The current bridge, the fourth on the site, was completed in 1907, although major reconstruction was necessary after it was damaged during World War II.

[2] A first wooden bridge across the Havel River at this location was built about 1660, in order to reach the hunting grounds around Stolpe.

By the early 1800s, a new, non-wooden bridge was needed to accommodate the massive increase in traffic on the chaussee between the Prussian capital Berlin and the Hohenzollern residence in Potsdam.

The Johann Caspar Harkort Company of Duisburg submitted the winning design, and the present-day bridge was inaugurated on 16 November 1907.

During the early years of the Cold War, the bridge was mainly used by the Allies as a link between their Berlin sections and the military liaison missions in Potsdam.

Because the Glienicke Bridge was a restricted border crossing between the Eastern Bloc, via Potsdam in East Germany, and territory affiliated with the Western powers, the American sector of West Berlin.

[3] When US military attache Arthur D. Nicholson was shot by a Soviet sentry in March 1985, his body was returned to the US Army at the Glienicke Bridge.

[9][10] The Glienicke Bridge as a venue for prisoner exchange has appeared frequently in fiction, for example in the 1966 Harry Palmer film, Funeral in Berlin, based on the novel of the same name by Len Deighton.

The popular nickname "Bridge of Spies" was used by the British band T'Pau as the name of the title track on their first album.

There is a brief reference to the bridge in the sixth episode of the first season of Archer, when Mallory Archer and her long-time lover (and head of the KGB) Major Nikolai Jakov mention meeting there "one moonlit night" when they both worked on covert operations in Berlin, presumably during the Cold War.