Archaeology Magazine - July/August 2014 - 48

Archaeologists have found a few personal items, including
handmade ID tags and rosary beads (above), in and around
the ditches in which the laborers sheltered during bombing
raids. They've also uncovered items, such as dog tags (below),
left behind by U.S. GIs working to get Tempelhof functioning
again after the war.

tags issued by Weserfug and Lufthansa-or
painstakingly handmade. "When they took
shelter, people brought things that were
most valuable and then either lost them or
didn't survive," Pollock says.
In fact, the barracks complex
was hit by a bomb and burned,
an event shown in aerial photographs taken at the time, which
has now been confrmed by the
archaeological evidence. Personal
efects, including a pocketknife and
metal ID tags, were found scattered.
When the team uncovered the posts that

had supported some of the barracks, they found that they
were mostly made of wood, rather than sturdier concrete,
that had been charred in a fre, likely from the bombing. (The
bathrooms were the only areas with concrete foundations.)
By the spring of 1945, the barracks were no longer standing,
although work for Weserfug went on among half-assembled
bombers in the airport's high-ceilinged hangars. "We know
there was an attempt to keep building these Stukas until
literally the last days," says Pollock, "and in the last gasps of
the war there were still forced laborers living in the airport."
In May 1945, Berlin surrendered, and after a few months of
Soviet occupation, control of Tempelhof Airport was transferred to the U.S. Army. Whatever remained of the barracks
was quickly cleared as the Americans raced to get the facility
back up and running. Rubble and airplane parts were bulldozed
to the north edge of the airport, covering the camp's foundations, then slowly cleared away.
Today, even as developers rush to build around the former
airport, Bernbeck and Pollock hope to continue their work.
They want to add more to the history of Tempelhof so that
its full complexity can be understood. And they hope that
the site will no longer be known only as a Cold War symbol
of freedom and resistance, but also as a place of coercion
and sufering. Working at Tempelhof is a departure for the
researchers, who live in Berlin but have spent most of their
careers excavating Stone and Bronze Age sites in Turkey,
Iran, and Turkmenistan. In today's Germany, the
impact of WWII-era excavations has political,
social, and personal implications beyond what
most archaeological digs promise. "What you
interpret and what you say have a distinct possibility of touching people who are still alive," says Pollock. "That's completely diferent from something
from the ffth millennium B.C." ■
Andrew Curry is a contributing editor at Archaeology.

Secret History

empelhof 's dark history actually began more than a
decade before the start of World War II. A military
prison on the site was shuttered in 1928 when the
area was turned into an airport. When the Nazis took power
fve years later, one of the prison buildings was reopened
as Konzentrationlager Columbia, "Concentration Camp
Columbia," a shadowy, semiofcial site where political opponents, Jews, and homosexuals could be detained. "People
were kept here for one to three weeks and tortured," says
local historian Bernhard Bremberger. "It was a way to terrorize the opposition in Berlin." For more ofcial interrogations,
prisoners might be bused to the Gestapo headquarters, then
brought back at night.
In 1936, Concentration Camp Columbia, which was close

to central Berlin, and thus to public scrutiny, was shut once
again and its remaining prisoners moved to a new camp on
the edge of the city called Sachsenhausen. Two years later,
Columbia was razed. With this rare opportunity to work on
a known concentration camp site, archaeologists Susan Pollock and Reinhard Bernbeck had hoped to uncover evidence
of the camp facility in a narrow trench they opened near the
modern-day street. However, they were able to fnd only the
faintest traces of the prison's foundations. Disturbed soil and
bits of rubble, including a three-by-four-foot piece of foundation, were all that was left. "[The Nazis] removed the building
down to the foundations, and beyond. Everything was dug out
of the ground," Bernbeck says. "We think there was a reason
for this-to remove the traces of its existence."
ArchAeology * July/August 2014

Archaeology Magazine - July/August 2014

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