They remained nameless: the Arte documentary “The Last Flight”

ÜMore than seven decades after the end of the war, it hardly seems possible to find contemporary witnesses for a documentary about the Second World War. But young people and children of yore can also vividly describe what they experienced themselves and learned from their parents – they too tell stories with faces that are marked by what they experienced and what their parents described.

Sandra Naumann and Jan Peter (“Rohwedder”, “Deutschland 9/11”) spoke to people who, in April 1945, lived in the Brandenburg villages of Glienig and Buckow and a few hundred kilometers away, in Upper Austria, experienced the last weeks of the “Third Reich”. They asked about a plane that crashed into a wooded area south of Berlin and listened.

The Junkers Ju 52, which flew in from the capital on April 20, symbolically pregnant, is still the subject of wild rumors to this day. They range to the assumption that only extremely important people could have been on the plane shortly after the beginning of the “Battle of Berlin”, yes, possibly guests on the way back from “Führer’s birthday”. Some believe that Hitler personally escaped that night.

Amazed at dealing with the past

Those who did not come from the villages and were interested in the crash of the plane, such as Volker Laschke, who moved to an old farm in Buckow after reunification and repeatedly came across remains of the plane such as pieces of the outer skin in the forest, are amazed at the handling of the plane of the past: “Sometimes it’s a little strange how unwilling people with the passage of time are to respond to the truth.”

The filmmakers were also amazed: How can it be that so little is known about such a dramatic event as the crash of a plane with 18 people on board? Her film shows that this is also related to other crash-time events that are more relevant to many lives: the arrival of the Russian soldiers and the fears, rapes and suicides of those weeks. And maybe also with shame. Some residents are said to have found and kept jewelry and money in the wreckage of the plane.

Above all, however, after the burial of the passengers in a cemetery, there was a lack of concrete clues for solving the mystery for decades. The wreck was scattered, the bodies remained nameless war dead. The families of the victims did not know that their relatives were on the plane. And no one found out that there was a survivor – although he had already visited the crash site in the GDR era and also contacted the administration of the neighboring villages, who are said to have greeted him “not too friendly”.

On the run in the direction of the Salzkammergut

Only when Kurt Runge showed up in Glienig again in 1998 and told of the plane being shot down did the secret begin to be revealed. “I came across the details not a day earlier,” says aviation historian Günther Ott. He emphasizes that the question of who was on board remains nebulous. Only a handful of names are known, the most prominent of which may have been director Hans Steinhoff (“Hitlerjunge Quex”), who was loyal to the regime.

Thanks to Runge, an engineer, who also recorded the circumstances of his business trip in a pocket diary, the key data became clear: the plane that crashed was one of the last civilian aircraft to leave embattled Berlin in 1945 – with Prague and Enns near Linz as destinations, one both An important region for the armaments industry like “bonzes” fleeing in the direction of the Salzkammergut.

To this day, the children who helped camouflage the airfield in Enns cannot get rid of the images of the death marches from the nearby Mauthausen concentration camp. They tell the filmmakers that they also knew about the murder of Jews in the camp beforehand.

It is such small, very personal eyewitness stories on the edge of the airplane puzzle that make up the documentary. And they get under your skin, as do the eerily staged mannequins that the filmmakers use to complement the elegantly edited archive footage from the final weeks of the war. This is modern cut history television cleverly marketed as a true crime documentary thriller.

The last flight11:20 p.m., Art.