Welcome to the Marienfelde Refugee Center Museum, the museum of flight and migration in divided Germany.
We hope you enjoy our walking tour around the former Marienfelde reception center.
On our tour, you can expect exciting insights into the reception center's 70-year history, which is now a listed building. However, it is not only a historical site: Where once people escaped across the inner German border, refugees from all over the world arrive today. Here, more than almost anywhere else in Berlin, the lives of past and present refugees are uniquely interwoven.
The complex was built in 1953 as the first point of contact and reception center for refugees from the German Democratic Republic. In 1964, it also opened up for so called “Aussiedler”. “Aussiedler” is the legal term given to Germans who have immigrated to the Federal Republic of Germany from the then communist states of Eastern and Central Europe since 1950. German unification in 1990 ended inner-German refugee movements, but the site remained a reception center for “Aussiedler”. However, the number of new arrivals steadily declined. The center was closed in 2010, only to reopen its doors a short time later as accommodation for refugees from war zones and crisis areas worldwide.
Before we start, we would like to say a few introductory words about how the tour is arranged. The tour takes you to ten Points of Interest around the former refugee center. You can follow the directions on the map sections to get from one point to the next. The dots mark the location of each station. How to get there is explained in the map section.
At each stop, we will direct your attention to a visible trace of the past on-site and invite you to compare it with historical photos in the guide. You can click on the images to zoom in.
You can listen to the guide as you walk. If the surroundings are too noisy or you don’t have headphones, you can read the text on the corresponding page.