Abandoned places

For years, Catholics and Protestants faced each other with drawn swords in the Northern Irish city of Belfast.

In the early 1970s, Berlin architect Rainer Rümmler designed the colorful Dreilinden gas station. Anyone who had braved the East German border control in Drewitz-Dreilinden could fill up their tank and have a bite to eat.

During Germany's division, the Helmstedt-Marienborn border post was the most crucial crossing along the German internal border.

The 1.5 kilometer-long runway of Tortoli-Arabatax airport ends a few meters short of San Gemiliano beach.

Until 1989, the five-hundred-meter-wide GDR border split the German Harz Mountains in half.

During the Cold War, almost three hundred air watchtowers were scattered throughout the Netherlands to detect enemy aircraft.

In 1937, architect Albert Speer unveiled his plans for converting Berlin into Welthauptstadt Germania. In his imagination, the new Berlin was teeming with ostentatious monuments that kept pace with the megalomania of the Third Reich.

The residents of the German village of Wünsdorf saw many neighbors coming and going during the Second World War when the army quickly built bunkers to hide the German Army High Command.

The German-German border, the 1,378-kilometer-long border that cut straight through Germany during the Cold War, was part of the Iron Curtain.

You should not only be in Berlin for some of the finest abandoned watchtowers and barriers. The border zone also left its mark in the most northwestern city of the former GDR, Dassow, Germany.