Fully armed Nazi bomber planes 'buried below East Berlin airport'

ALLAN HALL IN BERLIN

AN AIRPORT used by hundreds of thousands of tourists and business travellers each year could be sitting on top of thousands of live bombs.

Papers among thousands of files captured from the Stasi, the secret police of East Germany, claim tons of live Second World War munitions were buried in concrete bunkers beneath the runways of Schoenefeld airport in East Berlin. It is now the main destination for discount airlines, such as Ryanair, and numerous charter companies.
Not only did the commissars intern munitions beneath the runways, but also entire Nazi fighter planes, all fuelled and fully bombed-up, according to the Stasi.

The captured files of Interflug, the former East German government airline and the airport authority of the DDR, are now being examined to see if the Stasi claim is true.

(whew, finally an English link - the story has been around for some days)
http://www.thescotsman.co.uk/international.cfm?id=792292003

Edit: some pics and Info:
http://www.berlin-airport.de/PubEnglish/PubSchoenefeld/PubDatenFaktenSXF/PubGeschichteSXF/index.html

Freeper Airlines! The Swastikas are already painted on!

Started my morning with a smile!

Well, as ready as they can be for sitting 50 years....

Lift out the munitions and put 'em on Ebay. That's raise some Euros for a cash-strapped country..."Be the first kid on your block with his own HE-111!"

If the claim should be true, that outcome is very likely. Either that, or the technical Museum.
Old Nazi-Planes are an Item in high demand and low supply. American collectors pay fantastic amounts of money, even if the plane in question was resting in a Russian swamp for 50 years. The price for one in mint-condition would be mind-boggling.

There is a sad story about this: original Nazi-Uniforms are so valuable, that military cemeteries in eastern Europe are regularly plundered, just to provide American (and Russian) war gamers with their toys.

...they can keep the bombs. I have always wanted to learn how to fly - what better way to learn than in a piece of history?

Have them call me! :D

I would love to fly in a Messerschidt too. One way I cure my flying lust is I get pilots who own bi-planes to take me flying. Try it sometime. It is a awesome experience. Better than any modern plane


DEMMAN

Can I wear my Red Baron goggles and scarf? :D

My next flight is in Sept. I got the goggles and a white scarf. I am gonna play Eddie Rickenbacker. They actually do a WW1 air show in my neck of the woods. The German guy is actually pretty funny. He chases Fifi de Fleur around all day. And is plane is beautiful



DEMMAN

Eddie Rickenbacker? The Boy Scout camp I worked at named a camping area after him...

Did not come close to the Red Baron though.


DEMMAN

They did all this heavy analysis on his wounds, flight simulations, etc. They came to the conclusion that someone on the ground shot the Baron, not the British pilot who is credited with it.

DEMMAN

On one of the edu-tainment channels, Discovery or History channel, right? I was a little disturbed that they seemed so careful about everything, except that they only took a single eyewitness account to determine the exact spot the plane struck the earth.

I've had a little experience with aircraft wrecks, and I thought that part was danged sloppy.

I didn't think that much about it, but maybe that's all they had to go on. But, you'd think with all the suppositions they were otherwise making, they could have tried to determine where the crash site was.

Edit - I liked your SR-71 site. I bet that was fun as hell!

I am familiar with the Reinbeck Aerodrome near the hudson. Is it there ?

I used to go there with my buddies about 15 years ago. Great show

Cheers
Drifter

FA-18.

but since i will never be in a F-18. I will settle for a flying lawnmower.


DEMMAN

but you never know. They're still finding unexplode US bombs from the war. It kind of sucks when they have to evacuate a few blocks because someone found another bomb.

My guess is though that the Russians would have tried to steal anything cool like fighters, bomber, jets, rocket planes ect. Though I'm sure there are things buried that won't be found for a long time. Still if they had planes and more importantly fuel they would have used them, not left them hidden in some bunker.

I was stationed on a cruiser out of Pearl Harbor back in the mid-eighties and my supply officer told me that on his previous assignment he had gone on an excursion into some tunnels on Oahu- These tunnels were constructed right after Dec. 7th and they still had supplies in them. Mostly rations, furniture etc. It was a place that was basically frozen in time.

Of all three flavours: Nazi, Soviet and Western.
Some are frozen in time (those are shown on TV sometimes; for example parts of the Subway were used as bomb shelters in the war and were left in that condition.), others are museums or demolished and some are forgotten - a well guarded secret of a few (if any) individuals.

The Boy Scout camp I went to in the late '70s was on a hillside, and if you went exploring back in the trees far enough you'd find them. Anything of value had been taken out though. Still, it was neat to experience that bit of history first hand.

Can we let Smirk be the first to fly it?

(Look it up, and you'll get the joke.) :evilgrin:

I saw some Nazi warplanes at the Smithsonian A & S museum, and they were beautiful aircraft.
Especially the ME-262 "Schwalbe" the first operational jet fighter.
Reminded me in the front of a shark.

DEMMAN

The the V-1 "buzz bomb."

The "Komet" was a rocket-powered interceptor, that used fuels that were so dangerous that any hard landings, (the plane had no real landing gear, just a skid,) even if the plane didn't explode, the fuels would leak into the cockpit and literally dissolve the pilot. Yeesh.

But in the air it had a rate-of climb that was nearly vertical, and could reach speeds over 200 mph faser than Allied fighters.

But it was the only German fighter that killed more German pilots than Allied ones.

Years before Yeager.

The ME-262 couldn't go supersonic, except in a power dive.
And each one that tried that had the wings rip off.

The ME-262's top speed was 500 mph.
Supersonic is 700 mph.

And several were ripped apart. It was not built for such speeds, although it could reach them.
http://mach1.luftarchiv.de/mach1.htm

...would be interested in such a find.

http://www.tighar.org/Projects/Opsep.html

I can see the headlines now.

My friend from Berlin, an engineer, told me that they're always finding unusual things in the Berlin underground. He said that one time they found a completely finished subway station with trackage and everything that had never been used (it was constructed with the expectation that the subway line would eventually reach it, but it never did). They happened to be building a subway line out to that point, and the assayers determined that the tracks were half a metre off. What did they do?

They blew it up. They had a set budget for municipal, and if they didn't spend all of it, they'd have it cut for the next year. A pristine completed subway station just didn't fit into those plans.

Let's hope they don't just decide these finds are inconvenient, eh?

One is not even ten years old.