As the Berlin terminus, of what become known as the Anhalt Railway, it opened on 1 July 1841 as far as Jüterbog (the inaugural train being hauled by the very first Borsig locomotive), and extended to Dessau, Köthen and beyond at later dates.

At the time of the Anhalter Bahnhof's construction there was no opening in the customs wall at this location, and so one was clearly needed so that travellers could get from city to station and vice versa.

The customs wall eventually became redundant and was demolished in 1866–67, which allowed Hirschelstraße (newly renamed Königgrätzer Straße), to be developed into a proper street for the first time.

The new façade was 101 m across and embellished with zinc sculptures titled Day and Night by Ludwig Brunow (1843-1913), positioned on either side of the clock above the main entrance.

Inside the building was a lavish and spacious booking hall with separate waiting rooms and facilities for no fewer than four classes of ticket holders.

Behind all this, the huge iron and glass train-shed roof by writer and engineer Heinrich Seidel (1842-1906) measured 171 m long by 62 m wide (covering 10,600 m2, under which 40,000 people could stand), and rose to 34 m in height along its centre line.

This move was the key to establishing the Anhalter Bahnhof's ultimate importance, as the terminus became Berlin's “Gateway to the South,” with services via Dresden not only to Prague and Vienna, but to places as far away as Rome, Naples and Athens.

The building, which had also been built by Franz Heinrich Schwechten, was located on the south bank of the Landwehr Canal immediately to the east of the parallel passenger lines.

By the 1930s, trains left its six platforms every three to five minutes, carrying an average of 44,000 people daily (around 16 million a year, compared with barely 49,000 at Berlin Tempelhof Airport).

However, despite its size and passenger numbers, the station was earmarked for redevelopment as part of Adolf Hitler's grand plan to transform Berlin into the Welthauptstadt (World Capital) Germania.

Under the Nazis’ plan, which was to be realised by Albert Speer, the building would have ceased to be a railway terminus because the new triumphal avenue known as the North-South Axis would have severed its tracks.

In contrast to other deportations which used freight wagons, Jews were taken away in ordinary passenger coaches which were coupled up to regular trains running according to the normal timetable.

A massive bombing raid on the night of 23 November 1943 badly affected the station and caused so much damage to rail infrastructure further out that only a few local services could operate and no long-distance trains.

The Tempodrom, a major new concert and event venue opened on 8 December 2001, extends across the site of the terminus just south of the train shed's former location.

Its innovative futuristic roof rises to a height of 37.5 m. Further south still, extending down to the Landwehr Canal, is an area of woodland, recently tidied up and new paths laid, but amongst the trees and undergrowth, several crumbling sections of platforms are still clearly visible.

The main arch was once the centre span of three of a much older structure located elsewhere in the city - the Marschallbrücke, built by Eduard Albert Paul Gottheiner in 1881–82, which carried Luisenstraße over the River Spree just to the east of the Reichstag.

Just beyond it is where the S-Bahn North-South Link runs beneath the canal, and it was here that SS troops blew up the bulkheads in the last days of World War 2, deliberately flooding the tunnel in the hope of slowing the Soviet advance.

The second stage was the southern section from Potsdamer Platz via the new underground Anhalter Bahnhof station with the Wannseebahn which opened on 9 October 1939, shortly after the start of World War II.

With Hitler already dead, the remaining Nazi leaders resorted to increasingly desperate measures to slow the Soviet advance, whatever the consequences for their own citizens.

Fearful that the Soviets might try to storm the centre of Berlin by coming through the rail tunnels, on 2 May the Nazi leaders ordered SS troops to blow up the bulkheads where the North-South Link passed beneath the Landwehrkanal.

Altogether up to 26 km (16 mi) of tunnels and many stations were flooded by this action, most of which had been used as public shelters and also to house military wounded in hospital trains in underground sidings.

This gave rise to the infamous "Geisterbahnhöfe" (ghost stations), those unfortunate ones on the eastern side that were sealed off from the outside world and which trains ran straight through without stopping.

[2] At the points where the lines passed directly beneath the actual border, concrete "collars" were constructed within the tunnels with just the minimum clearance for trains, to prevent people clinging to the sides or roof of the coaches.

The S-Bahn station remains the only one open at the location, and still called "Anhalter Bahnhof" although it is over half a century since the great terminus aboveground closed.

At the top, Ludwig Brunow's Day and Night sculptures, somewhat the worse for wear, still sat on either side of the now empty clock space until the most recent restoration of the structure in 2003–2004, but to avoid further corrosion they have now been replaced by copies (the originals can be seen in the German Museum of Technology, close by on the south bank of the Landwehr Canal).