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German Spy Museum

Former name	The Berlin Spy Museum
Established	September 19, 2015 (2015-09-19)
Location	Leipziger Pl. 9, 10117 Berlin, Germany
Type	Spy Museum
Director	Franz-Michael Günther
Website	https://www.deutsches-spionagemuseum.de/en

The Berlin Spy Museum is a private museum in Berlin which was created by former journalist Franz-Michael Günther. The museum opened to the public on the 19^th of September 2015. Günther’s aspirations were to create a museum devoted to the history of spies and espionage in the former spy capital of Germany. The museum is located in the central area of Potsdamer Platz, formerly known as the "death strip", as it lies on the perimeters of the wall which once divided East and West Berlin. The museum acts as an educational institution, with it’s permanent exhibitions bridging together centuries of espionage stories and tactics, amercing visitors in a multi-media experience. Through 1000 different exhibits and artefacts, the museums display’s particularly focus on the World Wars and the Cold War. Since its opening in 2015, 1,000,000 people have visited the museum and recently in 2020 it became nominated for the European Museum of the Year Award. The Berlin Spy Museum is partnered with the International Spy Museum in Washington D.C, and many of the artefacts and installations within the museum have captured media attention around the world.

History and creation of the Museum

Prior to his creation of the Berlin Spy Museum, Günther worked as a television journalist reporting on the war on terror which was a campaign to eliminate terrorism following the September 11 attacks. During his research Günther had an unexpected encounter with the East German Stasi under Communism which inspired him to discover more about the pre-history of spies. From 2004, Günther’s passion for spying expanded, resulting in him collecting and planning the creation of the Berlin spy museum. Günther collected historically significant artefacts from former secret service workers and contemporary witnesses to create a museum dedicated to spying and espionage, which was once at the city of Berlin’s centre. The museum creates an educational experience for visitors, without passing any ethical judgment on the phenomenon of espionage, allowing visitors to come to their own conclusion on the effects of spying throughout history.

Before its construction, many sites for the Berlin Spy Museum were considered such as the famous Hackeschen Höfe, the Forum Museumsinsel and the Prinzessinnenpalais Unter den Linden. Günther’s final decision of the location of the museum was in the city centre of Berlin at Leipziger Platz, as “no place symbolises the Cold War more than Berlin”. Located on the previous division between East and West Berlin, the museum is positioned in a popular spot, surrounded by other tourist destinations like the Martin-Gropius-Bau, the Brandenburg Gate, Potsdamer Platz, the Bundesrat, Topographie des Terrors and the Kulturforum with the Philharmonie and Neuer Nationalgalerie.

The museums original building was constructed for a logistics company, which meant that serious renovations needed to be completed in order for it to turn into a museum. The architecture of the museum was designed by Frank Wittmer and was inspired by the Glienicker Bridge, which ran over the Havel river, bordering East and West Berlin. The Glienicker Bridge was a crucial location during the Cold War as it was used to exchange spies from East and West Germany, earning its name as "the bridge of spies". Following renovations, the museum opened on the 19^th September 2015, 25 years after the end of the Cold War. Shortly after the museums opening, the business encountered some financial issues with its innovative funding model, resulting in its temporary closure. After some careful planning to improve the financial concept of the museum, it reopened on 29^th of July 2016 as the "German spy museum".

The history of spies of spies during the Cold War

Through its exhibits, installations and artefacts, the Berlin Spy Museum creates a timeline of major historical events throughout the Cold War such as the building of the Berlin Wall and the Berlin Blockade. Spying and espionage has been around since ancient times, becoming most prevalent in the Cold War, “if the Great War belonged to the solider in the trenches, the Cold War surely belonged to the spy”. The notion of spying involves "entering an opponent’s zone under false pretences to get information". In 1945, the city of Berlin was split between the NATO powers and the USSR, making it a frontier for the Cold War and eventually becoming known as the international capital of espionage. Due to the continuous growth of arsenal between the two superpowers, there was an aim to move towards a more peaceful and secure world, which resulted in guns and weapons being replaced with spies and espionage, becoming an "indirect war". The Cold War saw old warfare tactics being substituted with modernised tactics and technologies such as spying and nuclear weapons. Information and knowledge became the most important and resourceful weapon during the Cold War, which led to the creation of sophisticated methods of spying such as "Operation Gold". Operation Gold involved the British and American intelligence organisations creating tunnels underneath the soviet occupied zone of East Berlin to try and tap into their telephone wires and gather information on the enemy.

