Weddewarden Airfield

The airfield Weddewarden in Bremerhaven at the district Weddewarden was built in 1925 as a commercial airport for civil aviation. After military use, it has been an industrial and commercial area since the 1990s.

Civil airport

Focke-Wulf A 17 in Weddewarden (1927)

Between 1925 and 1927, a traffic airfield was created between the towns of Weddewarden and Speckenbüttel . The location was ideal, as the port area of Bremerhaven was to the south and there were no buildings in the immediate vicinity. As early as 1927 there was a bus route with an airfield stop. Flight operations began in 1928. In 1927 Lufthansa opened a flight base here and flew to Heligoland with seaplanes , and there was also a scheduled service from Hamburg via Bremerhaven to Wangerooge - Norderney - Borkum with Junkers F 13 aircraft . In 1932, the square was classified as Airport II . Shortly afterwards, the system had to stop operating.

Military airfield

In 1935, as part of the general rearmament of the expansion to a military airfield and the Air Force took over the premises. Several hangars, administrative and operational buildings were built. A harbor basin on the southern edge was to serve as a berth for the German aircraft carriers Graf Zeppelin and Carrier B. This "Zeppelin harbor " is now the northern harbor . The carrier aircraft were to be stationed in Weddewarden, but were not used. For their maintenance and repair, three halls disguised as farmhouses were built on the other side of the Weser. The buildings are still standing today.

During the Second World War there were mostly sea aviation associations at the airfield. When the Red Army approached in the east in 1945, personnel and material were outsourced to Bremerhaven from the abandoned test center of the Luftwaffe in Karlshagen , which was to continue the development of missile weapons in Weddewarden . Among other things, the Fieseler Fi 103 , Ruhrstahl X-4 , Blohm & Voss BV 246 missiles and the Henschel Hs 293 glide bomb were stored here .

Minesweeping Group 1 was stationed in Weddewarden from 1942 until the end of the war. The mine sweeping aircraft were converted Junkers Ju 52 / 3m with a large ring under the machine. A powerful generator in the aircraft generated electricity for the magnetic loop under the aircraft. The machines flew low over the water surface and were supposed to detonate the magnetic mines - which was not without danger. The anti-aircraft unit in Weddewarden belonged to the Navy.

post war period

Staging Area Weddewarden (1957)

After the invasion of the British Army on May 7, 1945, these weapons (partially destroyed) fell into the hands of the Allies. Since the USA needed a base with a port to supply their units stationed in southern Germany, the area between Bremen and Nordholz was under US control. In May 1945 the US Army took over the air base and used it in the first few years as a transit camp for German soldiers to be released and for US troops returning to the USA. The main task then became the handling of consumer goods and military equipment for the troops stationed in Germany.

The property - initially known as the staging area - was named Carl-Schurz-Kaserne in 1973 . At the time, US Army units, United States Air Force and United States Navy were stationed there. In the barracks , among other things, the radar monitoring units 606th Tactical Control Squadron with subordinate 626th Tactical Control Flight were located. The 39th Signal Battalion was also stationed here, overseeing the European Command Control Console System (ECCCS) and the Cemetery Net . The nuclear weapons sites of the army and air force units of the NATO partners were connected to one another by these networks . After the Americans used several properties in Bremerhaven until 1970, they then moved all offices in Weddewarden together.

Every year in May, Bremerhaven was invited to Armed Forces Day . With its mixture of folk festival , aerobatics and military parades , it was very popular with the Bremerhaveners. At the end, jet fighters from the NATO countries flew low over the dike. Not far behind the grandstand, a German Lockheed F-104 crashed on May 2, 1964 . The American pilot, Captain Perfili , shot himself out with the ejection seat but passed out and drowned in a pasture ditch.

present

Bremerhaven lost its importance as a port of embarkation at the end of the 1960s when the troop transport ships were needed in the Vietnam War . The Rhein-Main Air Base handled the passenger transport, the port of Rotterdam handled the cargo. A further reduction in the US troop presence brought the end of the Cold War . After the last units were withdrawn in 1993, there was only one civil service center for loading . Even before the last units of the troops were withdrawn, the extensive grounds were used by freight forwarders for sea handling. Large areas of the airfield are used as storage areas for the car transshipment, which is particularly important in Bremerhaven. With this conversion to a purely industrial area , new buildings partially replaced the old ones. Nonetheless, individual, largely original, buildings of the old air base can still be found in the accommodation and administration area, as well as more modern buildings that the US military had erected. Some hangars and operational buildings on the edge of the former airfield also still exist. Together with two neighboring industrial areas, the site of the former Carl Schurz barracks is marketed under the umbrella term LoginPort .