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39
AIRBORNE ASYLUM: MIGRATION BY AIRPLANE IN
(WEST) GERMANY, 1945-1980S
Carolin Liebisch-Gümüs¸
GERMAN HISTORICAL INSTITUTE
I. Refugees don’t fly, do they?
“Why not fly to freedom?”
, or: “Ever wondered why refugees don’t
take the plane?”
Since , these and similar questions have fre-
quently appeared on the websites of NGOs and pro-migration net-
works in Germany and Europe. Amid the  European migrant
crisis, activists sought to explain why media abounded with images
of the strenuous journeys of migrants traveling via the Balkan route
or boarding shaky boats to cross the Mediterranean, running the
risk of drowning, while we saw hardly any images of refugees
arriving by airplane, even though flying would be safer, faster,
and much cheaper. In their answers, the activists cited a directive
passed by the Council of the European Union in . According
to this so-called Carrier Sanction Directive (//EC), airlines
are to be held financially accountable for any passenger that turns
out to be an asylum seeker who is not eligible for protection and
thus is rejected at the border. Anxious to avoid any risk, airline
agents oen refuse to sell flight tickets to potential asylum seek-
ers and customers who lack proper documents and visas – even
though, according to the UN Refugee Convention, a refugee is not
required to have papers in order to seek protection. Indirectly out-
sourcing migration control to private companies, this strategy is
intended to reduce the number of refugees and migrants that can
arrive at airports in the EU.
As a historian looking at this highly topical, normative debate and
the migration policies around which it revolves, I am interested in
its deeper historical roots. The trend towards outsourcing immigra-
tion control and limiting air access to Western Europe was not a
genuine invention of the Council of the European Union, nor did
it originate in . This article, which draws on my broader com-
parative research on the subject, traces the historical development
of airborne refugee migration
and its control. In the case of West
Germany, which is at the center of this article, the idea of including
airlines in a scheme for migration control goes back to the s
and the amendments to the Asylum Procedure Act made at that
1 Berliner Ratschlag für
Demokratie, Warum
kommen die Flüchtlinge
nicht einfach mit dem
Flugzeug?, September
2015, https://www.berlin-
erratschlagfuerdemokratie.
de/2015/09/flucht-per-
flugzeug/ (last accessed
January 9, 2021).
2 Jascha Galaski, LibertiesEU,
Ever Wondered Why Refu-
gees Don’t Take the Plane?,
December 10, 2018,
https://www.liberties.eu/
en/news/why-refugees-do-
not-take-the-plane/16529
(last accessed January 9,
2021).
3 The “measure is among
the general provisions
aimed at curbing migratory
flows and combating ille-
gal immigration.” Council
directive 2001/51/EC,
June 28, 2001.
4 In this article, I use the term
“migrant” in a generic sense
to denote dierent groups
(Jewish displaced persons,
German refugees from the
GDR, German resettlers from
the Soviet Union, and asylum
seekers) who relocated under
conditions that – despite wide
dierences between those
groups – can be regarded as
precarious and at least partly
involuntary. When I use the
term “refugee” to describe
asylum seekers, this does not
necessarily imply that those
persons’ refugee status was
legally confirmed, but that the
migrants themselves asked
for asylum and protection.
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BULLETIN OF THE GHI | 68 | SPRING 2021
5 Ulrich Herbert, Geschichte
der Ausländerpolitik in
Deutschland. Saisonar-
beiter, Zwangsarbeiter,
Gastarbeiter, Flüchtlinge
(München,
2
2017); Patrice
G. Poutrus, Umkämpes
Asyl. Vom Nachkriegs-
deutschland bis in die
Gegenwart (Berlin, 2019).
6 There are a few historical
studies on other countries,
e.g. Bret Edwards, “Gov-
erning Global Aeromobil-
ity. Canada and Airport
Refugee Claimants in the
1980s,” Transfers 6/3
(2016): 22-40.
7 Boris Nieswand, “Die
Transitzone und die Fik-
tion der Nichteinreise. Das
Flughafenasylverfahren im
Zwielicht von Normalität
und Ausnahme,” in
Migrationsregime vor Ort
und lokales Aushandeln von
Migration, ed. Jochen Olt-
mer (Wiesbaden, 2018),
345-376.
time. This policy emerged in a specific historical context, namely
in the context of rising numbers of South-North migrants since the
late s and the ensuing “asylum debate” in West Germany in
the s. West Germany was not alone in adopting such a policy.
Denmark introduced similar legal provisions against carriers in
, Belgium in , the UK in the same year, and other Euro-
pean countries followed. Even before the introduction of carriers’
liabilities, there were attempts to curb airborne migration by intro-
ducing new visa requirements or, on site at the airport, by rejecting
refugees who allegedly failed to clearly articulate their claim to asy-
lum at the airport or who had transited through a country that was
considered “safe” by the German authorities.
The legal background and the general history of German asylum pol-
icies are well documented.
The details of their close connection to
airborne migration and particularly to the local dynamics at airports,
however, have largely escaped the attention of historians.
One
of the few scholarly works on the topic was written by sociologist
Boris Nieswand, whose article analyzes the current border regime at
Frankfurt airport resulting from the  Airport Asylum Procedure
(Flughafenverfahren).
By concentrating on the period before , my
aim in this article is to draw on archival records to reveal deeper his-
torical trajectories while using Frankfurt airport, (West) Germany’s
largest transit hub, as a magnifying lens that allows me to trace these
trajectories in connection with local dynamics and actors, including
border guards, the airport operator, social workers and activists, and
the migrants themselves. To put it in a slightly oversimplified way,
I seek to historicize the questions posed by pro-migration activists
cited at the outset of this article. Historicizing these questions means
not only that my answer entails a longer historical background than
the answers usually given in public debates or the social sciences. It
also means that the human rights activism behind these questions
is part of the historization, since the history of humanitarianism and
pro-migration activism at and about the airport becomes part of the
trajectories that I outline here.
Admittedly, the title of this introductory section is somewhat rhe-
torical: Of course, some refugees travel by plane. This was the case
before the implementation of new restrictions to air access in the
s and it is still so today, as some refugees travel with valid
visas, while others manage to evade controls, for instance, with the
help of false documents or by choosing less monitored routes.
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41
8 The numbers must be
treated with caution, as
interviewees could have
been aware that air routes
are theoretically the only
way to legally apply for
asylum in Germany since
the Dublin Regulation
rules that a refugee must
apply for asylum in the
country where s/he first
sets foot on EU territory.
Also, refugees might have
taken a flight within the
EU.
9 “Sie fliehen nicht, sie
fliegen.” post on Facebook
and Twitter, AfD Bund-
estagsfraktion, March 6,
2018, https://twitter.com/
afdimbundestag/status/
971059035863740416
(last accessed January 3,
2021).
Certain groups of refugees are also included in EU resettlement
schemes and relocation flights, enabling them to get airlied to
Germany, as was the case not long ago, in September , when
over a hundred children and vulnerable persons were flown in from
the burned-out refugee camp on Lesbos. Data on asylum seekers’
means of travel, first collected in  by Germany’s Federal Oce
for Migration and Refugees, suggest that almost one third of all
migrants may have arrived in Germany by air.
The scope and reality
of migrants’ experiences with air travel is underrepresented both
in the general media and in activist-civic education about policies
against air migration. In the public mind, there is also the wide-
spread stereotype that refugees cannot aord airline tickets. This
discourse is also reflected on the political far right. When statis-
tics about refugees traveling by plane spread in , members of
the right-wing party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) did not hide
the fact that they perceived migration by air as downright obscene.
“They don’t flee, they fly,”
wrote a member of the AfD’s parliamen-
tary group in a widely shared social media post – as if being a “real
refugee” and boarding an airplane were mutually exclusive.
Observing that the phenomenon of air migration to Germany is
simultaneously understated, underrepresented in both research and
public, and politically highly contested, I hope that my article might
contribute to a normalization of the phenomenon by revealing its
hidden long existence in (West) German history. If the first aim of
this article is to historicize the control of air migration through the
lens of Frankfurt airport, its second aim is to situate this histor-
ization within a general account of refugee migration by air since
the late s and the resumption of civil aviation aer the Second
World War. This article is divided into chronological phases, from
the s to the s, which correlate with the dierent groups of
refugees that landed at Frankfurt airport over time: Jewish displaced
persons (DPs) in the late s, refugees from the Soviet occupa-
tion zone of postwar Germany in the s, German resettlers (Aus-
siedler) from the Soviet Union in the s and s, and foreign
asylum seekers, especially in the s. These dierent groups do
not have much in common except for, first, using airplanes and,
second, being migrants under dierent, precarious, and at least
partly involuntary conditions. Bringing them together in this article
allows me to track changing patterns of airborne migration and with
it the changes in their perception, acceptance, and management on
the policy level and on site at the airport.
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BULLETIN OF THE GHI | 68 | SPRING 2021
For the general historiography on migration, the transportation
modes of migrants are not mere side aspects and merit more atten-
tion. Following political scientist William Walters, who made a
similar point,

