January 06, 2009

Airport series: Berlin Tempelhof

As a corporate Christmas incentive I participated in a guided tour in the recently closed airport Berlin-Tempelhof. For a change it was just pure fun to be on an airport. Though it was rather strange to walk through the empty halls which were a full scale airport a couple of weeks earlier.
No departures, no arrivals expected...
No queues at the check-in, no pretty stewardesses :-( ....
Nobody waits for the luggage....
The good thing about a closed airport was that we were allowed to get onto the airfield itself...even without security checks...
...and into the subterranean levels where, during second world war, fighter jets had been assembled.
There still are a couple of room which were left as they were captured by the Russian soldiers in 1945. This one had been a movie archive of the Nazis. The Russians opened it with explosives with the result of an annihilating fire of the celluloid films (lasted a couple of days), no film roll survived. Until today there are rumours about what actually was stored there, even the mysterious lost amber room was one of the speculations ;-)