From 1941 to 1945, tens of thousands of Jews boarded a train from Gleis 17 at Grunewald train station. From here, the trains traveled to the death camps in German occupied countries, where the passengers were murdered. Today, Gleis 17 (platform 17) is a Holocaust memorial.

From fall 1941 to spring 1942 alone, 10,000 Jews from Berlin were deported to forced labor camps and concentration camps in Riga, Lodz, Minsk and Warsaw from the train station in Grundwald. Most of them perished in the camps.

Grunewald was just one of three stations in Berlin from which Jews were sent to their deaths in uncomfortable train transports. Another train station was Anhalter Bahnhof, which today lies in ruins.

After the Wannsee Conference, where the Final Solution to the Jewish Question was decided, Jews from Berlin were also taken by train directly to Auschwitch-Birkenau and Theresienstadt in German-occupied Poland from the train station in Grunewald.

Today, Gleis 17 is a memorial to the tens of thousands of Jews who were sent to their deaths from Berlin. You can go up on the platform and see date by date how many Jews were put on the train and where they were sent.

Gleis 17 was built as a memorial in 1998 by Deutsche Bahn.

It’s a place of reflection where you can wander down the platform on one side, cross the tracks with the disintegrating railroad sleepers and back again on the other side.