it seems important to take into analytical account
that dierent routes – like traveling on a boat via the Mediterranean
versus arriving via plane in an airport transit zone – lead to dierent
migrant experiences. Dierent routes also involve dierent mecha-
nisms of migration management and political control, and imply
diering opportunities and agency for all actors involved, includ-
ing migrants, border police, policy makers, smugglers, NGOs, and
activists. By highlighting the peculiarities of airborne migration, a
third aim of this article is to emphasize the potential of a focus on
transportation and transit within migration history.
II. From camps to runways: humanitarian airlifts in the
postwar 1940s
During the Second World War, few people in Europe experienced air-
cra as a means of humanitarian relief and rescue. Instead, for most
civilians, including refugees and individuals persecuted under Nazi
rule, aviation was largely synonymous with destruction and deadly air
power. Memories of the bombing attacks continue to shape collective
memories in Germany up to the present day.

Yet, airplanes – oen the
very same airplanes that had been used in the air war – also took on a
fresh and positive image during the postwar years of reconstruction.
Amid rising Cold War tensions, from June  to May , Ameri-
can and British planes dropped over two million tons of supplies for
the population in West Berlin aer the Soviet government had blocked
land access to the city. The use of air transportation for humanitarian
ends was not a post- invention; already in the interwar decades,
airplanes were used for dropping relief supplies, for instance, to vic-
tims of natural disasters. The scope of the Berlin Airli (Lubrücke),
however, was unprecedented and turned out to be a political and a
propaganda success for the western Allies. The famous nickname
“raisin bombers” (Rosinenbomber), as the planes were dubbed by parts
of the Berlin population, mirrors the shi from the image of Allied air-
planes as fatal weapons to a heroic story of airborne relief. Both the air
war and the mythologized Berlin Airli became aviation-related lieux
de mémoire in German commemorative culture.

One story linked to the Berlin Airli did not become part of heroization
and public commemoration, though: the Lubrücke was not only a cargo
10 William Walters, “Migra-
tion, Vehicles, and Politics.
Three theses on viapoli-
tics,” European Journal of
Social Theory 18/4 (2015):
469-488.
11 They figure in family
stories, local commemora-
tive culture, and, since the
early 2000s, increas-
ingly in popular film and
media, contributing to a
narrative of victimhood,
which contrasts with
the national politics of
memory and its focus on
the Shoah. Malte Thießen,
“Der ‘Feuersturm‘im
kommunikativen
Gedächtnis. Tradierung
und Transformation des
Lukriegs als Lebens- und
Familiengeschichte,“in
Lukrieg. Erinnerungen in
Deutschland und Europa,
eds. Jörg Arnold, Dietmar
Süß, Malte Thießen (Göt-
tingen, 2009), 312-331.
12 Martina Metzger, “Lu-
krieg und Lubrücke.
West-Berliner Erfahrun-
gen und Wahrnehm-
ungen,” in Die Berliner
Lubrücke. Erinnerungsort
des Kalten Krieges, ed.
Corine Defrance (Berlin,
2018), 141-157.
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43
li, but also one of the first ref-
ugee airlis in history. On their
return flights from Berlin, the
planes carried over , Jew-
ish refugees out of displaced
persons camps in the Ameri-
can and British zones of Ber-
lin and flew them to Frankfurt
airport, from where they were
transferred to DP camps in the
American, British, and French
occupation zones of Germa-
ny.

As the city was blockaded
and supplies had to be flown in, the Allied authorities thought “that it
might be more practical to bring the DPs to food, rather than food to
DPs in Berlin,”

as a member of the American Jewish Joint Distribu-
tion Committee (JDC), one of the largest Jewish refugee organizations,
noted. Moreover, the U.S. administration, who ran most DP camps in
Berlin, struggled with a constant lack of space as more Jews, fleeing
from antisemitic violence in Poland, arrived in Berlin while others did
not leave, since they refused to be repatriated and instead waited in the
camps until they obtained permission to move to Palestine, the United
States, or other countries. When they were oered the chance to leave
Berlin by air, aer initial hesitation and objections, most DPs accepted.
Among other reasons, many people wanted to escape the feeling of
being trapped in the city.

Although the Berlin Airli became such a publicly celebrated and
famous event, the DP’s part in the undertaking remained widely
neglected – even in Jewish memory cultures. This is not surprising;
although many refugees took a plane for the first time in their lives, the
airli was not their final passage to emigration, but just another transit
leg within their circuitous itineraries. Aer their flight from Tempelhof
to Frankfurt, most people arrived at yet another DP camp in Southern
Germany still awaiting emigration.

What is striking about the human
airli, besides its curious absence from ocial memories, is the fact
that it demonstrates the large humanitarian potential of air transport.
This potential was not so much due to its quantitative capacities, but
to its ability of flying over otherwise blockaded territories and borders.
Figure 1: Iconic image
of the Berlin Airli, July
1948. Most photographs
of the event capture the
perspective of either
German spectators and
children in Berlin or the
Allied pilots and cargo
packers. The Jewish Refu-
gees are as absent from
the visual commemora-
tion of the airli as they
are from its narrative.
© bpk-Bildagentur.
13 Angelika Königseder, “Die
Evakuierung jüdischer
displaced persons über
die Lubrücke aus
Berlin,“Zeitschri für
Geschichtswissenscha
46/6 (1998): 505-511;
Robert A. Slayton, “The
Most Precious Cargo,”
Commentary, September
2009, https://www.com-
mentarymagazine.com/
articles/robert-slayton/the-
most-precious-cargo/ (last
accessed January 3, 2021).
14 Memorandum, December
10, 1948, American Joint Dis-
tribution Committee Archives
[henceforward AJDCA],
Item 695400 http://search.
archives.jdc.org/multimedia/
Documents/NY_AR_45-
54/NY_AR45-54_Count/
NY_AR45-54_00059/NY_
AR45-54_00059_00060.
pdf#search= (January 16,
2021).
15 Königseder, “Evakuier-
ung,“509.
16 Ibid., 510.
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BULLETIN OF THE GHI | 68 | SPRING 2021
17 Peter Lyth, Hans-Liudger
Dienel, “Introduction,” in
Flying the Flag. European
Commercial Air Transport
since 1945, eds. Hans-
Liudger Dienel, Peter Lyth
(New York, 1998), 3-4.
18 Jewish Refugees Com-
mittee London to Jewish
Relief Unit B.A.O.R.,
September 19, 1947, The
Wiener Library HA11-
I/3a8, database Post-War
Europe: Refugees, Exile and
Resettlement 1945-1950,
https://link.gale.com/apps/
doc/SC5107608405/GDS
C?u=weberst&sid=GDSC&
xid=0dcdb965&pg=1 (last
accessed January 16, 2021).
19 Memorandum, December
10, 1948, AJDCA,
Item 695400 http://
search.archives.jdc.
org/multimedia/Docu-
ments/NY_AR_45-54/
NY_AR45-54_Count/NY_
AR45-54_00059/NY_
AR45-54_00059_00060.
pdf#search= (last accessed
January 16, 2021).
20 Preparatory Commission for
the International Refugee
Organization, press release,
June 22, 1948, The Wiener
Library HA5-5/2, database
Post-War Europe: Refugees,
Exile and Resettlement
1945-1950, https://
link.gale.com/apps/doc/
SC5107635712/GDSC?u=
weberst&sid=GDSC&xid=c3
be1a1d&pg=1 (last accessed
January 16, 2021).
Air transportation also meant that even long-distance destinations
could be reached faster than by train or ship (in the s still with
stopovers for refueling though). This also had humanitarian poten-
tial in terms of speeding up resettlement and making the transit
for refugees as comfortable and short as possible. Several relief
organizations in postwar Germany began to realize and use this
potential. In , more than , Jewish survivors and refugees
still lived in Germany – many of them uprooted, stuck, in transit.
Numerous parallel or overlapping attempts by states and humani-
tarian organizations to resettle or repatriate larger groups of Jewish
DPs concurred with individual eorts to depart from Germany. This
situation of pending transits and departures of refugees coincided
with significant progress in civil aviation. The end of the war had
led to a liberation of European airspace; technological innovations
during the war and a large pool of army-trained pilots and tech-
nical experts were factors that boosted the postwar expansion of
commercial aviation.

