Of History, Candy, and the Wrecking Ball April 28
I’ve been around aviation in one form or another for much of my life. I’ve spent hundreds of hours flying into remote airstrips and large international airports hauling everything from bodies to a small herd of goats. A daily intimacy of airplanes anthromorphizes them. Each one has its own personality made up of idiosyncratic quirks learned by sight, sound, or touch. For me, airports can sometimes be the same.
Templehof airport in Berlin is one of those places. When the Nazis built it, it was the largest building in Europe, so massive that you can easily see the U-shaped colossus on radar. Tempelhof was the starting point for the Berlin Airlift that kept Berlin from starving after the Soviets closed off the city. Nearly 30 years after my last visit it’s no longer a pilot’s ghost town, but a reliever airport to handle spill-over traffic from Berlin’s main airport.
I visited the place several times while in the Air Force. In my day, the Cold War was still on and the Berlin wall stood in all its shameful, ugly glory. You could easily see the difference between bright, modern West Berlin and dowdy East Berlin even if that scar on the face of the divided city wasn’t there.
I remember the end of the runway was lined almost to its boundary by sooty apartment buildings where Berliners sometimes waved from windows and tended to their daily lives. But the most impressive sight was the immense terminal. Massive on radar, it was an awe-inspiring monument to Hitler up close. Albert Spier designed it to emphasize the superiority of Germany and from close up, it’s tempting to say he might have succeeded. His terminal was jacked up on architectural steroids and swelled by grandiose Nazi fervor for a madman.
When we taxied to the parking area, we were alone in a space that could hold hundreds of airplanes. It was easy to imagine the chaos of the Airlift. The Candy Bomber became famous here as the hopeful face of an America that still did good. By the time I arrived, our image was already tarnishing.
With the roar of the engines gone, the place was almost silent - nothing other than some far-off traffic noise and the ticking of our engines as they cooled. Our footsteps echoed as we entered the building. In those days, only a small portion was in use by a contingent of U.S. Air Force and Luftwaffe clerks. The rest of the building was dusty and many of the floor to ceiling windows were boarded up. Ticket counters and shops were shuttered and the guttural German flight announcements were only a distant memory.
Cargo unloaded, we taxied out and left in a roar, back over the dirty apartment buildings and over the wall to our airbase in England. For me, Tempelhof lives on as a memory of grande plans ruined and good people helping others. I knew Tempelhof as a place with a rich history that once played a large role in the history of the planet. From the ugly reasons for its birth to its redemption as a lifeline to the starving, it is - and was - an important place that deserved to live on.
The Berlin city council recently voted to raze it to make way for something modern and no doubt immanently disposable in 20 or 30 years. It’s become an unwanted relic with its historic patina rubbed off. It will succumb to the wrecking ball - dust to dust as it were. And for me, that’s a shame.
The Poobah is a featured contributor at Bring It On!
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