Berlin Trip : Berlin Tempelhof Airport Tour (Part 1)
This transpired to be one of the most interesting tours that I’ve been on, a two-hour guided tour around the former Templehof Airport. It’s a complex site and the tour consisted of seeing the old airport terminal, the airside area, some of the remaining Nazi architectural elements, the US military base and the location of the Nazi secret storage. Hence why it might take me a while to plough through all the photos that I took, so there might be a few posts for my two loyal blog readers.
But we’ll start at the entrance as that seems sensible. The site is used for numerous purposes now, although the airport terminal building itself is still as it was left when it closed in 2008. I arrived a little early for the tour, although friends won’t be surprised at that, but there’s a little museum to look at whilst waiting.
This photo shows the scale of the site.
A photo of the terminal on 1 September 1975 and the tour took in this hall.
The Dutch guide was excellent and full of enthusiasm. Whilst walking to the next stage on the tour, he mentioned that Hitler had a private entrance to the airport and that’s in the centre of this photo.
One of the airside corridors. It doesn’t take much imagination to picture how this would have looked full of travellers.
Out on the tarmac and my friend Liam would like this, he used to specialise in concrete pours of runways (or whatever the technical term is).
The structure is ridiculously large and was at the time of its construction one of the world’s top twenty largest buildings. It’s one of the few airports that was designed to support massive growth in airline travel, although the Nazis had many grand plans. It was built to be symmetrical, but that didn’t quite come to pass. It was designed by the architect Ernst Sagebiel (1892-1970) and construction took place between 1936 and 1941, but some elements weren’t finished and some of the plans were changed. Norman Foster, who led the design for the reopened Reichstag, referred to it as “the mother of all airports”.
The airport wasn’t built with long runways, as they weren’t much needed at the time, and this limitation is one of the reasons that its growth was limited later on.
It wasn’t the only airport used during the Berlin Airlift after the Second World War, but it was perhaps the most important.
The old passport control signage.
The baggage system is all still there as part of the attempts to preserve the past. It wasn’t entirely clear to me what the long-term plan is for all of this, but I hope that they keep it.
