In 1879, a temporary exhibition site was created between Alt-Moabit street and Invaliden Street. A makeshift exhibition building was built, surrounded by pleasure grounds with ponds and fountains. It was dismantled right after.

The second "General Exhibition on the Subject of Hygienics and Rescue Services" burned down shortly before it was due to open. Nevertheless, the provisional arrangement turned to a permanent institution with the elaborate construction of a glass palace. A 40 meter tall cupola embellished the entrance building, which was extended by 5 times 5 hall modules with lower and more flat domed roofs.

Between 1934 and 1936, the Nazis converted the whole site into an aircraft museum. First there was a wide two-piece stairway, leading to the main entrance of the cupola building, which was located at a lower level. It was rebuilt into a one-piece stairway, as we see it today. Two lion sculptures were placed at it's lower end. Originally they sat at both sides of a pond between the two stairways. These sculptures were removed and brought to the German Museum of Technology in the 80s.

When I discovered the relics of this stairway in 2001, I was not aware of the depressing historical background of this site, nor that is was a secret venue for parties and prostitution. For years, every time when the trees had shed their leaves, I saw this "stairway to nowhere" from the city train. Usually, it was too overgrown to be seen even directly from Alt-Moabit street.

In 1919, after the violent crackdown on the uprising of the Spartacist, dead insurgents were hastily buried on the ULAP site. During earthworks for the electrification of the city train in 1927, 126 human remains were unearthed.

In the early 1933, the Nazis set up a torture center in the basement below the restaurant of the exhibition building. The exhibition site was also used for executions. Towards the end of the war, things went dramatically from wrong to worse.

In the night before April 23 in 1945, the SS murdered 15 political inmates from the Moabit Prison at Lehrter street here. A sixteenth survived severely injured. They were participants of the failed tyrannicide plot against Hitler (July 20, 1944). Soon after and obscenely quite short before the capitulation of Berlin (May 2, 1945), 100 other prisoners where shot on the site. The last ones, allegedly involved in the 20 July plot.

At May 2, 1945, Nazi leader Martin Bormann and SS doctor Ludwid Stumpfegger are said to have committed suicide on the railway bridge above the ULAP site. For decades there had been rumors about Bormann having survived the war. In 1972, skeletal parts were found between the ULAP site and the Lehrter Railway Station and clearly matched to Bormann by DNA analysis.

In 1951, the war damaged exhibition building was demolished. The Hauptbahnhof (Central Train Station) and other new constructions continued to consume land of the former ULAP site. In 2005, a landscape architectural design competition for the left over area was tendered. At June 25, 2008, the inauguration ceremony for the ULAP Plaza took place.

Basically, the winning architecture firm Rehwaldt from Dresden did some clearing work. They removed rubble and blocks from the stairway balustrade and a lot of shrubbery. I'm glad that they did not touch the trees which grew through the stairs. The site would be nothing without them. Nevertheless, on the left, if you look upwards, a strip of approximately two meters was removed from the stairway and rebuilt. Further on the right from the ULAP stairway, a parallel new one was built. I wonder, if this is an attempt, to undo the Nazi era symbolically, by reinstating two descending stairways?

I'm not sure, whether these sitting boxes all over the place inspire visitors to some sort of contemplation. What I know is, they cannot halt the wheel of time. Who knows, what will be left from the ULAP and the stairway, if land prices rise enough, to develop the remaining area. A chic ULAP Plaza with hip open-air cafés and nobody able to explain the name?

The sources used for this text (mostly German):