another and the vehicles pushed off the track collided with an oncoming train. One man was killed. The Wehrmacht opened a large army airfield at Alt-Lönnewitz southwest of Falkenberg in 1936. A connecting railway ran to it from the top station, which carried materials and airfield employees. The station had 20 km of mainline track and 93 km of sidings with 324 points in 1939. It had 20 signal boxes and three engine sheds on the upper and lower part of the station. The exits from the marshalling yard handled 4,000 freight wagons a day from the top part and 2,400 from the lower part of the station. There was a siding to the airport with branches to a substation and to the Falkenberg branch of the Torgau grain cooperative. In World War II, construction began on a multi-track upgrade of the line toward Jüterbog, which was not completed. Some embankments have been preserved. The work was carried out largely by the use of forced labourers and prisoners of war. Because of the strategic importance of the station, with its marshalling yards and the nearby Falkenberg airfield, it was a target for several Allied bombing raids in the Second World War. The most serious of these attacks occurred in April 1945. On 18 April, the entrance building, the crossing structure and a number of buildings in the area were completely destroyed. After radio reports had already announced that there would be further attacks on the day with the goal of total destruction of the Falkenberg railway junction, bomb raids were primarily carried out on the lower station and a number of buildings were destroyed, including the locomotive depot. After the Second World War A few days after the war, Soviet troops under station commander Braschenko began rebuilding the strategic rail facilities on 15 May 1945. In the following months, the railway lines out of Falkenberg were gradually returned to operation, at first provisionally. All tracks were usable again in 1948. In GDR times, the station was expanded and included 160 km of railway tracks and 377 sets of points. In addition to the north-eastern connecting curve from the lower to the upper station, which had existing since the 19th century, a connecting curve was built south-east of the crossing, allowing direct trips from the west to the lower station, allowing operations to Elsterwerda without having to reverse in the upper