Article by Verena Schmitt-Roschmann, dpa - Yesterday at 20:01

Little Wolfgang wrote to the "dear chocolate pilot" with an important request. "Oh be so good and write me where you always drop your chocolate," the five-year-old asked US pilot Gail Halvorsen on a postcard in 1948. "I am always looking with my little sister but have never found any." In return, the Berlin nipper offered the American free choice from his toys. "I also have a nice tricycle, do you want it?"

The small postcard in the holdings of the Berlin Allied Museum says an amazing amount about a key date in the Cold War. The Berlin Airlift 75 years ago was not only the first climax of the decades-long East-West confrontation. It helped two million people in West Berlin to survive and thus became a grandiose sympathetic success for the Western occupiers. Halvorsen, who often dropped sweets for children during the approach and thus became a folk hero, said himself: "It was fantastic. Enemies became friends, and that changed everything."

Those who wonder today why West and East look so differently on the USA may find clues here. Only three years after the German surrender in 1945, Washington, together with allies Britain and France, decided on this logistical tour de force to secure their outpost West Berlin and stand up to the Soviet Union. "This had a lasting positive impact on the US image," says historian Bernd von Kostka of the Allied Museum. For the Soviet Union, it was an unexpected setback that was hardly addressed later. "It was a deliberate blank space in the East," says von Kostka.

Briefly, the facts: The occupation zones of the three Western powers France, Great Britain and the USA, which had existed since the end of the Second World War, introduced the D-Mark with a currency reform in the summer of 1948. Their own currency signalled that the divided Germany was drifting apart. The USSR saw the opportunity to take over the sectors of Berlin controlled by the Western powers, which lay as an island in the middle of the Soviet occupation zone. Dictator Josef Stalin cut all land routes and gambled that the Western powers would abandon their remote outpost. Instead, the three countries began aerial resupply on 26 June 1948. By May 1949, they had flown to West Berlin 277,000 times and brought in around two million tonnes of vital goods.

"I still remember the utter astonishment even in the highest SED circles when the airlift suddenly got underway," said historian Wolfgang Leonhard, who was still a party cadre in the East at the time. "At the beginning, people laughed about it and said: 'You can't supply all of West Berlin - that was almost two million people - by air. That's just a show.' But then it became more serious."

Every minute the planes flew over the Karl Marx SED Party College in Kleinmachnow on the south-western outskirts of the city, where the young communist taught. "We felt it first-hand," recalled Leonhard, who had come from exile in Moscow with the "Ulbricht Group" and later fled to the West. "And we also felt the insecurity of the Soviet friends. We hadn't reckoned with that."

But that was almost as true for the Western powers. "It was anything but a matter of course that the Western Allies stayed," von Kostka explains. Great Britain had the idea of this gigantic relief operation for the newly defeated enemy, although the British themselves still had to make do with rationed food. The entire advisory staff of US President Harry Truman was against it. Experts considered an aerial supply impossible. In the end, Truman decided: "We're staying in Berlin, we're not going to be pushed out," is how the historian relates the US president.

By then, the former wartime allies USA and Soviet Union had long since become estranged. In 1946, the then British Prime Minister Winston Churchill coined the term "Iron Curtain" between West and East. In 1947, the US diplomat George Kennan swore his government to "containment", to curb Moscow's ambitions for power. To do this, they needed the former wartime enemy Germany in Europe - or at least half of it, which was under Western control. The airlift was a humanitarian achievement, but also a geopolitical move.

It signalled to Berliners "that we can rely on a certain firmness on the part of the Americans", as the later Governing Mayor Klaus Schütz (SPD) put it, attributing the credit primarily to US General Lucius Clay. Care packages and sultana bombers, all that became a myth. The West German view of the former wartime adversaries turned fundamental.

"The situation between the Germans and the Americans changed a lot when the airlift started," "chocolate pilot" Halvorsen later recounted. Before the relief operation, he said, US soldiers were treated with hostility, for example in restaurants where Germans got up and left in protest. After the airlift began, they not only stayed, they even bought the GIs a drink, Halvorsen said. He died in 2022 at the age of 101.

source: Vor 75 Jahren: Berliner Luftbrücke in West-Berlin

Translated with the help of https://www.deepl.com

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Personal footnote: My husband already found this article in the newspaper yesterday morning our time. He gave it to me to read and finally this article inspired us to visit the Allied Museum with our children in the afternoon.

For me, as a native of the former GDR, the visit was extremely interesting, after all, the subject of the "Airlift" was hushed up in our schools.

My husband, on the other hand, was able to confirm many details of the article, such as the gratitude towards the USA that developed among (West) Berliners as a result. According to him, his parents, who were once Berlin natives and were displaced to the Federal Republic of Germany as refugees during the turmoil of World War II, were always very grateful to the American people.

And our children? Well, I think they also learned their lesson from this visit.

What remains for us all to do is to always keep alive the memory of the catastrophes, misery and suffering into which the world was once plunged because too many fellow travellers blindly followed right-wing and nationalist ideologies.