In West Germany, seven airports resumed
civil operations immediately aer the war, including Hamburg and
Frankfurt, which from the outset oered more long-distance routes
than other German airports. The literature on the history of civil
aviation tells us that flying in the s and s was for wealthy
travelers and businessmen. Some flight tickets, however, were also
booked by displaced persons and NGOs to support their eorts to
solve the refugee crises in Germany (and other countries).
Since , dierent aid organizations increasingly used opportuni-
ties to include air transport in their rescue schemes; some bought
tickets, others chartered entire airplanes. Thus, starting in Sep-
tember , the British Jewish Refugees Committee booked seats
for DPs on commercial flights from Berlin to London.

Likewise,
the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) ran and
financed a regular passenger air service between Munich and Lod
airport, near Tel Aviv, since September , which comprised
about twenty flights per month and brought several hundred emi-
grants to the newly founded state of Israel.

Another important
humanitarian player, the United Nations Organization’s Interna-
tional Refugee Organization (IRO, the successor to UNRRA) also
decided, in early , that, in addition to the many ship passages
they booked, “the possibilities of this means of transportation [air-
cra] will be still further explored.”

In the case of Venezuela, the IRO
reported by the end of  that the “initiation of air movements to this
country has already resulted in the transportation of large numbers of
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21 Preparatory Commission for
the International Refugee
Organization, monthly
digest, August 1948, p.
29, 1947, The Wiener
Library HA5-5/2, database
Post-War Europe: Refugees,
Exile and Resettlement
1945-1950, https://
link.gale.com/apps/doc/
SC5107635712/GDSC?
u=weberst&sid=GDSC&x
id=c3be1a1d&pg=1 (last
accessed January 16, 2021).
22 IRO Information Bulletin
19, July 1, 1949, pp. 8-9,
The Wiener Library HA5-
5/2, database Post-War
Europe: Refugees, Exile and
Resettlement 1945-1950,
https://link.gale.com/apps/
doc/SC5107635712/GDS
C?u=weberst&sid=GDSC&
xid=c3be1a1d&pg=1 (last
accessed January 20, 2021).
immigrants. Six hundred, for
instance, are expected to be
moved during the month of
July and nine hundred dur-
ing August in one of the big-
gest civilian air lis ever
undertaken.”

Other air
routes booked by the IRO led
from Italy and Western Ger-
many to Brazil, Canada, and
New York. In October ,
more than one thousand DPs
were airlied from Germany
to Australia. Overall, the IRO
relocated substantially more
people by ocean passages than by air, however, even if in some
months they booked more planes than ships. In the second half of
June , for instance, twelve ships with over , Jewish emi-
grants from Europe reached destinations in the Americas, whereas
twenty planes carried  persons over the Atlantic.

Why, if capacities were significantly lower (and prices per passenger
in most cases higher), did refugee organizations like the JDC and
the IRO include air transportation in their relief schemes? For one,
air movements were not a substitution, but a supplement to ship
transport thus adding to a general increase of transport capacities.
Sometimes the organizations also wanted to speed up the resettle-
ment of those refugees who were already permitted to immigrate to
an overseas country but were unable to book a ship passage any-
time soon.

Another, perhaps more interesting answer to the ques-
tion is that certain groups were perceived as particularly vulnerable,
so that the organization chose a fast and comparatively less strenu-
ous mode of transportation. In , for example, the IRO orga-
nized eight flights to transport  pregnant or nursing mothers
and their families from Naples to Brazil; a similar number of unac-
companied children was airlied from Germany to the United States
and Australia. The majority of flights from Germany to New York
listed by the IRO in summer  was organized by Youth Argosy,
Figure 2: “Men and wom-
en, some holding little
children, board plane des-
tined for Israel,” Munich
1949. Oen it was chil-
dren and families, that is,
DPs who were considered
particularly vulnerable,
who were transported by
air to their new countries.
© Joint Distribution Com-
mittee Archives.
23 Preparatory Commission
for the International Refu-
gee Organization, monthly
digest, August 1948, p. 29,
1947, The Wiener Library
HA5-5/2, database Post-
War Europe: Refugees,
Exile and Resettlement
1945-1950, https://
link.gale.com/apps/doc/
SC5107635712/GDSC
?u=weberst&sid=GDSC
&xid=c3be1a1d&pg=1
(last accessed January 16,
2021).
46
BULLETIN OF THE GHI | 68 | SPRING 2021
a new, private organization in the U.S. that provided aordable air
travel opportunities for young people.

Here, once again, a special
humanitarian potential of airplanes comes to the fore, as they
were considered the preferred long-distance means of travel for
vulnerable refugee groups, especially children. Their other humani-
tarian potential, namely the ability to cross otherwise blockaded
borders via air, gained importance twice in German postwar history:
for the DPs during the Berlin Blockade and then, as the next section
will show, a few years later, for a dierent group of refugees stuck
in Berlin.
III. Changing patterns of migration and refugee relief at
Frankfurt airport, 1950s-1980s
Besides emigration from Germany and the resettlement of Jewish
refugees, the postwar years also saw immigration to West Germany
and the Federal Republic. The main immigrant groups were ethnic
German resettlers (Heimatvertriebene, Aussiedler) from the East-
ern bloc as well as inner-German refugees escaping from Soviet-
controlled East Germany and, aer , the German Democratic
Republic (so-called Zonenflüchtlinge) to the West. Considered Ger-
man, they could immigrate to West Germany as recognized citizens
of the Federal Republic. Seen as a whole, travel by air played a very
marginal role in these movements. Seen from the micro-perspective
of Frankfurt airport, however, the fact that some refugee groups did
arrive by airplane had important consequences on the ground as
it sparked the development of local refugee management in and
around the airport.
It was during the incipient mass exodus from the GDR that Frank-
furt airport first became a transit point in the East-West migration
during the Cold War. Aer the GDR had shut down its external
borders in , significantly more people than before escaped by
crossing the inner-city border between East Berlin and the city’s
western sectors.

From reception centers and refugee camps in
West Berlin such as Marienfelde, the refugees oen traveled with
Pan Am or other Allied airlines to the western parts of the FRG. In Feb-
ruary , two refugee flights a day reached the Rhine-Main-Airport
from Berlin Tempelhof. Upon landing in Frankfurt, the migrants were
brought to Frankfurt’s central train station to continue their journey by
train to transit camps and destinations mainly in southern Germany.

