The Berlin Wall was a month old. The West German federal election was three days away. And two Luftwaffe fighter-bombers were somewhere over Leipzig, in cloud, being hunted by Soviet MiGs, with no idea where they were.

Sixty-five years ago this week, on 14 September 1961, Feldwebel Peter Pfefferkorn and Stabsunteroffizier Hans Eberl of Jagdbombergeschwader 32 got extremely lost. What followed cost a squadron commander his job, produced an order named after beer, and ended with two jet fighters buried in a hole at a Berlin airport where they stayed for nearly a decade.

Why Two German Jets Over Berlin Was Unthinkable

To understand why this was a crisis rather than an embarrassment, you need the rule. Under the 1945 Allied Control Council agreement, only the three Western Allies could fly to Berlin, and only down three narrow air corridors. Not West Germany. West German aircraft, civil or military, were not permitted to fly to West Berlin at all.

So a pair of Bundeswehr fighter-bombers drifting into the southern corridor was not a navigational slip. It was a treaty violation, performed in uniform, over the most dangerous city on earth, one month after the Wall went up and three days before an election.

Airspace violations were not rare in themselves. In four weeks between August and September 1961 there were 38 Soviet incursions into West German airspace. NATO aircraft crossed the other way at a rate of roughly two a month. Both sides did it, some deliberately to see what happened, some because the border is genuinely hard to see from 30,000 feet.

A walk-around of a preserved F-84 Thunderstreak, the same type the two pilots were flying.

This one was simply an accident, and a well-documented one. The direction-finding set in one aircraft was defective. A thunderstorm was interfering with the compass. And the westerly wind was twice as strong as the forecast had promised. Pfefferkorn’s compass was reading somewhere between 40 and 60 degrees out.

The two men got so thoroughly disoriented that on the leg from Würzburg to Laon they mistook Liège, in Belgium, for Reims, in France. Radar stations at Warburg then picked them up heading east, towards Königs Wusterhausen, south of Berlin. Controllers called them to turn around. They missed the call because they were talking to each other, trying to work out where they were.

A short history of the Republic F-84F Thunderstreak and its reconnaissance sibling.

The Airman Who Saved Them

North of Leipzig, deep inside East German airspace, Pfefferkorn finally transmitted a mayday. To his considerable surprise it was answered.

The tower at Tempelhof, operated by the U.S. Air Force, picked it up. The radar operator there had not noticed the two contacts because he was concentrating on an inbound Pan Am DC-6. By the time anyone looked properly, a large number of Soviet fighters were already chasing them.

An airman in the Berlin Air Route Traffic Control Center made the decision that mattered. Instead of sending them back west, into the fighters, he told them to keep going and land at Tegel, which had a longer runway and was better suited to jets. That instruction, plus a thick layer of cloud, is the reason two Luftwaffe pilots survived the afternoon.

The French authorities at Tegel immediately told the Soviets in East Berlin that technical difficulties had made an emergency landing absolutely necessary. It was not true and nobody believed it, but it was the sort of thing that had to be said.

Moscow’s official line was less comic. The Soviet government stayed silent for several days, then protested formally against the West German “provocation” and threatened to shoot down any aircraft involved if it happened again. Soviet officials assumed the flight had really been a reconnaissance mission, which was not an absurd suspicion. Both sides ran those. The Allies flew C-97s from Wiesbaden and later Frankfurt on regular corridor routes, a service known as the Berlin Lunch Bunch. The Soviets, for their part, had a remarkable number of Aeroflot aircraft develop navigation problems in the vicinity of Berlin.

The Aircraft Simply Disappeared

The jets were pushed into a hangar within minutes of shutting down and journalists were forbidden to photograph them. Then the French made them vanish.

Everything valuable was stripped out of the interiors and flown back to West Germany in Allied transports. What remained of the two airframes was buried in the ground beyond the runways at Tegel.

For years nobody outside a small circle knew. Theories circulated: that the aircraft had been repainted in USAF markings and flown home, or dismantled and trucked out. The arrival of two enormous Douglas C-124 Globemasters at Tegel from Frankfurt fed the speculation nicely.

The truth came out when expansion work at Tegel in the late 1970s turned them up, and was confirmed publicly only in 2006, when the Luftwaffenmuseum at Berlin-Gatow put photographs of the buried and rediscovered Thunderstreaks on display.

Inside Tegel, the airport where the two Thunderstreaks landed and were buried. It closed in 2020.

Bier-Order 61

Then the politics started, and they are the strangest part of the whole affair.

Franz-Josef Strauß, the Defence Minister, was in full election campaign mode. After finishing the CSU’s closing rally in the Löwenbräu tent at the Oktoberfest, he summoned the Inspector of the Air Force, General Josef Kammhuber, to the Hotel Ambassador and ordered him to transfer the commander of JaBoG 32, Oberstleutnant Siegfried Barth, immediately. Any commander whose unit violated a border in future would be replaced the same way.

When Kammhuber announced this at Lechfeld the next day, the Luftwaffe gave the order the name it has carried ever since: Bier-Order 61. Beer Order 61, after the circumstances in which it had been formulated.

Barth was never questioned and was not allowed to speak during Kammhuber’s visit. His superior, Generalleutnant Martin Harlinghausen, a man who had once stood up to Göring, demanded a proper investigation and was forced into early retirement two weeks later.

What followed was almost farcical. The first investigation found Barth innocent. Kammhuber, unhappy with that, ordered a second, which found him partly at fault. A third found him innocent again. Barth lodged a formal complaint against the Defence Minister. Strauß ordered every general involved not to speak, on the grounds that they were under his command, and then ignored the ruling that he had been at fault until the military ombudsman forced him to accept it. He had to withdraw the order entirely in 1962.

Strauß himself resigned as Defence Minister later that year over the Spiegel affair. Kammhuber retired the same year.

Après

Pfefferkorn and Eberl came home after several weeks under arrest. Neither flew again. Both were transferred to the ground crew at Lechfeld, which for a fighter pilot is a life sentence.

Eleven months later the Soviet threat was tested. A Bundesmarine Hawker Sea Hawk flown by Kapitänleutnant Knut Anton Winkler strayed across the border near Eisenach on the way back from the carrier USS Saratoga. MiG-21s fired on him. He got the aircraft down at Ahlhorn, and it was written off. Winkler died in an F-104 Starfighter accident less than four years later.

JaBoG 32 flew the F-84F until July 1966, by which time the wing had put more than 80,000 hours on the type. The two aircraft that went to Berlin are, presumably, still there in fragments under a closed airport.

Sources: Der Spiegel, 9 May 1962 and 29 August 1962; Deutscher BundeswehrVerband; Heiner Möllers, “Total verfranzt”, Militärgeschichte 2/2017, ZMSBw; Luftwaffenmuseum Berlin-Gatow; Der Tagesspiegel