The state security service called the "Stasi" emerged in the establishment of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in 1949. The Stasi was a secret police organisation that closely monitored the activity of their citizens, and other states. In order to assert their power and dominance in the GDR, the repressive nature of the Stasi used civilians to spy on each other in order to collect information on suspects. By the 1950's the Stasi had developed a huge network of 274,000 employed spies and agents.

Berlin was considered the most valuable base in the world for espionage against the Soviet bloc until the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961. Half of the British Secret Intelligence Service (M16) total strength was concentrated in Berlin at the end of the 1950's. The construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961 was built to stop the migration wave from Socialism to Capitalism. Following the construction of the Berlin Wall issues arose for spies who formerly travelled from East to West Berlin to gather information, resulting in them having to modernise their espionage tactics to use a more technical approach. The construction of the Berlin Wall also initiated the Berlin Blockade which saw the USSR, in June of 1948, cut off resources entering the western half of Berlin (Van Tonder 2017). In response to this, the US flew cargo plans with resources over the Berlin Wall to sustain the city.

Exhibitions and artefacts

The museum was designed to educate its visitors through its hands-on, interactive exhibits in the 3.000 m² (32.000 sq ft) exhibition space. Original artefacts have been collected over the years and realistic replicas have been created to expose visitors to methods and tactics used by spies and secret services throughout history. The artefacts were sourced by the curators and historians of the museum, with many of the replicas being collected form the props used in James bond films. The exhibitions within the museum were designed by Bänfer Kartenbeck. The Arts electronica business helped create and conceive the leading edge and high-tech multimedia exhibits and interactive models in the museum. Interactive activities in the museum have the ability to stimulate visitors’ senses so that they feel fully immersed in the experience.

Secret agents and coding belong to some of the oldest professions in the world which is displayed through the exhibits on the cipher technique invented by Julius Caesar, and the secret service methods of Oliver Cromwell. Visitors can also read about personal stories from witnesses, such as the murder of the Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov in 1978 with a poisoned umbrella. The exhibits are positioned in chronological order, creating a physical timeline that visitors can walk through, beginning with secret scriptures from antiquity and ending with the recent NSA debate. The 10-meter long timeline creates a grand introduction for visitors through presenting the historical developments of spying from ancient Egypt all the way up until WW1.The entrance to the museum has security cameras peering down on the visitors, setting the scene for the entire facility as substantive focus of the exhibition is on data acquisition in the Internet Age. These security cameras highlight the issue of surveillance, data and security which effects every individual in the modern world of the 21^st century.

Main topics of the exhibition are the following:

1. The History of Espionage from the Ancient times until the Present Age
2. World War I
3. World War II
4. Cryptology, Morse, Radio
5. Cold War (Secret services in East and West Germany)
6. Spy Gear
7. Spy Training
8. Listening Devices
9. Spy Cameras
10. Animals Used as Spies eg. pigeons
11. Conspiracy Theories and Espionage (RAF-Stasi Connection / The Case Uwe Barschel)
12. Glienicke Bridge (Spy exchanges)
13. Secret Services and Poison
14. 007 – Espionage in Movies
15. Double Agents
16. Secret Service Operations
17. Espionage in Present and Future

Multimedia activities:

The Multimedia activities in the museum are presented on 200 different HD-screens and projections. The museum holds a range of activities that involve guests both physically and intellectually such as:

• Morse code stations which are positioned in the WWI section of the museum and allows visitors to send secret messages through Morse code.

