Berlin Tempelhof Airport

Tempelhof Entrance


Tempelhof Main Building

Berlin Tempelhof, once the world's largest airport, closed its gates today 30th October, 2008 on an 81-year history that spanned the Red Army's invasion, the Cold War and Germany's reunification. A 1940s Douglas DC-3 "candy bomber" and a Deutsche Lufthansa AG Junkers Ju- 52 of a similar age were the last aircraft to take off from the city-center airport shortly before midnight. With them departed an era of Berlin's history. Tempelhof, expanded under Adolf Hitler, played a central role in the 1948 Allied airlift that circumvented a Soviet blockade after World War II. After the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961, the airport was for many the only safe passage to the outside world. Designated by the ministry of transport on October 8, 1923, Tempelhof became the world's first airport with an underground railway station in 1927, now called Platz der Luftbrücke after the Berlin Airlift.


Luftbrücke memorial



Nostalgic Berliners bade a fond farewell to Tempelhof, the fabled hub of the Berlin Airlift, as it closed to make way for a major new airport to serve the reunified capital. One of the airport's most distinguishing features is its large, canopy-style roof that was able to accommodate most contemporary airliners during its heyday in the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s, thereby saving passengers from the elements. Tempelhof Airport's main building used to be among the 20 largest buildings on earth. Tempelhof, just south of the city centre, is a potent symbol of the days when free West Berlin was a Cold War outpost embedded in the Soviet bloc and of the city's survival, thanks to the massive aid of the Western allies.

The site of the airport was originally Knights Templar land in medieval Berlin and from this beginning came the name Tempelhof. The airport halls and the neighbouring buildings, intended to become the gateway to Europe and a symbol of Hitler's "world capital" Germania, are still known as the largest built entities worldwide, and have been described by British architect Sir Norman Foster as "the mother of all airports". With its façades of shell limestone, the terminal building, built between 1936 and 1941, forms a massive 1.2-kilometre long quadrant yet had a charmingly intimate feel; planes could taxi right up to the building and unload, sheltered from the weather by its enormous overhanging canopy. Passengers walked through customs controls and find themselves in a dazzlingly simple and luminous reception hall. The building complex was designed to resemble an eagle in flight with semicircular hangars forming the bird's spread wings. A mile long hangar roof was to have been laid in tiers to form a stadium for spectators at air and ground demonstrations.


Inside the Terminal

Tempelhof's association with aviation stretches back to the earliest days of flight. In 1909, the flat expanse where there are now runways played host to Orville Wright, the pioneering American aviator. Opened as an airport in 1927, Tempelhof expanded over the next decade and was included in plans by Nazi architect Albert Speer to transform Berlin into Germania, the futuristic capital of Hitler's Third Reich. Architect Norman Foster described the influence of the neo-classical limestone edifice molded during the 1930s as ''the mother of all airports.''

Hitler wanted Tempelhof – the world’s first truly modern airport – to be a showpiece of Nazi power. The front of the terminal is a concave curve 900m (more than half a mile) long looking out on to the aerodrome. It is still the second largest freestanding building in the world after the Pentagon and was plainly designed with the intention of hanging giant swastikas from its towers. The aim was to hold rallies of up to 80,000 people on the long, flat roof: the Führer could fly in, make his speech to the faithful, then fly away again.

From an architectural point of view, Tempelhof Weltflughafen - "world airport", as it was optimistically known before the Luftwaffe flew to Warsaw, with no intention of landing, in September 1939 - is a magnificent and compelling enigma. Designed by Ernst Sagebiel (1892-1970) between 1934 and 1936 and built well into WWII, it was to be the international gateway to Germania: Berlin in its over-inflated postwar guise, as planned by Albert Speer, assuming victory over the Allies by 1948.

