On 17 December 1912 Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz ordered the construction of a naval airship base on 800 hectares of marshland behind Cuxhaven. More than 18.16 million marks went into it: a gasworks to make hydrogen, barracks, workshops, and the sheds. Ten airships could be housed. From 1915 every hall was given a name beginning with NO — NORMAN, NOGAT, NORDSTERN, NORA, NORBERT — and the grandest of them, the double hall originally called HERTA and then NOBEL, was built on a turntable.

That building deserves its own paragraph. NOBEL weighed 4,600 tonnes, was 182 metres long — later extended to 200 — 70 metres wide and 30 metres high, and the whole structure could be rotated through 360 degrees in about an hour. A rigid airship is close to helpless in a crosswind while being walked in or out of a shed, so the shed was made to turn instead. Nothing else like it was built anywhere in Germany.

The Zeppelin L 3 landed at Nordholz on 2 September 1914, a month into the war, and the base became the principal North Sea airship station. The naval airship raids on Britain were flown from here from 1915, the campaign that gave the word Zeppelin its meaning for a generation of English civilians. The British came the other way too: on 25 December 1914 a raid on the base — the Cuxhaven Raid, remembered in Germany as the Weihnachtsangriff — achieved very little, hampered by weather and early detection, but it was one of the first carrier-launched air attacks in history.

It ended abruptly. The Treaty of Versailles required the sheds to be pulled down, and almost all of them were gone by 1921, the rotating hall by 1924. What had been the largest airship base in the world became grazing land.

The surrendered German High Seas Fleet lay interned at Scapa Flow through the first half of 1919. On 21 June, believing the armistice was about to expire and the ships about to be seized, Rear Admiral Ludwig von Reuter gave the order to scuttle, and seventy-four warships went to the bottom of a Scottish anchorage.

Two days later the airship crews at Nordholz did the smaller, less famous version of the same thing. On 23 June 1919 six Zeppelins were destroyed in their sheds by their own ground crews, dropped onto the shed floors and wrecked beyond repair, rather than be handed to the Allies as war reparations. The act was of a piece with Scapa Flow: a service destroying its own equipment at the moment of defeat, as much a statement as a denial.

It did not save the base. The Allied commissions came anyway, the sheds came down under the treaty, and the airship arm of the Imperial German Navy simply ceased to exist. What survived was the site, the name, and eventually the memory — the Aeronauticum museum now stands on the ground where the sheds were, and Marinefliegergeschwader 3 carries the honour name "Graf Zeppelin", granted on 9 July 1967, with Friedrichshafen as its sponsor city from 12 December of that year.

The Luftwaffe came back to Nordholz in 1935 under the cover name Neckar, built three intersecting runways and ammunition depots, and used the field through the Second World War. Heinkel He 111 units flew from it during Operation Weserübung, the invasion of Denmark and Norway, in 1940, and elements of Nachtjagdgeschwader 3 operated from it later in the war. American troops took the airfield on 16 May 1945.

The occupation sequence was unusual: the United States Army Air Forces held it, with P-47s of the 86th Fighter Group from 5 June 1945 until the group left for Lechfeld in November 1946, and the Royal Air Force took over in 1947. Neither wanted it permanently. The field went quiet again until the Federal Republic decided it needed a naval air arm.

The base that exists now was built between 1959 and 1962 to NATO standards and commissioned on 26 April 1963. Marinefliegergeschwader 3 formed here on 1 June 1964 under Fregattenkapitän Paul Kriebel, flying the Fairey Gannet, and received the honour name "Graf Zeppelin" on 9 July 1967. The Bréguet Atlantic arrived on 26 January 1966 and stayed for forty-four years: twenty aircraft, the maritime patrol versions retired in 2005 and the five signals intelligence conversions on 20 June 2010, when 61+03 flew the last sortie. Atlantic 61+06 stands as the gate guard of the Aeronauticum next door.

The other wing has a longer pedigree than its arrival date suggests. Marinefliegergeschwader 5 was set up at Kiel-Holtenau on 4 January 1958, because West Germany’s accession to ICAO in 1956 obliged it to provide air rescue over its own territory and waters. It moved to Nordholz between June and November 2012, and the Marinefliegerkommando was re-established here on 8 October 2012, restoring a single commander for German naval aviation after six years without one.

Germany bought eight second-hand Lockheed P-3C Orions from the Netherlands in 2006, in service from 17 March that year, as a quick fix after the Atlantic ran out of life. The quick fix became a case study in how not to do it. The upgrade programme overran repeatedly, availability was poor enough to feature in the Wehrbeauftragter’s annual reports, and the costs kept climbing. In the end the modernisation was abandoned and the aircraft were retired on 20 November 2025, ten years earlier than planned, after just under 28,500 German flying hours.

The replacement was bought the other way round: fast, off the shelf, from the United States. Five Boeing P-8A Poseidons were ordered in June 2021 for about 2.4 billion euros, three more followed in November 2023, and a further four, at an estimated 1.8 billion euros, have been in preparation, towards a long-term goal of twelve. The procurement agency BAAINBw described it, not unreasonably, as having been done in record time.

63+01 landed at Nordholz on the afternoon of Friday 7 November 2025, after a handover ceremony at Berlin-Brandenburg with the defence minister present. Kapitän zur See Oliver Ottmüller, commodore of Marinefliegergeschwader 3, called it a historic day. Boris Pistorius put the strategic point more plainly: Germany’s contribution to deterrence in the High North, he said, would be based substantially on this aircraft.

It is a genuine change of capability, not just of type. The P-8A is a jet where the Orion was a turboprop, it carries a modern acoustic and radar suite, and it is the same aircraft the British, Norwegians and Americans fly over the same water — which matters more in the North Atlantic than any single sensor does. The MQ-9B SeaGuardian is meant to join it later this decade.

The Sea King Mk 41 came into service in the mid-1970s and became the most publicly visible aircraft the German navy has ever operated, because it was the one that came for you. Flying from Nordholz with outstations on Borkum and Helgoland and at Warnemünde on the Baltic, it ran the German maritime search and rescue service for nearly fifty years and flew 14,645 rescue missions. Its last flight was on 15 August 2024 and it went out of service on 31 August.

Eighteen NH90 NTH Sea Lions took the role over. The shipborne side is changing too: the Westland Sea Lynx Mk 88A, which has flown from the navy’s frigates since 1981 and passed from Marinefliegergeschwader 3 to Marinefliegergeschwader 5 in November 2012, is in its last year after forty-five years and more than 120,000 flying hours. The first NH90 MRFH Sea Tiger was handed over on 16 December 2025 and takes over the shipborne anti-submarine and anti-surface role in January 2027; the Sea Lynx is to be out of service by the end of 2026.

Doing all of this at once — a new maritime patrol aircraft, a new search and rescue helicopter and a new frigate helicopter inside about three years — is either a remarkable piece of recapitalisation or evidence of how long everything had been left, depending on which Bundestag report you read. Both readings are defensible.

The last thing at Nordholz is the one most visitors come for. The Aeronauticum, the German airship and naval aviation museum, opened in four rooms on 17 October 1991 as the Marine-Luftschiff-Museum and reopened in its present form on 6 May 1997, on the site of the old airship base. It holds seventeen post-1945 aircraft and helicopters on about 36,000 square metres of open ground, including a Bréguet Atlantic of Marinefliegergeschwader 3, and a monument to the crew of the naval airship L 1, which came down in a thunderstorm over the North Sea on 9 September 1913 with the loss of fourteen of the twenty men aboard — the first people ever killed in a Zeppelin.