Last Flight from Tempelhof

Introduction The aura that surrounds the incomparable terminal building at Berlin’s Tempelhof Central Airport is still as powerful and mysterious today as it was seven decades ago. But the runways have gone silent, and just as it has at many junctures during its colorful history, this magnificent place that renowned British architect Sir Norman Foster dubbed “The Mother of All Airports” faces a period of monumental transition. The last flight from Tempelhof was an event some seventy years in the making, and many Berliners never wanted to see it come. But finally it did, on October 30, 2008. Right up until its closing, Tempelhof was still cherished among regional commuters for its ease of use and proximity to the city center. Over thirty thousand Berliners had signed a petition to keep the airport open, but to no avail. A two-billion-Euro expansion was already underway at the old East German airport at Schönefeld, and that cutting-edge facility will be inaugurated in 2011 as the new Berlin-Brandenburg International. Meanwhile, Tegel airport—for many years the city’s primary international hub—is adequate to handle the overflow. So Tempelhof has finally become redundant, just as Adolf Hitler’s chief architect Albert Speer had once predicted that it would. The grand old building was simply too expensive and impractical to maintain and operate as an airport. The problem now, however, is that the city of Berlin can’t figure out what to do with it. As a protected historical site, the massive structure can’t be torn down, and ideas ranging from a Formula One race track to a man-made lake have been suggested for the grounds. One of the more popular ideas—an amusement park—goes back at least as far as the early 1940s. At the height of planning for the new supercity Germania, Speer already considered the airport’s days to be numbered. In his memoirs, he recorded having discussed with the Führer the possibility of converting Tempelhof into a facility modeled after Copenhagen’s Tivoli Gardens. Sadly, however, the ultra-modern Tempelhof Gardens amusement park described in this book does not exist. Not yet, anyway. As of this writing, the only idea that has actually been approved is to have a few fashion shows there during part of the year. Any American serviceman or woman who served at Tempelhof during the Cold War can attest to the myriad of myths, legends, and ghost stories that always made us wonder who, or what, we might see walking down the hallway at night, or just how many floors there really were below ground. But for many of us who lived there, nothing in this book is more real than the sense of awe that overcame us each time we looked up at that marvel of architecture we called home. May its future, whatever its function, be as unique and illustrious as its past. D. M. Lindemann Prologue Berlin – August, 1945 Germany was officially still a country, but that was only because nobody could think of anything better to call it. Three years of Allied bombing had damaged or obliterated more than seven million buildings and two thousand bridges. Three thousand miles of railroad had been reduced to a tangled web of scrap iron, which no longer linked the piles of rubble that used to be cities. Roughly one out of every five Germans was dead, wounded, or missing. Tempelhof Field, the giant Nazi airdrome in the center of Berlin, had taken a heavy pounding. Soviet forces had seized the airfield in the spring of 1945 as they swept in from the east, but they only held it for a few weeks. That summer, the Allied heads of state gathered in Potsdam, twenty kilometers to the southwest. Nestled in the cozy, half-timbered Cecilienhof Palace, they formalized the partitioning of Berlin, and Tempelhof Field became the centerpiece of the American sector. Now, after systematically pulverizing the stately Prussian capital, the Allies quickly turned to rebuilding key logistical centers like Tempelhof for the long occupation ahead. The jagged remains of the Tempelhof, Schöneberg, Neukölln, and Kreuzberg districts encircled the airfield, with row upon row of bombed-out buildings scarring the horizon. Like forlorn spectators seated around the rim of a vast arena, the buildings seemed to be waiting. Waiting for the relief to come. Waiting to be knocked down or rebuilt. Waiting to be useful again. The chain of destruction continued through some three hundred degrees of the compass, but at the northwest corner of the airfield a single, massive edifice broke the monotony. There, spanning nearly a mile from end to end, loomed the largest building in Europe. From every conceivable angle, the air terminal at Tempelhof was a study in megalomania. Designed by architect Ernst Sagebiel, under the supervision of Hitler’s chief architect Albert Speer, the building was laid out in 1937 and mostly completed by 1941. As the working heart of the mighty Weltflughafen—world airport—the structure’s primary purpose was to conduct millions of air travelers each year comfortably and efficiently to and from Berlin. Its secondary but no less significant purpose was to strike awe into everyone who stood in its enormous shadow. On final approach, those passengers who caught a glimpse of the building from the air might discern the highly stylized outline of a Nazi eagle in flight. The only thing missing from the giant bird was the head. The eagle’s torso was formed by a cavernous reception hall at the midsection of the building complex. At the base of the reception hall a long, seven-story hotel formed the pelvis and upper thighs, with additional buildings curving away at obtuse angles from either end of the hotel. Here, concentric arcs joined rectilinear structures five stories high and a full city block long to form the legs, feet, and talons. By far the building’s most prominent feature—the component that defied all hyperbole used to describe it—was the part that formed the outstretched wings of the gigantic bird. This was in reality a sprawling, arc-shaped hangar, topped by the world’s largest cantilevered roof. From wingtip to wingtip it was over twelve hundred meters long—longer than three Empire State Buildings lying flat on the ground. As they disembarked with the hangar’s great awning far above their heads, the Nazi elite and everyday passengers arriving at Tempelhof had felt as if they were entering an immense cathedral dedicated to modern air travel and the power of the Third Reich. But those glory days, if one could call them that, were brief, and now they were gone. This was summer, 1945.