. A secret place of espionage, one of the West's most important listening stations during the Cold War. Teufelsberg holds many secrets.
During the Nazi dictatorship, Adolf Hitler laid the foundation stone for the construction of a new military engineering faculty on this site in 1937 - the beginning of Berlin's proposed architectural transformation into the “world capital of Germania”.
After the war, the building was partially blown up and then buried under what became the main dump for Berlin's war debris - the zero hour of Teufelsberg.
For the Americans, the 120-metre-high mountain of rubble seemed the perfect place to set up their easternmost European listening post. The “Field Station” was part of the “Echolon” global eavesdropping network. American and British agents worked in a three-shift system “on the Hill” and used huge radar systems to intercept political and military communications of the Soviet Union and its allies behind the “Iron Curtain”.
This film tells the eventful history of this place through its interviewees. John Schofield, son of a man who worked for the British secret service on the Teufelsberg, goes in search of clues, because his father never spoke about what he did there. In the mid-seventies, the young GI Christopher McLarren came to Berlin and worked as an analyst on Teufelsberg. He still lives in the capital today and talks about the tough security controls at the “Field Station”.
The film uses never-before-seen archive material and newly shot documentary footage, to bring this top-secret location to life.

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