Established in 1895 as the
Carlshorst mansion's colony, Karlshorst from 1901 had access to the railway line from Berlin to Breslau (today
Wrocław, Poland) and developed to a quite affluent residential area, sometimes referred to as "
Dahlem of the East". The locality encompasses the Waldsiedlung, a
garden city laid out between 1919 and 1921 according to plans by
Peter Behrens. In April 1945, as the
Red Army approached the
Reich's capital, Marshal
Georgy Zhukov, commander of the
1st Belorussian Front, established his headquarters at a former
Heer officer's
mess hall in Karlshorst, where on May 8, the
unconditional surrender of the German forces was presented to Zhukov by Colonel-General
Hans-Jürgen Stumpff as the representative of the
Luftwaffe, Field Marshal
Wilhelm Keitel as Chief of Staff of
OKW, and Admiral
Hans-Georg von Friedeburg as Commander-in-Chief of the
Kriegsmarine. From 1945 to 1949, the building complex served as the
headquarters of the
Soviet Military Administration in Germany. After the establishment of the
German Democratic Republic, it hosted various ministries of the GDR, and from 1963 on offices of both the KGB and the GRU. In fact
The KGB residency in East Berlin-Karlshorst was the largest in the world; it produced as much intelligence as an entire directorate back in Moscow thanks to East German efforts. But none of this was known in the West until after the Berlin Wall had fallen. The buildings on the side of the Museum had been left for a long time abandoned, now the process of renovation has started and as usual in Berlin, the former KGB buildings are now apartments. The leadership of the Politburo of the
Socialist Unity Party of Germany hid at the complex during the
East German uprising of 1953, where
Lavrentiy Beria also traveled to from
Moscow to personally coordinate the
Soviet Army's repression of the rebellion. The last Russian soldiers left Karlshorst in 1994. The former headquarters has been made the home of the
Museum Berlin-Karlshorst, formerly called the Capitulation Museum, and later the Deutsch-Russisches Museum. The
6th Independent Motorized Rifle Brigade, the Soviets' "Berlin Brigade," had barracks in the nearby
Wuhlheide area. ==Transportation==