From mid- February to the end of March  alone, the travelers’
24 Preparatory Commission for
the International Refugee
Organization, monthly
digest, March 1949, p. 6;
IRO Information Bulletin
19-21 (July 1949), The
Wiener Library HA5-
5/2, database Post-War
Europe: Refugees, Exile and
Resettlement 1945-1950,
https://link.gale.com/apps/
doc/SC5107635712/GDS
C?u=weberst&sid=GDSC&
xid=c3be1a1d&pg=1 (last
accessed January 20, 2021).
25 Presse- und Information-
samt des Landes Berlin,
Die Mauer und ihr Fall
(Berlin, 6th ed., 1996).
26 Welfare oce Frankfurt,
note, February 12, 1953,
Archiv Caritasverband
Frankfurt/Main [hencefor-
ward CArchF] 5113 1953.
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27 Travelers’ aid oce
Frankfurt, list, March 27,
1953; Travelers’ aid oce
Frankfurt to welfare oce
Frankfurt, March 11,
1953, CArchF 5113 1953.
28 Transport interconnectiv-
ity in Frankfurt only came
into existence in 1972
when the airport opened
its own train station.
Hans-Liudger Dienel,
“Foreword,” in Uncon-
nected Transport Networks.
European Intermodal Trac
Junctions 1800-2000,
ed. Hans-Liudger Dienel
(Frankfurt/Main, New
York, 2004), 7.
29 Welfare oce Frankfurt,
note, February 12, 1953;
magistrate Frankfurt to the
ministry of interior and the
oce for refugees Hesse,
March 4, 1953, CArchF
5113 1953.
aid oce at Frankfurt central
train station (Bahnhofsmission)
counted more than ,
refugees in transit whom
they supplied with basic pro-
visions.

For the oen tired
refugees, among them many
elderly people and families,
provisioning came rather late,
considering that their trans-
fer from the terminal to the
train station took quite long,
since airports and train sta-
tions were not yet connected
by regular transport in those
days.

The fact that most of the flights arrived in the evening made
direct transit even more dicult.

Back then, the airport also did
not yet resemble the recreational place it became in later years,
when waiting times could be comfortably bridged by visiting cafés
and restaurants. The travelers’ aid oce at the train station, run
jointly by the Catholic care organization Caritas and the Protestant
Innere Mission, therefore created an on-call service at the airport.
Learning about the imminent arrival of refugees, they headed to the
airport and provided their services on site.

These were the early
beginnings of a refugee relief organization at Frankfurt airport, even
though it was not yet permanently institutionalized.
Another wave of migrants came in the s, when the air route
became the most frequently used migration route for Aussiedler
from Romania. In March , the Romanian government made
these potential resettlers purchase tickets from the state-owned
airline Tarom if they wanted to leave the country.

The political
leaders in Romania generally did not make it easy for emigrants to
leave the country and tried to obtain economic compensation. This
way, they were able to capitalize on air emigration. At Frankfurt
airport, the sudden influx of migrants posed a logistical challenge
for the local authorities. Migrants oen arrived without cash and
orientation. Those who had neither relatives or friends in Germany
who could pick them up at the airport nor a clear destination and
Figure 3: Refugees are
transported to West
Germany from Berlin’s
Tempelhof Airport (1953).
© bpk-Bildagentur.
30 Travelers’ aid oce
Frankfurt to welfare oce
Frankfurt, March 27,
1953, CArchF 5113 1953.
31 Minister for Expellees,
Refugees, and War
Victims to Minister of
Interior Hesse, March
15, 1962, Hessisches
Hauptstaatsarchiv [hence-
forward HHStAW] 508
4199.
48
BULLETIN OF THE GHI | 68 | SPRING 2021
residence permit were in particular need of support. They had to be
guided by local helpers to a transfer bus to Frankfurt central train
station and then travel to the transit camp for Aussiedler in Piding,
on the Austrian-German border (which was where Aussiedler used
to arrive when they traveled overland). Again, the airport’s weak
public transportation links, combined with many delayed flights,
made transit dicult. As was the case for the GDR refugees, a social
service was therefore set up directly at the airport. Initially, the Ger-
man Red Cross took charge; a few months later, local Hessian wel-
fare authorities took over. The social workers provided the resettlers
with drinks, snacks, money, as well as train tickets to Nuremberg
and organized the transfer to the train station.

Meanwhile, the
number of resettlers rose, with Tarom increasingly using special
flights. In September  alone, , people landed at the airport.
By the end of , several hundred Aussiedler arrived almost daily.

In order to make their journey less strenuous, migrants occasion-
ally stayed overnight a few kilometers away from the airport at the
Hesse refugee accommodation in the town of Langen or in a room
at the travelers’ aid oce at Frankfurt main station.

It is interesting to note that there was no provision yet for any sort
of refugee accommodation on site at the airport. Instead, in the case
of both the GDR refugees and the Aussiedler, every eort was made
to help the migrants leave the airport and proceed with their immi-
gration as quickly as possible. To further expedite their entry into
West Germany, the airport administration and the border police
agreed to escort the resettlers from the plane to special passport
counters and waived customs controls.

This proactive approach to
migration management at the airport diers starkly from the local
migration regime that developed in the decades to come in order to
enhance the airport’s function as a border against supposed ille-
gal immigration. From the s to the mid-s, German refu-
gees and resettlers from the GDR and the Eastern bloc were the
only larger groups of migrants that arrived at the airport in need of
humanitarian assistance. For them, the airport was essentially not a
border, but a transit point through which they could smoothly enter
the country. Their border crossing was accepted and legitimized in
advance because they were already considered ethnic Germans and
future citizens of the FRG. Furthermore, their departure from the
communist bloc pleased the anti-communist government of West
Germany.

For refugees from the Middle East and the Global South,
who arrived at Frankfurt airport in increasing numbers since the
32 German Red Cross Frank-
furt to Ministry of Interior
Hesse, March 19, 1962,
HHStAW 508 4199.
33 Lists with numbers of
resettlers, HHStAW 508
4200.
34 Ministry of Social Aairs
Hesse, report, January 15,
1967; internal letter, Janu-
ary 13, 1971, HHStAW
508 4199.
35 German Red Cross to
Minister for Expellees,
Refugees, and War
Victims, January 17, 1967,
HHStAW 508 4199.
36 Klaus J. Bade, Migration in
European History (Bodmin,
2003), 266.
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49
late s, the situation was dierent. For them the airport was not
simply a transit point but rather a border and a barrier where they
were stopped and possibly turned away.
The changing pattern of migration at Frankfurt Airport was part
of a broader structural shi of refugee immigration to West Ger-
many and Western Europe. Whereas most refugees in the s
and s had arrived from the Eastern bloc, the s and espe-
cially the s saw a growing South-North trend.

One contribu-
tory factor behind this shi was the advent of new, globalized
access to air travel. The s marked a watershed in this regard.
It was a decade of accelerated change in commercial air transport.
Technical innovations such as the introduction of jumbo jets, the
expansion of consumer societies, and the liberalization of aviation
markets first in the United States and then in Europe leveraged
the rising age of mass aviation.

The result was a pluralization of
passenger milieus. New customers from the (lower) middle classes
benefitted from the democratization of flying, and so did migrants
and asylum seekers.
Observing the changing social composition of air passengers, Cari-
tas and its protestant counterpart Diakonie established permanent
social services at Frankfurt Airport. “Air travel is no longer only for
the wealthy […] ill travelers, the elderly, disabled, helpless foreigners,
people who are stuck, have been deported or have not yet been able
to enter the country”

also arrive at the airport, the Diakonie Hes-
sen explained. The Airport Social Services (Flughafensozialdienst, FSD)
was founded in  and consisted of an ecumenical team of social
workers. The airport operator – pleased that they could resolve an
unprofitable, yet indispensable task at the airport – provided the FSD
with oces and access to most areas of the airport. Refugees were
not yet a major client group when the FSD started. Its social work-
ers did assist the German Red Cross and the local welfare authori-
ties of Hesse from time to time when German migrants from Eastern
bloc countries arrived at the airport and they also looked aer asylum
seekers. Their main task, however, was regular passenger aid. In the
s, with the numbers of asylum seekers landing in Frankfurt ris-
ing, refugee work was suddenly propelled to the top of the agenda.

