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At the conclusion of the battle of Berlin in May 1945, the Soviet command decided to repair Berlin’s utility infrastructure, with the result that beginning in August 1945, water, gas and electricity were successively restored to various parts of the city. The Mauerstraße power plant again provided the center of Berlin (most of which had been destroyed by bombing) with power.
 Nevertheless, the facility’s full output was never fully restored in the succeeding years, and the existing and damaged sections of the plant were dismantled, or were replaced by new installations.
For example, in order for the Mitte cogeneration plant to provide the East German government offices within the former Reich Air Ministry complex across the street with district heating, large control facilities were realized in these buildings. After the Berlin wall came down in 1998, the German privatization agency (Treuhandanstalt) occupied this building complex, and after this agency was dissolved, the German finance ministry moved in.
The East German government felt that the property should not be used extensively owing to its very close proximity to the borderline that separated Berlin’s various sectors and to the no-man’s land within the borders of the East German part of East Berlin. The eastern side of the area extended into the border security area of the former Allied Checkpoint Charlie on Friedrichstraße, whereas the southern side abutted the Berlin wall on Zimmerstraße. Any official use of the property was further complicated by the fact that the East German government’s foreign currency acquisition agency headed by Alexander Schalk Golodkowski was located in the neighboring building on Mauerstraße.
The facility’s days of supplying power to the center of Berlin came to an end when the installation’s main components were shut down for good in 1973 and only residual functionalities such as supplying electricity for subway line 5 were maintained.
During the waning years of the East German regime, substantial modifications in Berlin’s cityscape were planned as part of efforts to align the country’s economic and social policies, and at the same time demonstrate the viability of East Germany’s socialist model. The area around Friedrichstraße played a disproportionately role in these plans to give East Germany’s capital city a facelift, which included construction of large department stores and other consumer amenities. Studies were also to be realized to determine whether the existing structures of the central power plant and the transformer facility at Mauerstraße 80 were large enough to house an interim storage facility for the envisaged department stores.
These plans progressed quite far and construction aimed at their realization was begun in the 1980s in the Friedrichstraße Mitte district. This project came to an abrupt halt with the demise of East Germany, although detailed plans had been elaborated by then for renovation of the former transformer facility.
In the late 1980s, while this planning process was ongoing, the area underwent something of a renaissance, with the result that the East German regime granted the transformer facility complex landmark status in 1987. In addition, artists began creating installations, and fashion shoots were realized whose results were published in one of the last East German issues of the leading fashion magazine Sybille.
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