A personal memory from 1970s Berlin…
In the late 1970s, I lived in Berlin for two years. My husband was in the military and was stationed at Field Station Berlin. We lived in an apartment off-base, on the corner of Ringstraße and Finckensteinallee—about a mile from the Andrews barracks, a former SS facility.
We walked in and out of those front gates a thousand times. After a while I began to notice an older woman standing across the street on the corner. At first my mind just acknowledged that she was there.
Then I began to wonder why she was there. Her posture was stooped and even if she stood straight, she probably wasn’t anymore then five feet tall. Always dressed in very dark garments, dark shoes and a dark scarf around her head.
You could barely see her face. Even during the hottest part of the summer she wore the same clothing. The closest I ever saw her was from the other side of the street. I was very young, hardly knew any German and would have never considered walking up to her and talking to her. But I was very curious.
Andrews holds a rich and dark history. It began life as a Prussian Cadet School, housed Hitler’s SS, then the Russians, contained a very large pool (still in use) then the US Army Security Agency. It was also the centrepoint for the ‘Night of the Long Knives.’
It was a place that when you visited you had that creepy, goosebump reaction. There were many of those places in Berlin for me, including one room of our apartment. We visited Andrews often to pick up mail, visit with friends, watch a movie, or visit the small PX (Army and Air Force Exchange Service).
At some point we asked the gate guard what the old woman’s story was. There seemed to be two stories. The first was that this woman’s husband had gone to Andrews on the night of the long knives and was never seen again.