The Spy Who Walked Out - Tränenpalast

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The low glass pavilion at Reichstagufer 17 was built by the East German railways in 1962, one year after the Wall went up, as the departure hall of the border crossing at Friedrichstraße station. Because East Germans who could not travel said goodbye to their Western visitors at its door, Berliners christened it the Tränenpalast, the Palace of Tears. Behind its roughly ten passport booths sat Stasi officers in border guard uniforms, yet on 19 January 1979 the fortress was beaten from the inside. Werner Stiller, a physicist and first lieutenant in the Stasi's foreign intelligence arm, the HVA, had secretly been working with the West German BND for months. That night he carried a bundle of HVA files through the station's service crossing and simply walked into West Berlin. Agents in West Germany, Austria, France and the United States were exposed and arrested, more than forty others were hastily recalled, and Stiller helped unmask spymaster Markus Wolf, the man without a face, whose photograph landed on the cover of Der Spiegel in March 1979. The hall also witnessed a killing: on 29 March 1974 Polish firefighter Czesław Kukuczka was shot in the back here by a Stasi officer who was finally convicted of murder in October 2024. Since 2011 the building has been a free museum on everyday life in divided Germany.

Datos clave

• 1979 year — On 19 January 1979 HVA first lieutenant Werner Stiller walked through the service crossing at Friedrichstraße station into West Berlin with a bundle of secret Stasi files.
• 40 agents recalled — After the defection, numerous East German agents in the West were arrested and more than forty others were hastily pulled back to the GDR before they could be caught.
• 10 passport booths — Roughly ten control booths staffed by Stasi officers in border guard uniforms processed everyone leaving East Berlin through this hall between 1962 and 1989.

📍 Reichstagufer 17, 10117, Berlin

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