## The German Workers
The Berlin Airlift would not have been possible without the labor of thousands of German workers who unloaded aircraft at Tempelhof and the other airlift airports, maintained the runways and facilities, and kept the supply chain moving on the ground.
At Tempelhof, German workers unloaded cargo from aircraft that were on a strict turnaround schedule. The five-minute unloading target that Tunner’s team achieved required practiced, organized ground crews working quickly and without error. These crews were German civilians employed by the military occupation administration, working under American supervisors.
The position of these workers was striking. They had been, three years earlier, subjects of a government at war with the United States. Many had served in the Wehrmacht or had relatives who had. Now they were unloading American aircraft carrying food for German children in a city that American aircraft had bombed extensively less than a decade before. The historical compression was extreme, and there is no simple account of how individual German workers navigated it.
What is documented is the work: the trucks that moved cargo from aircraft to storage facilities, the loaders who carried bags of flour and coal off the ramps, the maintenance workers who kept the runways clear and the facilities functioning, the administrative staff who tracked cargo and scheduled aircraft movements. The airlift’s operational efficiency was not purely American. It was partly German.
The construction of Tegel Airport demonstrated German workers’ capacity in a different register. Building a full-length runway suitable for heavy transport aircraft in 92 days, in the conditions of 1948, required organized labor and genuine technical skill. The workers who built Tegel were doing so in a city under blockade, with the awareness that the airport they were building would help sustain the city’s supply. This context shaped the work in ways that simple wage labor analysis does not capture.