The movement began long before the camp did. In 1949, 129,245 people left the Soviet occupation zone for the West. About 200,000 followed in 1950, some 165,000 in 1951, 182,000 in 1952. West Germany passed its Federal Emergency Admission Law on 22 August 1950 to give the arrivals a legal footing; West Berlin adopted the same law on 4 February 1952.

Then the ground shifted. On 26 May 1952 the East German government closed the inner German border — fences, a ploughed strip, a controlled zone, villages cut off from their own fields. What remained was Berlin, where the sectors still touched, streets still ran across them, and an S-Bahn ticket still worked. For nine more years that gap in the middle of a sealed country was the way out, and tens of thousands of people used it.

A small camp had operated in Charlottenburg since January 1950 and was hopelessly overrun. On 30 July 1952 the cornerstone of a much larger centre was laid at Marienfelde, on the southern edge of the American sector — chosen because it stood near Tempelhof airport and the S-Bahn lines, and a reassuring distance from the Soviet sector boundary. The new barracks opened on 14 April 1953 and the centre began full operation that August.

What arrivals found was a bureaucracy and a bed: registration, a medical examination, food, identity papers, a room shared with strangers, and a wait for resettlement somewhere in the West. Nobody was staying. Everyone in those blocks had walked out of one life that week and was waiting for permission to start another, in most cases having left behind a flat, a job, relatives and a return address they could no longer use. On 20 September 1956 the centre formally registered its one-millionth arrival.

There was another routine at Marienfelde that appears in no brochure. Western Allied intelligence officers interviewed arrivals as a matter of course, and the questions were about the country they had just walked out of.

It was the one commodity every new arrival carried. They had lived in East German towns, worked in East German plants, done East German military service, and the West wanted all of it — which meant that people at the most exposed moment of their lives, hours or days after a decision that had cost them everything, sat down with strangers who would not say who they worked for. The screening ran both ways: Western authorities feared agents entering with the crowds, so the same conversations also served as a filter. Whatever their intelligence value, the experience belonged to people who had come looking for shelter and were asked, first, to be useful.

The numbers in 1961 tell you that people could feel what was coming. June brought 19,198 arrivals to Marienfelde. July brought 30,444 — a thousand a day. In the first days of August it passed twelve hundred a day, and on 12 August it hit two thousand four hundred.

On 13 August the buffer zone between the two halves of the city was closed and construction of the Wall began. The camp did not empty at once. For a few days more people kept coming through the gates, most of them East Germans who had crossed into West Berlin for an ordinary visit and, watching the news, decided not to go home. That is the quietest and hardest fact about that week: many families were divided not by an arrest or a border guard but by a decision taken in an afternoon, by someone who had only meant to be out for the day.

A memorial was inaugurated on the site in 1993. Since April 2005 the permanent exhibition "Flight in Divided Germany" has occupied about 450 square metres with more than 900 objects, run by the Berlin Wall Memorial foundation. The centre marked its sixtieth anniversary in 2013 with a ceremony attended by President Joachim Gauck alongside former refugees, the people the whole place had been built for. In 2021 Hans Ticha's painting "The Wall" went on display.

The part that unsettles visitors most is not in the exhibition. Marienfelde never stopped being what it was built to be. It processed ethnic Germans resettling from the former Soviet Union, and since December 2010 the buildings have again housed refugees and asylum seekers arriving in Berlin from other wars and other borders, under the management of the Internationaler Bund. The museum is due to close in December 2026 for a rebuild, and to reopen in 2028 around a new permanent exhibition on flight and migration — a subject the site has never had to look up.