Nordbahnhof

On the evening of November twenty-seventh, nineteen sixty-two, seventeen-year-old Otfried Reck brought a crowbar and a pocket flashlight with a red bulb to a ventilation shaft near Nordbahnhof. Reck was training as a gas station attendant, but after his recent imprisonment he feared another arrest and wanted to get to West Berlin. His older friend Gerd P. planned to escape with him.

A year earlier, Reck had been detained on Gartenstraße among people gathered at the newly sealed border. A GDR court sentenced the teenager to one and a half years in prison for anti-state remarks. In August nineteen sixty-two, he was released early. Three months later, he returned to the same border with a crowbar.

They chose the route from childhood memory. Otfried and Gerd had grown up in this neighborhood, played on railway property, and had previously gone down through the shaft to the tracks. The opening was now covered by a grate, and beneath the ground ran an S-Bahn line connecting the northern and southern parts of West Berlin.

It was this line that turned Nordbahnhof into a ghost station. After August thirteenth, nineteen sixty-one, the GDR authorities closed stations in East Berlin on West Berlin routes. The entrance from Invalidenstraße was on the eastern side of the border, while the entrance from Gartenstraße was on the western side; the border line ran between them. Passageways were bricked up, grates and alarms were installed, and armed guards were posted on the platform. Trains continued to pass slowly through the station, but their doors did not open here. The name “ghost station” was coined by West Berlin passengers who saw the empty platform with guards from the train cars.

Otfried and Gerd intended to use the only thing that remained operational at this closed station: a train. They wanted to break open the grate, descend into the tunnel, and stop a train bound for West Berlin with the red flashlight. A third friend, Michael M., had no intention of escaping and stayed above to keep watch.

A border guard beneath the tracks heard a noise. When Michael went to check what was happening and did not return, Otfried and Gerd abandoned the attempt. They were already running away from the border when they noticed they were being pursued and took refuge at a familiar roller rink nearby. A lieutenant from the search party shot Otfried in the back. He died in the hospital three hours later. Gerd initially managed to get away, but the next day he and Michael were arrested; both were sentenced to three years in prison. Otfried’s parents were informed of their son’s death only two days later. In nineteen ninety-five, the shooter was found guilty of manslaughter and received a two-year suspended sentence.

Today, trains stop at Nordbahnhof again. In the intermediate concourse, the lines of the barrier walls that once cut through the passageways are marked, and in the park above the tunnel stands a memorial marker bearing Otfried Reck’s name.