In the forests west of Berlin, a hill rises above the treeline that shouldn't exist. It was built by hand from the rubble of 400,000 bombed buildings. Beneath it, entombed in concrete, lies an unfinished Nazi military college so solidly built that the Allies couldn't demolish it — so they buried it instead.

On top of all of that, the stood one of the most important spy stations in the world.

From 1961 to 1991, over a thousand operatives worked around the clock at Field Station Berlin — known to locals as Teufelsberg, Devil's Mountain — intercepting Soviet and East German military communications, feeding intelligence to the NSA, the CIA, and British intelligence. Most of what they heard is still classified.

Then the Berlin Wall fell, the agencies packed up and left, and Teufelsberg was reclaimed by the forest.

In this episode, I visit Teufelsberg — climbing the hill, stepping through the chain-link fence, and standing inside the radar domes where some of the Cold War's most sensitive intelligence work took place.

Some places hold their secrets long after the people who kept them are gone; Teufelsberg is one of them.

My book BERLIN UNDERGROUND was party inspired by Teufelsberg and other places in Berlin. Tap here to read it.

Here's what Berlin Underground is all about:

A missing fashion tycoon. Rival gangs at war. A city built on secrets.

When Leo and Allissa take what looks like a straightforward case, they’re pulled into the darkest corners of Berlin — from its underground techno clubs to the eerie ruins of Teufelsberg, an abandoned Cold War listening post looming over the city.

But someone will do anything to keep the truth buried.

With Berlin’s most dangerous man closing in, Leo and Allissa find themselves trapped in a deadly game of violence, betrayal, and shifting loyalties. And as the pressure mounts, the bond between them is pushed to breaking point

Because this case is bigger than a disappearance.

It’s a secret people have killed to protect for decades — and if Leo and Allissa don’t uncover it in time, Berlin may bury them with it.

Takeaways:

• The origins of Teufelsberg, constructed from rubble over two decades, illustrate human resilience in the face of destruction.
• Field Station Berlin served as a crucial intelligence hub during the Cold War, monitoring Soviet communications.
• The evolution of Teufelsberg from a military site to an artistic space reflects the changing narrative of Berlin.
• The intricate history of surveillance at Teufelsberg remains largely classified, shrouding its operations in mystery.
• Local efforts transformed Teufelsberg into a ski slope in the 1950s, showcasing adaptability amid urban challenges.
• Today, Teufelsberg stands as an open-air gallery, demonstrating how history can inspire contemporary creativity.

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If you have a mystery, legend, or adventure you’d like me to explore, drop a comment or email me at hello@lukerichardsonauthor.com. I’d love to hear from you!

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In the forests of West Berlin, a hill rises above the tree line.

As you follow the path, winding upwards through the trees, something feels wrong about the gradient.

The slope is too steep, too perfectly formed to be natural.

Which makes sense because nature didn't make this hill.

Human hands did.

Truck by truck, day by day, for over 20 years, piling the rubble of a destroyed city into something that now passes for a landscape.

You keep climbing, and then through the trees.

Gradually, something emerges, rearing above the branches.

Climbing higher, it resolves into focus.

Then you recognize them as radar domes, these enormous white orbs that loom over the forest like the remnants of some half forgotten science fiction film.

You continue and come face to face with a triple chain link fence.

It's the sort of thing that tells you, without any sort of apology, that getting inside is not for the faint of heart.

Finding the gate, you head through and look up at the buildings that peer through the undergrowth.

Broken windows looking down at you like a gap toothed smile.

Welcome to Field Station Berlin.

Known to the locals simply as Teufelsberg, Devil's Mountain.

Hey, I'm Luke.

I'm an author of archaeological adventure novels.

I travel the world looking for stories to put into my books and to share with you right here on the Adventure Story podcast.

Now, now, now, just quickly before we dive in, most podcasts grow through recommendations.

So if you're enjoying the show, you're liking the things I'm talking about, going on adventures with me, please share it with any adventure lovers in your life.

Right, let's go to Berlin.

At its peak, Field Station Berlin was one of the most important spy stations in the world.

Over a thousand people worked from here around the clock, intercepting Soviet and East German military communications, feeding intelligence to the nsa, the CIA and British intelligence.

What they heard in the rooms of this building helped shape the course of the Cold War.

And most of what they heard to this day remains classified.

To understand this place properly though, we have to go back in time.

The building was designed by Albert Speer, the Nazis chief architect.

When the war ended, the Allies tried to demolish the complex, but found it just too robust to bring down easily.

So they did the only thing they could do.

They buried it.

Now with a Fuel shortage and limited space to put the rubble from the war damaged city, they just piled it on top of the college.

Over the following two decades, an estimated 12 million cubic meters, the remains of roughly 400,000 bombed buildings, grew the pile into a hill.

Local women transported much of it by hand.

The small army becoming known as Trummerfrauent or rubble women.

Eventually, the hill, now 120 meters high, became the highest point in the city.

The city had been divided since the end of the Second World War.

East and West, Soviet and Allied, separated first by an invisible line and then later from August 61, by a wall of concrete and wire that snaked through the heart of the city.

Berlin was the front line of the Cold War.

The place where the two competing visions of the world stared at each other across a few hundred feet of no man's land, and where the smallest miscalculation could have triggered something catastrophic.