One reason for the increase of refugee numbers at Frankfurt Airport
was the closure of another transit route in the late summer of .
Up until then, many asylum seekers aiming to reach West Germany
or one of its neighboring countries but lacking the necessary
37 Ibid., 267.
38 For a cultural history of the
transformations in avia-
tion, see Alastair Gordon,
Naked Airport. A Cultural
History of the World’s Most
Revolutionary Structure
(Chicago, 2008).
39 Newsletter of the Dia-
konisches Werk Hessen
und Nassau, 1974,
Zentralarchiv der Evange-
lischen Kirche in Hessen
und Nassau [henceforward
EKHNArch] 155 3409.
40 FSD annual report 1975;
church services at the
airport, minutes,
March 3, 1976, EKHN-
Arch 155 3409.
50
BULLETIN OF THE GHI | 68 | SPRING 2021
documents and visas to book direct flights had instead traveled to
Schönefeld airport in East Berlin. From there they took the metro
or city train to West Berlin.

Only in  did the government in
Bonn succeed in concluding an agreement with the GDR according
to which potential refugees from the Middle East, Africa, and
South Asia who wanted to cross the border from East to West
Berlin had to present GDR authorities with a valid visa issued by
West Germany. For many refugees, the so-called “hole in the Berlin
Wall” (Berliner Loch) had been a transit opportunity that suddenly
closed.

With one transit opportunity closing, another one gained in
importance: at Frankfurt airport, the numbers of asylum seekers
skyrocketed. According to the Federal Ministry of the Interior,
 percent of all people asking for asylum at West German
borders between mid-January and June  did so in Frankfurt.
Nationwide (i.e. not only at the borders), the airport accounted
for approximately  percent of all applications.

Until ,
“the airport remained the most vital point of entry,”

the Ministry
of Transport in Bonn declared. Many of the arriving migrants
came from the Global South, frequently from Ghana, Ethiopia,
Lebanon, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, and Sri Lanka. The
majority, though, were Turkish citizens – oen Kurdish, Yezidi,
or Christian minorities from southeast Anatolia. A general
visa requirement for Turks had been introduced by the federal
government in West Germany in  to curb the growing asylum
immigration from Turkey that followed the ban on work permits
for Gastarbeiter in . Circumnavigating this new restriction,
many migrants from Turkey started to purchase plane tickets
from Istanbul to places like Barcelona or Lisbon for which Turks
needed no visa. During the regular stopover in Frankfurt, they
could enter the airport building, because the so-called transit
privilege allowed them to enter the airport transit area without
any visa. They could then ask the local German border ocials for
asylum.

Migrants from other countries took advantage of transit
privileges as well. For others, seeking asylum in transit became
a spontaneous compromise rather than a planned strategy. This
was the case with migrants who had hired smugglers to take them
to destinations like Canada or Scandinavia, but then ended up
in Frankfurt, being le by their agents during stopover, without
papers or money.

41 Ministry of Interior,
internal report, December
27, 1983, Bundesarchiv
Koblenz [henceforward
BArch] B 106 90204.
42 Herbert, Ausländerpolitik,
270.
43 Ministry of Interior, inter-
nal briefing, June 1, 1987,
BArch B 106 207414.
44 Ministry of Trac, notes
on meeting, November 20,
1989, BArch B 108 9879.
45 Minister of Social Aairs
Hesse to the Minister-
President of Hesse,
September 24, 1987,
HHStAW 505 6008.
46 Fluchtpunkt Flughafen
Frankfurt, Sozialdienst
Jahresbericht 1986, p. 7,
CArchF 5120-01.
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47 “Wenig Chancen für
Lager auf Rhein-Main,”
Frankfurter Neue Presse,
July 9, 1980; “Sammel-
lager am Flughafen nicht
mehr aktuell?” Frankfurter
Allgemeine Zeitung, July
14, 1980, ISF S3/V
22.970.
48 FSD annual report 1982,
p. 2, CArchF 5120-01.
49 In 1987, the average
length of stay of applicants
amounted to four days
according to the BGS. Min-
istry of Interior, internal
letter, June 2, 1987, BArch
B 106 207414.
50 FSD annual report 1987,
p. 34, Evangelischer
Regionalverband Frankfurt
und Oenbach Archiv
[henceforward ERFOArch],
Berichte Flughafensozial-
dienst.
In view of the growing asylum numbers in the transit zone, in  the
government of Hesse considered creating refugee accommodations
within the airport area. The airport operator was not fond of the idea,
proposing instead to set up emergency accommodations outside the
fenced airport territory.

As no plan met with approval, the refugees
continued to stay in the public transit area aer their arrival. The Fed-
eral Border Guard (Bundesgrenzschutz, BGS) struggled to keep pace;
the preliminary examination of each asylum petition, i.e. the interview
with the individual asylum seeker and paperwork, took time. Even ref-
ugees who had already undergone the procedure were oen forced to
wait in the transit zone until they were brought to the Hessian refugee
reception center in Schwalbach. In , the FSD complained about
backlogs and “inacceptable conditions”

in the transit area. Most per-
sons could leave the transit zone aer one to ten days, but in some
extreme cases they stayed for weeks.

The airport operator installed
a small room with  emergency beds within the transit zone. Aer
being reduced in size in , when refugee numbers had seemed to
trend downwards, the m room with ten bunk beds soon became
overcrowded. An additional waiting area for refugees created in the
transit zone in  also failed to oer enough beds to keep asylum
seekers from spending the nights on seats and floors. During their
time in transit, the refugees were, as the FSD reported, “completely
dependent on the FSD, since they were not allowed to leave the transit
area and, for example, relatives of the newly arrived were not allowed
to enter the transit area.”

The social workers provided primary care
in the form of blankets, food, clothing and shoe donations, hygiene
products, toys, etc. If need be, they also escorted refugees from the
transit area to the airport clinic. And they helped retrieve lost luggage,
since many items – unlike their owners who had quit their journey in
transit – traveled on to the destination airport.
Figure 4: Numbers based
on lists prepared by Air-
port Social Services. From
1983 to 1988, while asy-
lum application numbers
in the whole Bonn Repub-
lic quintupled, cases at
Frankfurt Airport rose by
thirty times. Graph by the
author.
52
BULLETIN OF THE GHI | 68 | SPRING 2021
Sooner or later, most of the asylum seekers received permission to
enter the country. The transit zone did not yet have the quality it
acquired in , when the whole asylum procedure had to be com-
pleted while the applicant stayed in the transit zone (Flughafenver-
fahren). However, for asylum seekers in the s, the transit zone
was not a mere waiting room or way station. Rather, it was a closed
border zone in which their status was undecided and they faced the
real possibility of being turned away. This frontier character of the
airport was enforced by the BGS and secured by the transit zone’s
spatial enclosure. Over the course of the s, as the next section
goes on to show, asylum seekers faced increasingly sophisticated
bureaucratic procedures and tightening control while in transit.
In other words, the transit zone became a local migration regime,
a changing “field of action for institutional actors” and a space in
which these actors, border guards and government authorities,
regulated access and “categorized the (potential) migrants”

into
admissible or rejectable migrants.
IV. From transit to camp: the emergence of an airport
migration regime in the 1980s
Much to the chagrin of the Ministry of the Interior in Bonn
and the state government of Hesse, the attempt to close the
“Berlin hole” had increased the number of asylum cases through
the “transit hole” at Frankfurt Airport. The migrants’ strategy of
disembarking during transit might appear as a clever trick or a
legal loophole, but it was in fact their international right. Accord-
ing to the  UN Refugees Convention, no signatory state
should reject asylum seekers on the grounds that they lacked
visas or other documents. Although asking for asylum in transit
was legal, the Bonn government did not consider the use of airport
transit zones a legitimate access path to the basic right to asylum.
“Manipulated routing,”

as they saw it, was an abuse that had to
be stopped.
Their objection was based on the argument that too many applicants
for asylum were not “real” refugees. Especially asylum seekers
from Turkey fell under suspicion of seeking to immigrate “with
no reasons eligible for asylum.”

