Qualla: Marienfelde Refugee Transit Camp

Marienfelde Refugee Transit Camp: Introduction

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Freepenguin, CC BY-SA 3.0. On 12 August 1961 two thousand four hundred people arrived at Marienfelde in a single day. The camp's first ten residential blocks had been built, eight years earlier, to hold around two thousand at a time. None of the people queuing that Saturday knew it was the last ordinary day — that before the next morning was out, East German authorities would seal the boundary between the two halves of Berlin and begin laying the wire that hardened into the Berlin Wall. They knew only what everyone in the East had been reading in the air for months, and had acted on it. Roughly 1.35 million people passed through this reception centre in its working life, out of the four million who left the GDR between 1949 and 1990.

Image: Freepenguin | CC BY-SA 3.0

Marienfelde Refugee Transit Camp: Why Berlin Was the Last Door

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit A.Savin, FAL. 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...

Image: A.Savin | FAL

Marienfelde Refugee Transit Camp: Ten Blocks Near Tempelhof

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Charmbook, CC0. 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 ...

Image: Charmbook | CC0

Marienfelde Refugee Transit Camp: What Do You Know About the Place You Just Left

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Müller, Simon, CC BY-SA 3.0 de. 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 h...

Image: Müller, Simon | CC BY-SA 3.0 de

Marienfelde Refugee Transit Camp: The Summer It Broke

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown author, CC BY-SA 3.0 de. 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 t...

Image: Unknown author | CC BY-SA 3.0 de

Marienfelde Refugee Transit Camp: Still a Reception Centre

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Adrian Purser from London, UK, CC BY-SA 2.0. 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 wi...

Image: Adrian Purser from London, UK | CC BY-SA 2.0