For many, it was a first stopping-off point: a place where refugees could prepare for a new life in the West after turning their backs on Communist Eastern Europe during the Cold War. The Marienfelde Refugee Centre in south-east Berlin, which served as a temporary home for close on 2 million people during its busy 55-year history, closed Wednesday.
It was no longer needed. Refugee arrivals from Eastern Europe having dwindled to a trickle in recent years. Operated by the West Berlin authorities and earlier by US, British and French Allied officials, the Marienfelde camp was set up in 1953 to cope with growing numbers of refugees arriving from the east.
Initially, the centre consisted of 15 structures with room for 1,200 individuals, but as the number of refugees swelled, 11 more buildings were added to the facility in 1955, increasing accommodation to 2,800. The refugees were housed in small, self-contained apartments, complete with kitchens and bathrooms.
A camp official says the refugee camp was "a place of transition." The average length of stay was one to two weeks, this being the amount of time it took refugees to pass through the 12 stages of vetting. Most refugees were Germans fed up with life in communist East Germany, and were eager to start again in the West.
But western officials were cautious. In the early years after World War II, with the Cold War at its height, dozens of East Bloc agents were being infiltrated into West Berlin and other parts of West Germany in the 1950s. So vetting procedures were strict.
Berlin bore the costs of the refugees' housing and meals. Charitable organisations offered advice to the refugees and were generous with donations. The Lutheran and Catholic churches provided counselling to refugees and christened, confirmed and married them if asked.
Of the 4 million people who fled westwards from East Germany between 1949 and 1990, 1.35 million of them passed through the Marienfelde camp. In the late 1980s, when the Communist world started to unravel, large numbers of refugees again began turning up at the camp.
In the spring of 1989 the Marienfelde camp was deluged with new arrivals, among them people of German origin from Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Ukraine, as well as from East Germany. In April 1989, 6,000 arrived. In May it was double that number. By November, the camp was jammed with 100,000 refugees.
Among them in the spring of that year was Katrin Lange. After waiting four years to get permission to leave East Berlin, she suddenly received word she could finally depart for the West. A student who had passed examinations qualifying her for university study, she was angry at being denied admission to any university.
At a mass-transit station in East Berlin, she bid farewell to her father and brother before crossing to the West. At the Marienfelde camp, she soon learned she would be allowed to remain in the West.
Katrin, now a reporter working for the Berlin newspaper Der Morgenpost, said, "I had no painful feelings about leaving, but wondered if I would ever see my relatives again." She need not have worried. Less than 5 months later, the Berlin Wall fell and she was joyously reunited with her mother at a crossing point in the southern part of the city.
Katrin attended Berlin's Free University and later secured a grant to study in Montreal, Canada, before starting her career as a journalist in Berlin. While the Marienfelde Centre officially closed on Wednesday, a handful of refugees still remain on the premises. They will stay until alternative accommodation is found for them, said a camp official.