- An airport used by hundreds of thousands of tourists
and business travellers each year could be sitting on top of thousands
of live bombs.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- Experts believe it entirely feasible that, in the aftermath
of the Second World War, with Berlin littered with millions of tons of
unexploded ordnance, the Soviets could well have pressured local officials
to move to clear the airfield as swiftly as possible.
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- "They would have stuffed them anywhere they could
- there was simply too much stuff to blow up all at once," said Karl-Heinz
Eckhardt, a Berlin historian. "There was a warren of massive Nazi
bunkers beneath the site of the present airport that would have suited
their purposes."
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- City authorities claim the airport is perfectly safe,
but a thorough check on the claims in the Stasi files - 140 km of them
that will still take a number of years to decipher - is being undertaken.
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- Nearly two million passengers a year pass through Schoenefeld.
According to the Stasi files, the ammunition was buried in bunkers between
eight and nine metres deep.
-
- A spokesman for the airport said: "We became aware
of the bunkers in 1993, four years after the fall of the [Berlin] Wall.
A check was undertaken then and everything was determined to be safe."
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- But he conceded that he was astounded at the claims that
fully-fuelled and bombed-up aircraft lie beneath the runways and said new
tests about the safety of the structures will be carried out.
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- He added: "We had no idea that so much ordnance
is supposedly under there."
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- Frank Henkel, the Conservative interior ministry spokesman,
said: "This must be investigated thoroughly and immediately and the
runways strengthened if necessary."
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- Berlin, with its sandy, dry soil, was perfect for the
bunker-building of the Third Reich. Hundreds of thousands of them were
constructed during the 12-year lifespan of the Nazi government: for every
one metre of building above ground in modern-day Berlin, there are three
metres below ground.
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- Bunkers are being discovered every day and a group called
Underground Berlin has turned several of them into tourist attractions.
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- http://www.thescotsman.co.uk/international.cfm?id=792292003
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