Glienicker Brücke connects Berlin and Potsdam, but during the Cold War the border between East and West crossed in the middle of the bridge and this was where a famous spy exchange took place when the two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, exchanged two top spies. The United States exchanged the arrested Russian agent, Rudolf Ivanovich Abel, for their shot-down U2 pilot, Captain Francis Powers, on February 10, 1962.

It is also this bridge that is referred to in Spielberg's excellent film "Bridge of Spies", in which Tom Hanks stars as the one who mediates the exchange of the two spies.
During the Cold War, an American lawyer (Tom Hanks) is recruited to defend an arrested Soviet spy in court and then help the CIA facilitate the exchange of the spy with the Soviet-captured American U2 spy pilot, Francis Gary Powers.

Many will remember the pictures of the bridge from the period around the fall of the wall, where the East German trabants - "trabies" - crossed the border between the GDR and the Federal Republic to inspect the west, which most people only knew about from radio and TV.

Over the years, several tried to escape via the bridge to the west. Thus, on March 11, 1988 around noon. 02, where three refugees from Potsdam broke through the barriers on the bridge to West Berlin in a stolen standard W50 truck. Subsequently, the barriers on the bridge were further expanded.