This abandoned NSA field station sits atop an 80 meter
artificial hill in the Grunewald forest on the west edge of
Berlin. The hill has a noteworthy history: created from the
post-WWII debris of desolated Berlin, it is higher than the
highest natural hill (the Kreuzberg) in the Berlin area,
believed to be created from the rubble of some 400,000
buildings. Buried deep within the hill a building still stands,
once a Nazi military-technical college, it proved easier to bury
the robust structure, than to blow it up. For a time the hill
served as a ski-hill, before it was re-purposed by as a
"listening station." Believed to be part of ECHELON, a global
network of listening stations, the listening station was erected
on the hill and run by the U.S. National Security Agency to
eavesdrop on communist East Berlin. To their surprise, they
found that the local Ferris wheel, erected each year for the
German-American Festival, helped relay signals and improve their
listening efforts, and the US radio spooks asked if the w