Report: Merkel backs keeping Berlin's historic Tempelhof airport open

Chancellor Angela Merkel is backing efforts to keep open Berlin's Tempelhof airport, according to comments released Friday — drawing criticism from the capital's mayor.

Berliners will vote in an April 27 referendum on a group's proposal to keep the money-losing airport running. Berlin's left-wing city government wants to shut Tempelhof in October, but the local branch of Merkel's conservative Christian Democrats has supported keeping it open.

"The further operation of Tempelhof is not only of significance for the economy and jobs," Merkel was quoted as saying in an interview with Berlin's B.Z. daily, released by the newspaper before its publication Saturday. "The airport is for many, and for me personally, a symbol with the airlift of the history of this city."

Opened in 1923, Tempelhof was expanded under the Nazis, who built a massive terminal that went on to serve as the hub of the nearly yearlong, U.S.-led Berlin airlift when the Soviets blockaded West Berlin in 1948.

These days, the centrally located Tempelhof is by far the quietest of Berlin's three airports. It is used only for short-hop flights with small aircraft.

Mayor Klaus Wowereit's city government wants to close it as part of a plan to concentrate flights at a new hub just outside the city to be created by expanding the former East Berlin's Schoenefeld airport.

Wowereit argued Friday that keeping Tempelhof open would pose legal complications to the new hub and dismissed Merkel's comments as a "transparent party political maneuver."

Merkel should concentrate on improving Berlin's relatively poor international air connections "instead of damaging the city by supporting a backward-looking campaign," the mayor said in a statement.

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