They left long ago, but left their mark because there was hardly any orderly handover: the 340,000 members of the “Western Group of Troops”, as the former “Group of Soviet Armed Forces in Germany” (GSSD) called itself from 1989.
The soldiers took their military equipment with them from the more than 600 locations in the territory of the former GDR until the complete withdrawal in 1994. But what remained were the barracks, airfields, monuments and military training areas, some of which had a history going back decades. Because the military objects were already used by the Germans before and during the Second World War.
Given the abundance of properties, there were initially hardly any considerations for a new use. The facilities were left to their own devices and abandoned to decay: they became forgotten places, so-called “Lost Places”.
These enchanted places have a very special charm for photographers. Of the Jaron publisher in Berlin has been documenting all Lost Places in the East German states for years with his book series “Geisterstätten”. So far, volumes have been published on the federal states of Mecklenburg-West Pomerania, Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt, Thuringia and on the cities of Berlin, Leipzig and Dresden.
The book is for the anniversary “25 Years Withdrawal of the Western Group of Troops”. “Haunted places of the Soviets –
Forgotten places in East Germany” published. The authors and photographers went in search of clues and roamed the military grounds of the former occupiers.
On the following pages of the photo series above we present some of these “Lost Places”.
You can also click through the following photo series:
– The charm of decay: ghost towns in Saxony
– Berlin’s secret cabinet of horrors – no tourist strays to these forgotten places
– When a synagogue becomes a fitness center – in search of Jewish life in Eastern Europe
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