• Encoding and decoding messages through the rotor-based cipher machine Enigma. Visitors are able to communicate and decipher codes with other guests, whilst also learning about the history of these old type writers.
• Quiz stations which test the visitor’s knowledge of spying and conspiracy theories.
• Facebook puzzles which expose how much information Facebook beholds on its users and what happens with our information. Visitors can also check the security of their passwords through a Password Hacker that tests the strength of a user’s password.
  

Hands on exhibits:

• Bug detectors: visitors are put under a time limit to try and find listening devices in a room using a bug detector. A replica of an office is created to try make the activity as real as possible.
• Laser maze: visitors become physically tested through the laser maze obstacle course. The tricky course relates to the challenges many spies are faced with in spy films. Visitors are able to try to complete the course themselves through finding the most efficient way through the laser maze without touching a light beam. Spectators can watch other visitors of the museum manage their way through the maze via thermal imaging cameras and motion detectors.
• Reconstructing files: visitors piece back bits of a puzzle to try and make sense of destroyed documents.  
  

Artefacts:

The Berlin spy museum has accumulated a collection of artefacts, particularly on WWII and the Cold War:

‘Fialka’ the Russian cipher machine:

The Fialka is an electro-mechanical rotor cipher machine created by the USSR in the 1950’s and used during the Cold War . Most of the machines have been destroyed, however,  one of the remaining Fialka’s is on display at the Berlin spy museum. The Fialka encrypts and decodes messages written in Cyrillic and is similar to the Enigma device that was used to protect commercial, diplomatic and military communication during World War II. The Fialka encrypts and decodes messages written in Cyrillic printed onto paper. The design of the Fialka is largely based off the enigma design, however the exposed some of enigma’s flaws and weaknesses.

Bulgarian Umbrella:

Georgi Markov was a Bulgarian writer and critic of communism. On the 7^th of September, 1978 the author believed he was shot with poison by the KGB in London by a man with a umbrella. In hospital doctors found a small metallic pellet containing the poison ‘ricin’ in Markov’s right thigh where he claimed it had been shot, which was the cause of his death. However, following further research it was discovered that Markov was not killed via the ‘Bulgarian umbrella’ but the poison was injected into him via a smaller murder weapon was a smaller hand-held device. A reconstruction of this killer umbrella is displayed at the Berlin spy museum. This event caused a climax in the secret intelligence operations during the Cold War, with the ‘Bulgarian Umbrella’ turning into a "synonym for cold-blooded, well-organized, and deadly operations, particularly those associated with socialist state security services".

Odour capture:

The odour capture was a technique to capture and trace individuals via their smell. This technique was used by the Stasi during the Cold War as an investigative tool to establish an opponents identity. One of these odour jar artefacts is on display in the museum. The odour jar is labelled with information such as GK (the abbreviation for Geruchskonserve meaning “odour sample”), the date and time the sample was taken and the name of the person it belongs. In 1979 the Stasi began to archive hundreds of "suspected political dissidents" smells through collecting their odours on materials such as clothing and storing them in air-tight jars. The Stasi eventually built an extensive scent archives in the belief that individual's odours could be preserved and that trained canine noses could detect them. Odours were captured in a number of ways by the Stasi, for example from the cars or houses of suspected individuals, or from crime scenes.

Enigma

The Enigma machine was the most famous encryption machine of the World War II. The encoding device was invented in 1918 by the German, Dr. Arthur Scherbius. The Enigma machine resembled the construction of an old school typewriter, however had a series of rotors and wheels that could be changed to encode messages in 150 different ways. The German cipher machine was predominantly used throughout world war two to encrypt communications. However unknown to the Germans, the allies were able to read the messages, resulting in them continuously updating and making changes to the enigma machine so that it’s coding couldn’t be hacked. One of the models of the famous Enigma machine, initiallt used by the German military, can be viewed in the museum.

"Spywatch"

Enigma machine

Observation Trabant

Spy Map

James Bond props

Laser Obstacle Course

External links

• Website of the Spy Museum Berlin