Bad Company

On the morning of 26 April 1945, two Junker 52s loaded with tank ammunition managed to land in the center of beleaguered Berlin on a makeshift runway constructed from a city road. Russian artillery was pounding the city hard, and within a few days it would be the end of the Third Reich and Hitler would be dead by his own hand.

The Junkers were not the only planes to land that way. That same day Luftwaffe General Ritter von Greim flew in to Berlin in a Fieseler Storch, accompanied by air ace Hannah Reitsch. Von Greim became badly wounded, however, and Reitsch took over and managed to land the plane on East West Avenue near the Brandenburger Tor. Von Greim, promoted to field marshal, left again the following day in an Arado piloted by Reitsch.

There are reports of many other light aircraft at that time leaving Berlin using streets as runways. Legend has it that Martin Bormann, himself the most powerful man in Germany next to Hitler, escaped to Norway that way to join a U-boat bound for South America.

And there is another legend, one even more extraordinary: the story of SS Sturmbahnführer Baron Max von Berger, who escaped in a Fieseler Storch, taking off from East West Avenue shortly after the Führer’s marriage to Eva Braun and carrying with him Hitler’s most enduring legacy…