A visit to the German Spy Museum requires its visitors to use all their senses as they discover the history of espionage. In addition to a number of multimedia installations, visitors can interact with a range of issues drawn from the secretive world of intelligence and espionage: send encrypted messages, find listening devices, place your enemies under surveillance and write with secret inks.
Here is just a little foretaste of Berlin’s hands-on museum:
At the height of the Cold War, the KGB bugged an office. Use a bug detector to find the listening devices. But you only have a minute to do so and the clock is ticking. Good luck!
The ultimate secret agent training course: You must negotiate the laser beams without breaking them. A real challenge for young and old alike.
Coded messages have been in use since ancient times. Whilst the Ancient Greeks had the scytale and the Romans used Caesar’s cipher, cryptographers later developed a range of cipher discs such as the Alberti cipher disc. Can you crack the code?
Use a range of different secret inks to compose secret messages. Our staff also demonstrate poisonous secret inks at weekends and in the scope of a birthday party celebrated at the German Spy Museum.
Listen carefully and proceed with a light touch to crack our massive safe – what will you find?
Disappear without a trace and escape through the ventilation shaft like James Bond. Course for children between 4 and 12 years!
Microdots are tiny data carriers no bigger than a pin prick. Agents use them to carry secret information. Can you find our microdots?
Intelligence services have a penchant for destroying documents to hide their tracks. Whilst the Stasi is the undisputed world champion in document shredding, German domestic intelligence has also proven itself to be rather good at operating the shredder to cover up its failures in the recent NSU investigation. How good are you at putting the documents back together?
If you tune in to the right frequency, you will hear sinister sequences of numbers being broadcast through the air waves. Intelligence services use this technique to communicate with their field agents. Working at two stations in the museum, you can listen to and decipher radio communications.
The time it takes depends on the complexity. A password with few characters can be cracked in milliseconds, while a longer password with numbers, symbols, and both uppercase and lowercase letters may take much longer. At the German Spy Museum, you can test how long it would take for you to crack a password.