This was a key argument in the
so-called asylum debate (Asyldebatte) that grew ever more heated
and polemical in the West German public since the mid-s.
Not only conservatives or right-wingers but people from all sides
51 Jochen Oltmer, “Einfüh-
rung,” in Migrationsre-
gime vor Ort und lokales
Aushandeln von Migration,
ed. Jochen Oltmer (Wies-
baden, 2018), 6.
52 Ministry of Interior, internal
letter, January 31, 1985,
BArch B 106 90204.
53 Minister of Social Aairs
Hesse to the Minister-
President of Hesse,
September 24, 1987,
HHStAW 505 6008.
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53
54 This was a generaliza-
tion that did not take into
account that the motives of
migrants were oen multi-
faceted, blurring the border
between being a refugee or
an immigrant. Aer the FRG
had stopped labor immigra-
tion in 1973, many people,
e.g. the relatives of “guest
workers” in Germany indeed
used the asylum system a
back door to immigration.
See, Bade, Migration, 268.
55 Quote from Carl-Dieter
Spranger, member of the
CDU/CSU fraction in parlia-
ment: German Bundestag,
Plenarprotokoll 8/228, July
2, 1980, 18548.
56 On the “asylum debate”
in general see, Herbert,
Ausländerpolitik, 265-273.
57 Again, quote by Carl-Dieter
Spranger, German Bunde-
stag, Plenarprotokoll 8/228,
July 2, 1980, 18548.
58 “Asylantenschwemme auf
Rhein-Main“, BILD, Janu-
ary 30, 1989, ISF S3/V
22.970.
59 FSD annual report 1987,
pp. 1, 7, ERFOArch Berichte
Flughafensozialdienst.
60 Board meeting of the
church services at the
airport, March 18, 1985,
ERFOArch ERV01/17.
61 UNHCR Germany to
the Ministry of Interior,
October 4, 1984; Ministry
of Interior, internal report,
November 30, 1984,
BArch B 106 207414.
62 CDU-Informationsdienst
Union in Deutschland
25/86, Sonderbeilage
Nordrhein-Westfalen,
September 4, 1986, 6.
63 Manfred Kanther, personal
letter to Manfred Schölch,
December 21, 1987, Fra-
port Archiv VG05-1910.
of the political spectrum held the view that Article  of the West
German Constitution, which granted everybody the right to ask
for asylum in the FRG, and the protection clauses of the Geneva
Refugee Convention were being abused by “economic refugees”
who were not fleeing from persecution, but aspiring to better life
opportunities in Europe’s rich welfare states.

Pejorative terms
like Scheinasylant

(“bogus asylum-seeker”) or Asylmissbrauch
(“asylum abuse”) became widespread and put asylum seekers
under general suspicion.

Politicians and popular media fed a
widespread “asylum angst” by invoking threatening images of
a “flood of asylum seekers.”

“Asylantenschwemme auf Rhein-
Main,”

a headline in the tabloid BILD warned with regard to
asylum seekers at the airport. Negative feelings towards refugees
also surfaced at the airport. Sometimes the social workers of
the FSD met with pejorative remarks from airport personnel or
travelers who felt repelled by the image of food leovers, piles of
blankets, and “the hardly decorative human caravan”

moving
down the corridors, as one FSD member put it. “Our prestige at
the airport has suered due to our unpopular commitment to the
refugees,”

the board of the FSD noted regretfully in . The
FSD also frequently complained about some of the border police
sta acting hostile. In , for instance, the FSD had addressed
the Federal Ministry of the Interior through the representative of
UNHCR Germany: A poster of UNHCR with the slogan “Refugee
go home – he would if he could” hanging in the BGS oce had
been scribbled over by some ocers and changed into “he (never)
would (even) if he could.”

The airport and airborne migration in general became key targets in
the eort to contain asylum migration. New transit visa requirements
were introduced in . Chancellor Helmut Kohl, in order to stress
his government’s decisive stance against alleged asylum abuse,
explained that the new regulations targeted passengers from “certain
problem states,”

among them Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Ghana,
Iran, Lebanon, and Sri Lanka. Two years later, his government
also lied the transit privilege for Turkish citizens. Political
decision makers also increased pressure on airlines. The minister
of finance in Hesse, Manfred Kanther, asked the airport operator
whether airlines could not be “packed from an economic angle”
by exposing them to “delays, controls, and costs as a result of the
transportation of asylum seekers.”

The airport operator, who had
54
BULLETIN OF THE GHI | 68 | SPRING 2021
demanded political action on the “Asylantenproblematik”

in the
first place, hesitated; to punish airlines through generic controls
at Frankfurt (and thus through delays) contradicted international
regulations. Eventually, the FRG government embarked on the
strategy of holding airlines financially and practically responsible
for returning rejected persons to their country of origin. All
these measures combined aimed at limiting air access to the
asylum system without formally withdrawing from the Refugee
Convention and violating the constitutional right to asylum. What
was portrayed as a strategy aimed at individuals using the asylum
system as a backdoor to immigration was purposely designed to
aect everyone without a visa, including potentially persecuted
persons.
This prevention strategy was one element of the air migration
regime that took shape in the s. As asylum seekers continued
to arrive at the airport, another element was the local control of asy-
lum seekers arriving in the transit zone. Not everyone who applied
for asylum at the airport was allowed to enter the country in order
to wait for a decision on his or her asylum procedure. Since the air-
port was a state border, asylum seekers could be rejected directly,
either for having failed, in the eyes of the border guards, to articu-
late their request for asylum and the claim that they were perse-
cuted, or because they came from a country that was excluded from
the right to asylum. An amendment to the Asylum Procedure Act
of  made it easier for the BGS and the Federal Ministry of the
Interior to reject asylum seekers on these grounds. Up until then,
rejections had only been legal if the asylum seeker was proven to
have already been granted protection elsewhere. The new law ruled
more generally that a refugee could be denied entry if he or she had
been safe from political persecution elsewhere.

This allowed the
Ministry of the Interior to declare certain countries as safe and thus
to exclude whole groups from the right to asylum, such as Afghans
who had traveled to Germany from Pakistan or India, or Ethiopians
who came from Sudan.
The BGS and the Ministry of the Interior were not the only actors
shaping migration control on the ground. Using migration histo-
rian Jochen Oltmer’s terminology, one could say that they were the
leading actors of the local migration regime, while others, in par-
ticular the airport social services, influenced or even subverted the
regime.

Oering its services on behalf of the churches, the FSD
64 Board member Airport
Rhine/Main AG to Manfred
Kanther, January 5, 1988,
Fraport Archiv VG05-1910.
65 Bundesgesetzblatt Teil I,
Nr. 3 1987, 89.
66 Oltmer, Migrationsregime, 4.
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remained independent of the state even though the Hessian Minis-
try of Social Aairs began reimbursing the FSD for its basic expenses
for refugees in April .

This independent position gave the FSD
room for maneuver that reached beyond its social work. During the
s many church members and leist groups opposed the gov-
ernment’s restrictive asylum policy.

The FSD explicitly used “its
presence in transit” to assume “a controlling role vis-à-vis the fed-
eral border guard.”

