Platform 17 at Grunewald S-Bahn station is no longer in use. When it was, tens of thousands of Jews were sent from this platform to their deaths
From 1941 to 1945, tens of thousands of Jews boarded a train from Platform 17 at Grunewald train station. From here, the trains traveled to the death camps in German occupied countries, where the passengers were murdered. Today, Platform 17, or Gleis 17 in German, is a memorial.
From fall 1941 to spring 1942 alone, 10,000 Jews from Berlin were deported to ghettos and concentration camps in Riga, Lodz, Minsk and Warsaw from the train station in Grunewald. 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.
Photo by Chrissie Sternschnuppe.
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, Platform 17 is a Holocaust memorial to the tens of thousands of Jews who were sent to their deaths from Berlin. You can walk up to the platform and see date by date how many Jews were put on the train and where they were sent.
Photo by Chrissie Sternschnuppe@Flickr. CC BY-SA.
The Platform 17 Memorial was built 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.
In memory of the tens of thousands of Jewish citizens of Berlin who were deported from here to the death camps and murdered by the Nazi executioners from October 1941 to February 1945.
Photo by Chrissie Sternschnuppe@Flickr. CC BY-SA.
Where:
Am Bahnhof Grunewald
14193 Berlin
Family friendly: Yes
Price: Free
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