While Berlin was the capital of Germany’s Empire, the Emperor was a suburbanite, living in splendor in the palaces at the Sanssouci Park a few miles away at Potsdam.
And you wouldn’t expect the Kaiser to share the station and platform with the ordinary folk of the region, would you? So, in 1910, adjacent to the Potsdam Park station, a splendid little Kaiserbahnhof, or Emperor’s Station, was built, with direct access to a special platform, under shelter inside the building.
That’s not the 1910 view, by the way: That’s how it looks now after its restoration. Its glory days were short; opened in 1910, with visits by Theodore Roosevelt and Tsar Nicholas of Russia, it was little-used for many years after the Kaiser’s abdication in 1918.
In 1939, the Luftwaffe took over the building. Later, it was used for Hermann Goering’s special train, and after 1945, it became the Berlin end of the Moscow-to-Berlin Soviet military train. From 1952 to 1977 it was used by East German railway police, but was eventually abandoned because of deterioration. That’s a 1990 view below.
In 1999, despite its condition, it was listed as a UNESCO World Heritage, leading to its restoration by Deutsche Bahn, the German railway system, which uses it to house the DB Akademie, a management training school for DB managers..
Not the only special accommodation for German royalty, by the way. In Berlin, at the Anhalter Bahnhof, a special ‘Princes’ Portal’ was set aside for royal use. Today, it leads into the railway exhibits at the German Technical Museum.