Its members developed a set of strategies in
order to proactively facilitate refugees’ admission. They handed out
information sheets in dierent languages that informed the refu-
gees about the asylum procedures.

In , the BGS observed that
members of the FSD frequently used their access pass to the tran-
sit area to approach passengers who looked like potential asylum
seekers and gave them advice. On a regular basis, the FSD called in
lawyers whom they could bring into the transit area with their sta
passes. Sometimes lawyers would even issue powers of attorney
that enabled the social workers to present the asylum application on
behalf of the refugee.

When more refugees were rejected at the air-
port in , based on the amended Asylum Procedure Act, the FSD
documented these cases and brought them to public attention.

In
all this, the FSD was not acting alone, but as part of a network of
pro-immigration and human rights groups.
The two leading figures behind the foundation of PRO ASYL in
Frankfurt in , which to this day remains one of Germany’s most
influential pro-refugee organizations, were members in the Catholic
and Protestant churches of Hesse. One of them, Herbert Leuninger,
was the spokesperson on migration within the Catholic Diocese of
Limburg which held one of the chairs on the board supervising the
FSD. The head of the FSD, Birgit Plank, was a member of Amnesty
International and in contact with the head of UNHCR Germany
who, on some occasions, such as the poster incident, supported the
FSD by exerting pressure on the German government.

Whereas the BGS and the Ministry of the Interior appreciated the
FSD’s social work, its systematic interventionism generated con-
flicts. Police ocers complained about the “aggressiveness of the
socially engaged persons” and about being under the “impression
of complete surveillance”

by the FSD and its lawyers. In the eyes of
the BGS, the FSD was “constantly making broad-brush, unfounded,
unqualified and emotionally charged accusations against the bor-
der guard service.”

Several airlines also united in protest against
67 Chaplain Gerhard
Homann, template for
board meeting, January
25, 1989, ERFOArch
ERV01/17.
68 Herbert, Ausländerpolitik,
267.
69 Gundula Schmidt, “Der
Frankfurter Flughafen
Sozialdienst. Ein Erfah-
rungsbericht,” Theologia
Practica 24/2 (1989):
85-88.
70 FSD annual report 1986,
pp. 7-9, 18, CArchF 5120-
01; FSD annual report
1987, p. 11, ERFOArch
Berichte Flughafensozial-
dienst.
71 BGS airport oce to BGS
directorate Koblenz,
November 28, 1984.
BArch B 106 207414.
72 BGS Frankfurt to BGS
directorate Koblenz, June
10, 1987. BArch B 106
207414.
73 FSD annual report 1982,
pp. 2, 5, CArchF 5120-01;
FSD Annual Report 1987,
p. 38, ERFOArch Berichte
Flughafensozialdienst
74 BGS airport oce to BGS
directorate Koblenz,
November 28, 1984.
BArch B 106 207414.
75 BGS airport oce to Min-
istry of Interior, October
29, 1984, BArch B 106
207414.
56
BULLETIN OF THE GHI | 68 | SPRING 2021
the FSD aer its members had entered some
of their aircra, a practice that not only dis-
rupted their customer operations, but also
brought them into potential trouble if an insuf-
ficiently documented person was on board.
They opposed the “commitment of the local
church social service,” arguing that it went “far
beyond the usual” and was one reason why
“Frankfurt has become an El Dorado for asy-
lum seekers.”

A leist German college student who had
learned about the FSD’s support for refugees
“through reports in the press, television and
specialist literature” decided in  to apply
for an internship with the FSD. He believed
that it was the right place to fight growing anti-
asylum sentiments and the asylum policy of
the government in Bonn: “The FSD, I assumed,
is at the outermost frontline in the fight for
the right of asylum anchored in the German
constitution.”

Indeed, all actors involved
saw the airport as a front line of the “asylum
debate.” However, they considered themselves
to be on very dierent fronts. The FSD and its
supporters fought against what they saw as
the subversion of the constitutional right to
asylum. In a radio interview, Herbert Leun-
inger and Birgit Plank explained that the basic
right to asylum was in acute danger at the air-
port border.

The BGS and the federal minis-
try of interior, on the other hand, led a “fight
against illegal entry by air.”

At some point,
the BGS even accused the FSD of “increas-
ingly acting in the lead-up to organized illegal
entry” by “making massive eorts to enable
the entry of alleged asylum seekers.”

77 FSD Annual Report 1988,
p. 7, CArchF 5120-01.
78 Transcript from radio talk
show, February 16, 1987,
BArch B 106 207414.
79 BGS airport
oce to Minister
of Interior,
October 29, 1984.
BArch B 106
207414.
80 BGS airport oce to Minis-
ter of Interior, October 22,
1984; BGS airport oce to
BGS directorate Koblenz,
November 28, 1984, BArch
B 106 207414.
76 Airline Operators
Committee Frankfurt
Airport to Airport Rhine/
Main AG, January 21,
1985, BArch B 106
207414.
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81 BGS Frankfurt to BGS
directorate Koblenz,
December 23, 1986,
BArch B 106 207414.
82 BGS directorate Koblenz
to Minister of Interior,
November 28, 1986,
BArch B 106 207414.
83 “Eigenes Gebäude für
Asylbewerber,” Frankfurter
Rundschau, June 28, 1988,
ISF S3/V 22.970.
84 Press release, November
3, 1988, Fraport Archiv
Pressemitteilungen 1979-
1988; Chaplain Gerhard
Homann, template for
board meeting, January
25, 1989, ERFOArch
ERV01/17.
The ocers were deeply bothered by the situation in the transit
zone because it was a border that they could not control completely
and in which the refugees could move freely and interact with the
FSD and its helpers. As the BGS complained in /, there
existed neither patrol controls in the transit area nor surveillance
of the asylum seekers’ accommodations. Therefore, the exchange
of advice and information among asylum seekers and with the FSD
went widely unchallenged. Worse still, from the BGS’s standpoint,
the asylum seekers were able to secretly dispose of their tickets
and passports in transit and wait several hours before presenting
themselves to the BGS. This strategy made it dicult for the BGS
to identify the asylum seekers’ country of origin and the flight they
had boarded. These were crucial items of information needed for a
possible rejection and for forcing the airlines to return the passenger.
The fear that human smuggling could flourish in the transit zone
also troubled the BGS. Indeed, transit was not only an opportunity
for refugees and migrants but also for human smugglers. The BGS
had caught several prospective asylum seekers using the letter
box in the transit zone to send their false or manipulated travel
documents and return tickets to their agents, who could then use
them for another client. On several occasions, smugglers even
accompanied their clients to Frankfurt. They then separated in the
transit zone, where the client asked for asylum and the helper took
back the documents and le.

As the director of the Federal Border
Guard (BGS) in Koblenz explained to the Ministry of the Interior,
“the transit zone itself […] would remain an insecure factor even
if it were to be patrolled sporadically, because transit travelers can
abuse a certain freedom of movement at any time during their
stopover.”

When in  the transit room was so overcrowded that
the authorities again considered moving all refugees to a separate
building, the BGS was relieved since “the mixing of applicants for
asylum and passengers made their work more dicult.”

In the late s, asylum applications at Frankfurt airport rose dras-
tically from , in  to , in . The consequence was
a serious backlog of asylum seekers in the transit area, where more
people than usual had to sleep on the floors and benches in the pas-
senger areas and existing sanitary facilities did not suce. German
government ocials, the BGS, the airport operator as well as the
churches and the FSD all spoke of an “unbearable situation for every-
body involved.”

The press reported on “chaos in the transit area;” the
transit area “is intended to serve the stay of air travelers and not asy-
Figure 5: Images from press
coverage of the refugee
management in the transit
zone: the FSD distributing
food to refugees from Sri
Lanka, while travelers in
the back line up for board-
ing (A); the FSD transit
oce (B); refugee children
in the transit bedroom (C).
Source: Frankfurter Neue
Presse, April 29, 1986;
Sonntag 40, 1987. Photos:
KNA.
58
BULLETIN OF THE GHI | 68 | SPRING 2021
lum seekers,” explained a politician from the Liberal Party (FDP) in a
newspaper article.