Although under construction for more than ten years, it was never finished because of World War II. Soviet forces took Tempelhof in the Battle of Berlin on 24 April 1945 in the closing days of the war in Europe following a fierce battle with Luftwaffe troops. Tempelhof's German commander, Colonel Rudolf Boettger, refused to carry out orders to blow up the base, choosing instead to kill himself. After he died the Russian troops attempted to clear the 5 lower levels of the airbase but the Germans had booby trapped everything and too many were killed, leading the Russian commander to order the lower levels to be flooded with water. The lower 3 levels are still flooded to this day, having never been opened up due to un-exploded ordinance.


Bahntunnel under the airport

''It's very sad,'' said Doris Oelschlegel, 69, who went on a tourist flight in a DC-3 with her husband last year from the airport. ''Tempelhof is a historic monument and a symbol.'' Berlin city authorities say they are legally obliged to close the unprofitable airport, the smallest and most central of three airfields in the capital, to concentrate air traffic at a planned site 20 kilometers (12 miles) southeast of the city. An April referendum to halt the closure was defeated after support from Chancellor Angela Merkel and Bild, Germany's biggest-selling newspaper, failed to swing the vote.

Passenger numbers at Tempelhof fell to 350,000 last year compared with 6.3 million at Schoenefeld in the former East and 13.4 million at Tegel, former West Berlin's airport. Tempelhof lost between €10 million euros and €15 million a year since the mid-1990s, according to its Web site. ''Tempelhof for me is one of the icons of Berlin,'' said Elke Schumann, 63, who boarded her first airplane at Tempelhof on a British Airways flight to Hamburg in 1961. ''I don't understand the decision, it's a mistake.''


Tempelhof Airport Berlin 1948


Reichsadler - Nazi Eagle

While Schoenefeld in the former East is being developed into Berlin's main airport, there are no firm plans for Tempelhof once the aircraft leave. The airport is on a subway line four stops from the city center, and is a 10-minute cab ride from downtown. Proposals for the 1,000-acre site ranged from a park for solar-power generation to a casino complex to a medical clinic with fly-in service for patients. The clinic, spearheaded by U.S. billionaire Ronald Lauder, was rejected because of the flights.

The airfield's finest hour, commemorated in concrete at the entrance to the terminal building, came at the end of the war as Berlin was carved up into zones controlled by the victorious Allied powers: Britain, the U.S., France and the Soviet Union. In 1948, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, in an attempt to squeeze U.S., British and French forces out of the nearly 500 square-kilometer (193 square-mile) enclave of West Berlin, ordered his soldiers to cut off supplies. On 20 June 1948 Soviet authorities, claiming technical difficulties, halted all traffic by land and by water into or out of the western-controlled section of Berlin. The only remaining access routes into the city were three 25-mile-wide air corridors across the Soviet-occupied zone of Germany. Faced with the choice of abandoning the city or attempting to supply its inhabitants with the necessities of life by air, the Western Powers chose the latter course, and for the next eleven months sustained the city's two-and-a-half million residents in one of the greatest feats in aviation history.





During the Cold War, Tempelhof was the natural location to film Michael Caine as British secret agent Harry Palmer, arriving disguised as a salesman with a suitcase of women's underwear in the 1966 movie of Len Deighton's novel, ''Funeral in Berlin.'' Garbed in classical dress, stripped of ornamentation, Tempelhof Zentralflughafen, as it is called today, addresses the streets of Berlin set immediately across from its massive and lofty entrance. In the imagination, it is easy to add Nazi eagles, swastika flags and titanic statuary by Arno Breker to that facade. Today Tempelhof stands mute, the only part of Albert Speer's project for the New Reich Capital of Germania which remains.

There was little fanfare for the closure. A loudspeaker spluttered briefly with a routine announcement that echoed across the high-vaulted departure lounge. Then Tempelhof, Hitler’s favourite airport, fell silent. It was the last call for one of Germany’s cultural icons. Outside, there were no oompah bands and no grand parades, only a DC3 “candy bomber” revving its engines for the final take-off from the otherwise deserted runway.

''Tempelhof is a symbol that is strongly identified with the blockade and the role the airport played in allowing life to go on in the city,'' said Gerhard Braun, a professor of urban studies at Berlin's Free University. ''It's a mistake to close a central airport like Tempelhof.''