US Army garrison Wiesbaden commemorates the 75th anniversary of the Berlin Airlift, 16 June 2024
75 years of the end of the Berlin blockade, rescue with the return flight.
In 1948/49, thousands of Jews stranded in Berlin travelled to West Germany and beyond via the airlift. A story that has hardly been illuminated to date. Passers-by on Clayallee in Dahlem cannot miss the somewhat chubby matt silver-grey bird. The four-engined propeller plane, on display in the grounds of the Allied Museum, has symbolised the airlift for years. If it ever takes off from there, it will only be on the hook of a crane so that it can be used as a prototype in Hangar 7 of the former Tempelhof Airport as a reminder of the life-saving, enormous deliveries of materials and food to the constricted frontline city: the Berlin blockade by the Soviets, which was lifted 75 years ago this Sunday. But the Berlin transport of 1948 and 1949 was not only characterised by non-stop one-way deliveries to Tempelhof, Gatow and Tegel. The "airlift" was also extremely helpful in the opposite direction. Over 5,500 Jews travelled via the special air corridor to West Germany to safe freedom. "We were the empties of the sultana bombers," says Majer Szanckower, born in 1947, smiling mischievously as he looks back today. For the Jewish boy, the evacuation in 1948 was a once-in-a-lifetime flight. Together with his parents, who came from Poland, he travelled to southern Germany to a refugee camp especially for Jews. According to Szanckower, the family, who survived the Holocaust, felt safe there. It was not until 1957, when the last camp "Föhrenwald" on Lake Starnberg was dissolved, that they ventured out of this care and into German society by moving to Frankfurt am Main. As head of the Jewish cemeteries there, Majer Szanckower remains active in his community to this day.
Escape from Eastern Europe to Berlin:
After 1945, the military administrations had probably prepared for large flows of refugees, especially in the Berlin hub. However, nobody had realised that around 80,000 Jews, mainly between 1946 and 1948, would then stream into the metropolis on the Spree via Szczecin.In fact, after returning from the Soviet Union, the Eastern European Holocaust survivors also fled from their old homeland, from their own neighbours. Pogroms like the one in Kielce with 42 dead in July 1946 drove them westwards in a panic - not to the Germans, the perpetrators, but to the Western Allies. Under the pressure of the influx, the Americans and French - but not the British - also granted the so-called Jewish Displaced Persons, DPs for short, the coveted refugee status. This allowed them to find temporary shelter in the general DP camps such as the one on Teltower Damm. But it was precisely there that the traumatised survivors encountered their former tormentors - an untenable situation. Of necessity, the French decided to set up a special DP camp just for Jews on Eichborndamm in Wittenau. This quickly overflowed, which is why the US Army stepped in and allocated the Schlachtensee camp on Potsdamer Chaussee to the Jewish refugees. Although there were constant deportations to the western US zone, this refugee centre soon reached its capacity limit with up to 6,000 people. The same thing happened at a later date with another camp on Eisenacher Straße in Mariendorf.
In the cargo holds of the bombs:
And then the Soviets closed the escape routes to the West with the Berlin blockade that began on 24 June 1948. At short notice, those responsible decided to dissolve the DP camps for Jews and use the still frequent empty flights, mostly to Frankfurt, for transport.mOn the orders of military governor Lucius D. Clay, the evacuation began on 23 July. In just ten days with around 160 flights, the operation went surprisingly smoothly. US lorries, often from the loading area directly into the cargo holds of the bombers, took many, often frightened DPs into the air for the first time, for the first time in safe transit, whether in Hesse, Baden-Württemberg or Bavaria.
Of course, the cargo planes also transported other people on their return to West Germany. It is estimated that at least 160,000 people were transported. But for the DPs from the East, the overflowing refugee city of Berlin was a further traumatising situation. Many Germans were astonished, even contemptuous, that there were any surviving Jews at all with whom they had to share the meagre food. Even the Western Allies did not always show understanding and empathy for those who had fled from Poland, most of whom did not want to return to their former homeland, but only far away, to Palestine or the USA. Only a small proportion of the DPs remained in Germany. The airlift at the time meant a leap back into life for all of them, as it did for contemporary witness Majer Szanckower - after surviving.
But what reminds us of this today? This detail of the Berlin blockade has hardly been documented or told anywhere. Anyone walking along the former northern runway of the Raisin Bombers on Tempelhof Field can now at least mentally retrace the events of that time. A solitary memorial stele on the edge of a meadow, erected by the Senate, bears witness to the somewhat different, long-forgotten history of the airlift.
Source: taz
