Berlin Airport Used in Cold War Airlift Gets a New Humanitarian Mission

BERLIN — The planes touched down every five minutes for months, often cutting through a thick fog to bring food, coal and other supplies to those marooned on an island in a red sea of communism, as the grim joke went.

Tempelhof Airport was, in the Cold War’s early days, a lifeline for West Berliners isolated from the world during the Berlin Blockade. Its two runways accommodated a constant stream of Western cargo planes that were known as “Raisin Bombers.”

Now the iconic former airport will reprise that role, offering refuge in a city adept at adapting to crisis, as hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers pour into Europe, a Berlin official said Friday.

 Berliners’ apparent acceptance of Tempelhof’s new use as a home for some of the migrants is a reflection of a general willingness across Germany to accommodate the newcomers — a message that has reached Syria and Iraq, where the war-weary view Germany as a haven and a welcoming destination.

After receiving the most asylum applications of any industrialized nation last year, Germany expects about 800,000 migrants by the end of 2015 as Europe faces perhaps its worst migration crisis since World War II.

Germans have scoured their surroundings for housing, with some residents even opening up their homes. Empty United States Army barracks that once housed thousands of soldiers at the former headquarters in Heidelberg, closed two years ago, have been reopened for migrants along with other shuttered military posts.

The task of providing shelter is especially daunting in Germany’s capital.

It will receive about 5 percent of the migrants, a share based on its population and tax revenue, as dictated by the 1949 Königstein Agreement, originally intended for state investment in some of the country’s larger research organizations.

Faced with the prospect of 40,000 newcomers, Berlin officials have already added portable shipping containers, stacked apartments of corrugated metal that in some cases come complete with shared kitchens and bathrooms. By the end of August the containers, which can be seen in southwest Berlin, already housed more than 2,000 people.

But Berlin has started seeing about 1,000 new arrivals each day — what it used to receive in a month, said Bernhard Schodrowski, a city spokesman. Many of the migrants are being placed in makeshift tent camps, an option viewed as a last resort.

“It’s an urgent situation,” Mr. Schodrowski said.

August’s record heat has already given way to a September chill, with temperatures dipping into the low 50s, adding urgency to the need for sturdier shelter.

City officials said Friday they would go ahead with plans to shelter migrants at Templehof, as well as at an old bank, Mr. Schodrowski said. The Internationales Congress Centrum Berlin, among the largest convention centers in the world before it closed last year, is also being considered.