Nazi airport turned Berlin lifeline closes

(CNN) -- It has been a piece of Berlin history for 80 years, a symbol of Nazi power but also of Germans' desire for freedom after World War II.

Friday, Berlin's Tempelhof Airport will shut its doors for good.

Tempelhof was where American and British pilots touched down after the war when Soviet Forces blockaded West Berlin. The allied pilots flew in millions of tons of food, fuel and medication for an ailing population, earning themselves the title "candy bombers," for dropping candy as they flew over the city.

"Through Tempelhof, we stayed alive," said Hedi Koenig, 83, who lived near the airport in West Berlin after the war. Without the air drops, she said, the people would have starved to death.

The airport rapidly became Berlin's only hub for supplies, eventually carrying almost 2.5 million tons of goods into the city.

Tempelhof's massive main building -- originally designed to represent Nazi Germany to visitors -- remains one of the largest structures in the world. The U.S. Army later built a basketball court and firing range at Tempelhof, and hid an entire command center in the vast network of tunnels under the buildings.

These days, however, its runways are too short for most modern civilian aircraft. City officials said the airport was not profitable and needed to be shut down as Berlin builds a major new airport, Berlin-Brandenburg International.

Moves to close Tempelhof have sparked protests from residents and aviators who thought more should have been done to preserve such an important part of the city's history. See archive photos of the airport

"The people want it, private enterprise wants it, all national arguments are in favor of it," Friedbert Pflueger, a local opposition leader, said last year.

More than 100 private pilots staged a "fly-in" in September 2007 to protest the plans.

Koenig said Berliners were still angry with city officials who allowed the closure. She blamed business leaders for putting pressure on the city to close the airport by arguing it cost too much and didn't make enough money.

"For business people, the airport doesn't mean anything," said Koenig. She said they were too young to remember how important Tempelhof has been for the city.

Koenig is among many who believe the airport should be turned into a cultural memorial.

A memorial already exists outside the airport to remember the candy bombers, dozens of whom died flying in during bad weather or after being harassed by Soviet fighter planes.

"The success of the airlift made sure that the communist ideology lost its impetus, lost its thrust, because people began to realize that democracies can defend their way of life," said Helmut Trotnow of the Berlin Allied Museum.

The allied pilots, Koenig said, were responsible for saving the city amid the Russian blockade.

"The Russians tried with all their might to break us," she said.

Koenig snuck into West Berlin from the East after the war. That meant she didn't have a visa and couldn't receive official food rations, so she literally scraped by during her night job at a bakery.

Koenig said she cleaned the pans and would try to scratch off whatever food remained stuck to the sides. Her boss would check to make sure she wasn't eating any of the remnants, but Koenig said she did it anyway, whenever her boss wasn't looking.

Tempelhof's beginnings date to September 4, 1909, when American aviation pioneer Orville Wright flew an engine-powered plane for a few minutes on the airfield there. It ushered in the era of aviation in Germany, and Tempelhof eventually became Berlin's central airport and the biggest hub in Europe.

The airport also became the home of Lufthansa, which was founded in Berlin in 1926.

Civilian traffic declined during the second world war and the Soviet Army occupied the airport. The Americans took it over in July 1945.

The Soviet blockade of West Berlin began in May 1948 as an attempt to force the Western Allied powers out of that part of the city. They cut off rail and road links to the West, and West Berlin -- isolated in the middle of the new East Germany -- found itself isolated even more.

In response, the Allies imposed counter-blockade measures which included cutting off East German communications and an embargo on Eastern bloc exports. The moves forced the Soviet Union to eventually lift the blockade a year later, in May 1949.

The last flights from Tempelhof will fly just before midnight Thursday, the airport authority said. One will be a special Lufthansa flight aboard a Junkers Ju-52, a post-World War II transport aircraft. The other will be a DC-3 -- the same type of plane flown by the candy bombers from Tempelhof some 60 years ago.

With the closing of Tempelhof, the city has two remaining airports -- at Schoenefeld and Tegel. All flights from Tempelhof will move to Tegel.

Eventually, Schoenefeld will become the new Berlin-Brandenburg International, or BBI. It is scheduled to open in 2011, after which Tegel will close.

CNN Berlin Bureau Chief Fred Pleitgen and CNN's Carolin Fiehm in London contributed to this report.