Qualla: Sperenberg Airfield

Sperenberg Airfield: Introduction

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit A.Savin, FAL. In 1991, with German arrest warrants out for him, Erich Honecker spent his last night on German soil in a forest south of Berlin and flew to Moscow the next morning. The place he left from does not appear on ordinary maps of the period. Sperenberg was a Soviet air base buried in pine woods, its 2,500-metre runway invisible from any public road, and for more than thirty years it was the logistical throat of the Soviet military presence in East Germany - the place where the heavy transports came in. The former head of state of the German Democratic Republic left the country through a door most of his citizens never knew existed.

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Image: A.Savin | FAL

Sperenberg Airfield: Gypsum, Gunnery, and a Very Deep Hole

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit The original uploader was AlterVista at German Wikipedia., CC BY-SA 3.0. The ground here was already spoken for long before the Soviets arrived. The Prussian Army used the forest as a military laboratory and testing site, part of the Kummersdorf complex a few kilometres away - the artillery range and weapons development centre where, on 21 December 19...

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Image: The original uploader was AlterVista at German Wikipedia. | CC BY-SA 3.0

Sperenberg Airfield: Built in Three Phases

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit A.Savin, FAL. In the late 1950s the Soviet Army went looking for an airfield that could take heavy transport aircraft. Drewitz, Rangsdorf and Sperenberg were all considered; Sperenberg won, and East Germany was brought to the table on cost-sharing, in part because a dedicated military field re...

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Image: A.Savin | FAL

Sperenberg Airfield: A Town With No Address

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mbzt, CC BY-SA 3.0. What grew alongside the runway was not a barracks but a small city. More than 5,000 people lived at Sperenberg, and the Soviet military town acquired a theatre, a cinema, shops, a bakery, schools, a kindergarten and hospitals. A daily train ran to Potsdam and onward, directly, to...

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Image: Mbzt | CC BY-SA 3.0

Sperenberg Airfield: The Airport That Wasn't

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Naturparkverein Fläming e.V., CC BY-SA 2.5. The Soviet Army agreed to hand back all its bases by the end of 1994, and the helicopter squadron flew out to Vorotinsk in Kaluga Oblast in July of that year. Almost immediately Sperenberg became the centre of a national argument. With a runway, a terminal and 2,400 hectares of f...

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Image: Naturparkverein Fläming e.V. | CC BY-SA 2.5

Sperenberg Airfield: Crash Tests in the Woods

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit 44penguins (Angela M. Arnold), CC BY-SA 3.0. The federal government passed the land to the state of Brandenburg in 2009 - all 2,400 hectares of it. The site is open, which means it has been comprehensively vandalised, and it is now rented to companies that need somewhere large and empty: TÜV and DEKRA have both installed ra...

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Image: 44penguins (Angela M. Arnold) | CC BY-SA 3.0