Beginning in November , all arriving asylum
seekers were moved from the general transit zone to a separate tran-
sit building, C , a converted warehouse on the edge of the airfield
housing a large dormitory and oces of the border police.
Whether the new building really facilitated a “more humane treat-
ment” and a “shortened stay at the airport,”

as the airport operator
claimed, seems questionable aer reading the FSD’s reports about
the conditions in Transit C . For the BGS and the Ministry of
Interior, the new space was not a temporary solution. On the con-
trary, they appreciated the arrangement as it allowed for enhanced
control and modifications of the procedure. The entrances and exits
of the building were tightly controlled. The building could only be
entered through a kind of double-door system that separated newly
arriving asylum seekers from the already registered refugees; the
BGS aimed to prevent any exchange of information between the
two groups. Refugees were cut o from the public transit zone and
other parts of the airport. They had to stay in the building until their
status had been decided. This exceptional, almost detention-like
facility remained in place even aer refugee numbers began to fall
significantly in .
The FSD, which constantly feared that its refugee work could be
terminated due to the constant tensions with the BGS and the
government, faced a dilemma. If they wanted to continue their
“protective function”

for the refugees, they had to get permanent
access to the new building, and the only way to achieve this was
to continue providing primary care for the refugees.

By doing so,
however, the FSD members felt their organization would change
from a largely external (and oppositional), ambulant service into an
integral part of the institutionalized, separated migration regime
at the airport. As one member of the FSD noted, it meant the end
of “outreach street work” in the transit zone and the beginning of
“welfare work in a closed institution.”

To policy makers this closed institution seemed so convenient that
they even suggested holding not only the initial hearing, but the
whole asylum procedure in the building, so that unsuccessful asy-
lum seekers would never get to enter the country in the first place.
To this end, Federal Minister of the Interior Wolfgang Schäuble, in
cooperation with the minister of transport, the Federal Oce for
85 “Unerträgliche Zustände,”
FAZ, April 14, 1988;
“Chaos im Transitbe-
reich. FDP kritisiert die
Asylbewerber-Praxis auf
dem Flughafen,” Frank-
furter Rundschau, April 15,
1988, ISF S3/V 22.970.
86 Board member of Airport
Rhine/Main AG to
Manfred Kanther, January
5, 1988, Fraport Archiv
VG05-1910.
87 FSD annual report 1987,
p. 7, ERFOArch Berichte
Flughafensozialdienst.
88 Chaplain Gerhard
Homann, template for
board meeting, January
25, 1989, ERFOArch
ERV01/17.
89 FSD annual report 1986,
pp. 7-9, 18, CArchF 5120-
01.
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Migration and Refugees (BAFl), the BGS, and authorities in Hesse
aimed at setting up a branch oce of the BAFl at the airport. This
way, the government ocials reasoned, the “flood of asylum seek-
ers through the airport” could be “prefiltered” and “many futile
applications could be swily decided.”

In June  – years before
the introduction of the  Airport Asylum Procedure – the Inte-
rior Ministers’ Conference decided to test such an in-situ-proce-
dure for Turkish asylum seekers arriving at Frankfurt airport; the
implementation of the test run failed only because the airport
operator, who was not fond of the plan, insisted that the BAFl would
have to pay rent for the oces.

Federal and state authorities kept
pressing for an agreement with the airport operator and hoped to push
through their plan. However, with the fall of the Berlin Wall and declin-
ing numbers of asylum cases at the airport, the project lost its urgency.
This changed in fall , however, when, under the impact of the
nationwide asylum campaign and strong pressure from the Hessian
state government, the introduction of a special asylum procedure at the
airport was put back onto the agenda and eventually became a reality.

V. Conclusion
Every decade in postwar German migration history witnessed
airborne migration. This also means that already in its early second
phase aer the Second World War, the history of civil aviation
was connected to refugee history.

Involving groups as disparate
as Jewish displaced persons, German refugees, resettlers from
the Eastern bloc, and asylum seekers from the Global South and
the Middle East, migration by airplane took place against the
background of changing migration policies and engendered very
dierent experiences. Since the sections in this article have focused
on the dierent groups as they first appeared at airports in Germany
over the decades, the development described here might seem like a
linear process, which in fact it was not: German resettlers continued
to transit via the airport at a time when asylum seekers were held
back in the transit zone, and refugees today keep being airlied
to Germany as part of humanitarian resettlement schemes faintly
reminiscent of the schemes used for Jewish DPs in the late s.
Nevertheless, we can identify certain trends and turning points.
One significant trend was the discovery and use of the humani-
tarian potential of airplanes by relief organizations and political
administrations in the s. The capacity of airplanes to provide
90 Ministry of Trac,
minutes on meeting with
other federal and Hesse
ministries and the BGS,
November 20, 1989,
BArch B 108 98793.
91 Ministry of Interior to
other federal and Hesse
ministers, December
1, 1989, BArch B 108
98793.
92 Ministry of Social Aairs
Hesse, internal note,
October 13, 1992,
HHStAW 505 6013.
93 A growing number of
historians have recently
begun to take fresh looks
at the history of aviation.
Going beyond technical
developments and nar-
ratives of progress, some
historians focused on
social history to question
the general view that civil
aviation, until the 1970s,
remained an exclusive
means of travel for elites,
businesspeople, and
middle to upper classes.
See Max Hirsh, Airport
Urbanism. Infrastructure
and Mobility in Asia (Lon-
don, 2016); Anke Ortlepp,
Jim Crow Terminals. The
Desegregation of American
Airports (Georgia, 2017).
60
BULLETIN OF THE GHI | 68 | SPRING 2021
rapid relocation, especially of vulnerable groups, and to fly over
otherwise obstructed borders was used by organizers of airlis.
From the late s to s, generally speaking, the perspective
on airborne migration and its management in West Germany was
more about support and relief than matters of control and restric-
tion, mainly because the refugee groups were either emigrants
or already accepted as legal immigrants prior to their arrival. As
regards the individual migration of asylum seekers, one might also
identify a specific humanitarian potential of air routes: taking the
plane allowed undocumented refugees to avoid multiple border and
document checks and to land directly in a country that adhered to
the Refugee Convention and might accept them without a visa or
passport. In the s, however, this potential was increasingly
sidelined by the government’s strategies to curb air access to asylum.
Another trend, which the article has traced over time, was the
steady development of a humanitarian infrastructure at the airport.
This humanitarianism evolved from mere care work into an oppo-
sitional force that defended airborne asylum migration against the
tightening migration regime.
The s were a turning point. Frankfurt’s Rhine-Main Airport
was perceived as a frontline in the struggle against climbing asylum
numbers and “asylum abuse.” Not only quantitatively but also in
terms of quality, the airport seemed like a frontline. Delineating a
direct border with the world in the middle of Germany, the airport
transit zone seemed much more closely connected to the Global
South or the Middle East than, say, Germany’s land borders with
France or Italy. Tightened policies on air migration were accompa-
nied by increasingly strict management on the ground, including
more frequent rejections and the building of a closed facility for
asylum seekers in  – a crucial step towards the introduction of
the Airport Asylum Procedure. As this article has sought to dem-
onstrate, the  Airport Asylum Procedure was not a top-down
innovation. Rather, it arose from earlier experiences with airborne
migration and local conflicts at Frankfurt airport.
Carolin Liebisch-Gümüş is a Research Fellow in Global and Transregional
History at the GHI Washington. She has published Verflochtene Nationsbildung.
Die Neue Türkei und der Völkerbund, 1918-38 (De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2020). Her
current second book project is a comparative study that explores air routes and
airports as sites of refugee history and migration control.