Seventeen Moments of Spring: Berlin and Bern on Soviet Film Sets

In the first scene Stierlitz, travelling as Herr Bolsen, strolls through a small wood beside a pond with Frau Saurich, in what is meant to be Germany in February 1945. The wood is really the Arkhangelskoye-Tyurikovo park outside Moscow, which also played the Bavarian Forest, and the pond is the one where Stierlitz drops his pistol. The series left its mark: local people still call the park the "Bavarian Forest".

Location precision: The film only names Germany; the pin marks the Moscow-region park that stood in for the Bavarian Forest.

Berlin is shown on screen as a city of tavern doors and street corners, and the crew went to East Berlin for the first part of the shoot in March 1971. Street views of the tavern "Rough Gottlieb" were filmed outside Zur letzten Instanz, a well-known Berlin restaurant near Alexanderplatz on Waisenstraße. In the film it simply goes by the invented name, so a real address stands behind a fictional one.

Location precision: The tavern in the story is invented; the pin marks the real restaurant used for its exterior.

The safe flat from which the radio operator Kat transmits is not in Berlin at all. It is an Art Nouveau house in Moscow, on the corner of Khlebny and Maly Rzhevsky lanes, at Maly Rzhevsky 6, known for its architecture. It is a good reminder of how much of the series' wartime Germany was assembled from Soviet streets and studio sets.

Location precision: The flat is in Berlin in the story; the pin marks the Moscow house used for it.

Scenes of the prison inside the RSHA building, the Reich Main Security Office where Stierlitz is watched and questioned, were shot in Moscow's Butyrka prison. The present building was put up in 1879 near the Butyrsk gate.

Location precision: The RSHA building is fictionalised; the pin marks the Moscow prison used for its cells.

Professor Pleischner goes to Bern to make contact for Stierlitz, but the safe flat there has already been betrayed to the Gestapo and an ambush is waiting. For these scenes director Tatyana Lioznova used Jauniela (New Street) in the old town of Riga, passing off the odd-numbered side as Bern's Flower Street.

Location precision: Jauniela is the Riga street used; the exact spot on it is not named.

Bern is played by the town of Meissen. At the start of episode 11 the Bern shown on screen is the Meissen town hall on the Markt, and Pleischner's walk to the safe flat was filmed on Schlossbrücke street. The town hall was built mainly between 1472 and 1480, so the Swiss capital of the series is a building far older than the 1945 in which it is set.

Location precision: Bern is fictionalised; the pin marks the Meissen town hall used for it.

At the end Stierlitz meets the Centre's contact in Switzerland and learns he has been put forward for the title of Hero of the Soviet Union. The Alps were not filmed: in early 1972 the crew went to the Georgian SSR and used the mountains near Tbilisi as a substitute for the Swiss Alps.

Location precision: The film does not say where in the mountains it was shot; the pin marks Tbilisi, the base for the shoot.