Tunnels under Tempelhof
The
tunnels under
Tempelhof. I was stationed in Berlin, West Germany with
the USAF in 1983
and 1984. A constant rumor one heard while stationed there was
regarding the tunnels under the airport, used by the Nazi's during late WWII
as bomb shelters and to manufacture airplanes. Even today, Tempelhof is one of the largest buildings in the world. So, it
always seemed like it would be great if one could get down into
them. We always had visions of finding a bombed out plane or
at least some cool souvenirs.
Tempelhof was shaped like a curved capital Y, and the leg of the Y
(which was actually multiple buildings) was where the men’s dormitory
was. The story was this used to be the hotel part of the airport, and as
military dorm rooms went these were pretty good. Interestingly,
there were parts of the outside building that still had repaired bullet
pock marks from WWII. There was a bowling ally, arcade, and award
winning dining hall, as well as a “club”
and the restaurant. The "club" was a combined officers and NCO
club, had a small casino area and was very nice.
I was Senior NCO on my floor so
I had a set of keys to a storeroom on the top floor of our building.
The storeroom was accessed by a stairwell that went top to bottom of the
building. I had the
keys so if any airman needed to put or get items from storage, I could
let them in.
At the
bottom of that stairwell, in what was a basement level, was a locked
door. Rumor was it accessed the “tunnel’s” but no seemed to know
for certain. One day, while with my friend Kevin, we went down the
stairs and on a whim I tried the key that unlocked the storeroom, and
amazingly, it opened that door as well. We went in and
immediately there was a staircase “down”, and we explored a little bit
but didn’t go too far out of paranoia.
Curiosity
got the better of us at some later date, and we went into the
underground areas of Tempelhof several times, exploring. I
remember 3 main areas we explored. The first was off in a
direction towards the female dorm’s, which were some distance away in a
converted hanger area of the airport. It was pretty uneventful but
quite a bit of work – the tunnels or “corridors” were full sized and
easy to walk through, but often had pipes and other utility type things
to climb over, and occasionally ladders to go up or down between what
appeared to be several levels.
 When
we did get to what seemed to be the girl’s dorm area, we became pretty
paranoid about the whole thing, i.e. being discovered and getting into
major trouble for sneaking around underneath what was the female dorm rooms.
There were several small crawlways always to the left of the main tunnel
that we suspected were for utility access to groups of rooms, and though
there was some level of temptation, but we didn’t go down them.
We had to
often guess about where we were, but in many cases it was actually
possible to hear voices above us as people traversed hallways, etc. when
we were only one level down. There was quite a bit of “air duct”
type piping that allowed sound through fairly effectively. This
made us paranoid enough, as sound can go both ways :)
The
second major exploration was toward the center of the “Y” of Tempelhof,
and at one point, found us crawling up a “ramp” we discovered leading
into the old main Terminal area of the airport! The ramp we came up
turned out to be part of the baggage system. This was one of the
most amazing areas we discovered – everything was covered with dust, and
there even old posters, sighs, etc from what appeared to be the 40’s –
50’s. Major temptation to take something as a souvenir, but common
sense got the better of us… one thing to be caught where we should not
be, another if we were stealing. We went back down the baggage
area and followed that set of tunnels in the other direction, which we
quickly realized led out to the flight line… a place we didn’t
dare go out onto, as there were frequent SP patrols.
I
understand that after the wall came down, Tempelhof was re-opened as a
regional/European airport, so the ticketing/terminal/baggage area was in use again.
 The
third major exploration was, as I recall, the last for a couple reasons.
One was the difficulty in navigating the tunnels, we had gone down a
ladder into a lower tunnel, which was only 100 feet long, and the only
way up on the other side was to climb up some pipes. There was no
real proper ladder, just bracing on the wall to hold the pipes.
Well, it was as hard as heck to get up, but once we did, we realized it
would be even harder to climb down. At that point we felt like we
were stuck. Fortunately the tunnel continued on, so we began
looking for a different exit.
The first
interesting room area we came to was a literally bombed out (or so we
wanted to believe, anyway) or at least “collapsed” room through a door
along the tunnel we were traversing. It did not look like we could
cross the room safely, however, even though there was a door on the
other side. The “slope” of the rubble was very steep and loose,
and the bottom of the slope was dark and full of what looked like sharp
stones, etc.
BTW, some
of the underground area actually had light switches (not very dramatic
:) that worked, others were simply totally dark and we used flashlights.
Continuing past the ruble room, we came to a branch in the corridor, one
direction quickly ended in a chain link fence/gate that covered the
entire corridor top to bottom, and had a gate with a lock. To this
day we wonder what was on the other side… the lost treasures of
Tempelhof no doubt.
The other
direction went on a way, and ended in a small room with a “trap door” at
the top accessible by ladder. We stood debating quietly whether we
should try to push up the trap door, and even climbed up the ladder.
I distinctly remember being at the top, debating whether to try to open
it when I heard voices. Listening for a few minutes, we realized
the trap door led up into the German police station that was on that
side of Tempelhof!!!! Bad idea!!!!
So, we
went back the way we came and had a very hard time climbing down - if I
recall, the biggest problem was “seeing” what we were doing, because we
had to climb while the other person lit the way with a flashlight.
That was
exhaustive and scary enough that I don’t recall going again… this was in
my first year in Berlin, in my second other things kept me busy and I
didn’t go there again. I cannot believe I never took a camera or
pictures, what was I thinking?!??! I will have to ask Kevin if he
did, I don’t have any distinct memories of him taking any. I have
to imagine others had been in their besides us. Searches on Google
and Yahoo have not revealed anything...
We were
both paranoid for another reason – each of us had one “black mark” on
use for “incidents” while stationed there, and another visit to the 1st
shirts office was to be avoided. Those tales are for another
day...
Michael
Pacheco
Thanks
to Lisa of Baker Flight for pulling this out of me...
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