In that context, intelligence was everything.

The Western Allies needed to know what the Soviets were planning the and what their military was doing, and how their communications worked and where their weaknesses were.

They needed to listen.

And to understand.

And listening in a city surrounded on all sides by Soviet controlled territory required height.

From these domes, intelligence officers monitored radio communications from deep into East Germany, into Poland and towards the Soviet Union itself.

Apparently, work inside the station was highly classified and structured like a puzzle.

Everyone only knew their tiny small part of what was being collected and why.

The data was stored on paper and recorded on tape.

And these large incinerators regularly destroyed the information to stop it falling into the wrong hands.

Walking through the abandoned station to this day, some of these vast machines remain.

They were clearly too big to pack down and take away.

In other places, bolt marks and severed electricity cables show where something was, but has long since been removed.

And inside those iconic radar domes now open to the sky, that's where the most sensitive surveillance equipment the Western alliance possessed constantly scanned and listened for 30 years.

One of the most remarkable footnotes in this station's history.

One of the most interesting Things involves a Ferris wheel.

During the annual German American Volksfest held nearby, the NSA discovered that the Ferris wheel they bought on site just for the festival significantly improved the radio reception.

Functioning as something like an accidental resonator, they talked the festival organizers into keeping the wheel in place long after the festival was over, just to help them listen to that little bit more.

Now, whilst the facility itself was obviously far too big to be kept a secret, what went on inside was highly restricted, giving rise to elaborate stories, including the possible existence of tunnels beneath.

Now, whether any of this is true has never been confirmed.

What is known, though, is that the Nazi college buried beneath the hill was never fully explored after the war.

So who's to know what deep concrete chambers could remain there to this day?

Before the spies arrived, though, Teufelsburg had a rather more innocent purpose.

They've made the most of it.

A ski slope was built down one side of the hill, complete with a ski lift, a ski jump, the and a grandstand capable of holding 5,000 people.

For a brief, slightly surreal period, families could sledge down what was essentially a mountain built from the ruins of their own city.

But activities on Teufelsburg, the spy station itself, all had to come to an end.

The site passed through several owners, accumulating a remarkable series of failed redevelopment plans along the way, including luxury apartments, a hotel, a spy museum, and most memorably, a proposal by American film director David lynch to establish a meditation university on the site.

None of it came to anything, though.

What Teufelsberg became instead was something nobody planned.

One of the largest open air street art galleries in Europe, with over 400 works by local and international artists covering the abandoned spaces.

Now, I first visited Teufelsberg while researching for my novel Berlin Underground, and it got under my skin in the way only extraordinary places like that do.

Standing inside one of those domes, looking up through the open roof at a sky crisscrossed with graffiti and the ghosts of all those thousands of intercepted signals and secrets.

For me as an author, it was impossible not to feel the weight and the intrigue of everything that happened there and everything that could still be buried beneath layer upon layer of history, each trying to bury the one before.

Things like this you can feel in cities like Berlin.

I think the veterans who worked here left a commemorative plaque on the site.

Inscribed on it, in Morse code are the words, in God we trust.

All others we monitor.

For me, it's funny, it's proud.

And it captures something true about what this place was.

But walking through the empty rooms now, severed cables trailing across the floor, the incinerator still too large to move, I kept thinking about all those things that those walls had heard and how much of it is still classified, still locked away in its own way, still buried.

If you're ever in Berlin, go.

It's unlike anywhere else, in my opinion.

And the view from the top, looking out over the city that was divided and then reunited and is still somehow making sense of it all, is one you won't forget.

Teufelsberg and Berlin itself inspired my book Berlin Underground, which is the third book in my international detective series.

I love doing this when I explore a place and I sort of get a feeling for it and then I go and put it into a book.

It's one of the things that, for me, brings travel to life, and I get to share it with you as well.

That's available wherever books are sold.

You can search for it.

It's also available in audiobook as well.

And here's what it's all about.

A missing fashion tycoon.

Rival gangs at war.

A city built on secrets.

When Leo and Alyssa take what looks to be a straightforward case, they're pulled into the darkest corners of Berlin, from its underground techno clubs to the eerie ruins of Teufelsberg.

An abandoned Cold War listening post looming over the city.

But someone will do anything to keep the truth buried.

With Berlin's most dangerous men closing in, Leo and Alyssa find themselves trapped in a deadly game of violence, betrayal, and shifting loyalties.

As the pressure mounts, the bond between them is pushed to breaking point.

Because this case is bigger than a disappearance.

It's a secret people have killed to protect for decades.

And if Leo and Alyssa don't uncover it in time, Berlin may bury them with it.

Berlin Underground is the gripping third book in my international detective series.

Search online and start reading it or listening to it today.

This is the Adventure Story podcast.

Thank you so much for hanging out today.

It's great to be able to share these stories and I particularly like it when it's a place like this that I feel I know that means something to me that I've enjoyed visiting in the past.

I hope it encourages you to perhaps seek that out as well.

If you've enjoyed the show today, please subscribe, please like and please share.

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And if you're a fan of adventure stories like the one we talked about today, check out my books.

Lukerichardsonauthor.com Bon voyage.

Enjoy the adventure and I'll see you next time.