E agle-eyed football fans heading to Berlin’s Olympiastadion for the Euros may spot what looks like an abandoned space station topped with four enormous white orbs on a hill a mile or so south of the ground. The Guardian’s journalism is independent. We will earn a commission if you buy something through an affiliate link.
Learn more. The stadium – which will host the Euro 2024 final – has a more storied past than perhaps any other. Built by the Nazis for the 1936 Berlin Olympics, the great African American sprinter Jesse Owens won four gold medals here in front of a watching Adolf Hitler, single-handedly debunking the Führer’s myth of Aryan supremacy.
The overnight sleeper pulls into Gesundbrunnen station, it is still dark, deserted and shrouded in a pre-dawn mist But the weird sci-fi-looking building nearby has an even more fascinating history. Teufelsberg (Devil’s Mountain) is a manmade hill eight miles west of the city centre, created from 25 million cubic metres of second world war Berlin rubble that was piled on top of a Nazi military academy to form the highest point in the city. Then, at the height of the cold war, US intelligence agencies built a hilltop listening station on Teufelsberg to intercept East German and Soviet communication.
The station’s towers and enormous antenna radomes – those white domes that resemble giant golf balls which protected the radars – are almost comically eerie. View image in fullscreen Street artists from all over the.
