Germany was not allowed a military air force in 1934, so Wunstorf was built as something else. Construction began that spring under the cover name Deutsche Verkehrsfliegerschule — the German commercial pilots’ school — on 414 hectares between Großenheidorn and Klein Heidorn, with a thirteen-kilometre perimeter fence finished in August 1934, four concrete hangars, workshops and barracks. By April 1935 the local water tower could not supply it and the base had to be plumbed into the Harz water main. The pretence was dropped on 2 April 1936, when the airfield was formally inaugurated with a parade through Wunstorf’s old town.

What flew from it belongs to the honest part of the story. III./Jagdgeschwader 2 was there from March 1935 with Heinkel He 51 biplanes and converted to the Bf 109; bomber units with He 111s and Ju 52s rotated through from 1936 to 1945. In August 1936 three Ju 52 crews left Wunstorf for Spain by way of Munich and Rome, the start of the base’s contribution to the Legion Condor, and twelve airmen from Wunstorf took part in the attack on Guernica on 26 April 1937.

The airfield was expanded eastwards in 1941 and again in 1943, cutting local roads. It ended as most Luftwaffe bases ended: with aircraft on the ground and no fuel to fly them. When British paratroops of the 5th Parachute Brigade took it on 7 April 1945 they found nineteen Messerschmitt Bf 109s, four Focke-Wulf Fw 190s, two Ju 88s and two Ju 52s, along with a great deal of other equipment. The fight for the field cost the 7th (Light Infantry) Parachute Battalion six killed and twenty-one wounded, most of them in an ambush of the four leading trucks of B Company.

The Royal Air Force kept Wunstorf as Advanced Landing Ground B-116 and then as RAF Wunstorf, flying Typhoons and Spitfires of 123 Wing with British, Canadian, Belgian and Dutch pilots. Then, on 24 June 1948, the Soviet Union closed the land routes to West Berlin, and an ordinary fighter station in Lower Saxony became the most important airfield in Europe.

The first British Dakotas left Wunstorf for Gatow on 28 June 1948, two days after the Americans began. Seventeen aircraft grew into a round-the-clock operation of Dakotas and four-engined Avro Yorks, flying at three or four different altitudes in the same corridor. The base was not built for it: unfenced ground had to be reinforced in a hurry with steel matting, the sewage system was expanded from a capacity of 600 people to more than 3,000, and a railway siding was run straight to the flight line. At the peak more than 5,000 people worked at Wunstorf — 2,072 RAF personnel, around a thousand German Luftbrückenhelfer and the rest — and the airmen’s mess served 4,800 meals a day.

The numbers that came out of it are still hard to take in. The airlift as a whole flew some 280,000 sorties; the millionth ton was delivered on 18 February 1949; on 16 April 1949 aircraft were landing at Gatow at one every 62 seconds. Wunstorf handled roughly a sixth of everything that went into the city, from a field with routine maintenance due after every third flight.

It cost lives. The worst single accident came on 19 September 1948, when the Avro York MW288 lost an engine on a night take-off, struck a radar vehicle, stalled and came down near Klein Heidorn, killing all five on board. The base is still, seventy-five years later, the thing Wunstorf is best known for.

The Luftwaffe took Wunstorf back in March 1958 and put its transport flying school there. The wing number arrived later and by a roundabout route: Air Transport Wing 62 was raised at the army airfield at Celle on 1 October 1959 with the Nord Noratlas, flew relief missions to Agadir after the Moroccan earthquake in the spring of 1960, moved to Köln-Wahn and then to Ahlhorn in April 1963, took its first Transall C-160 in April 1968, and was dissolved on 30 September 1971 with its people going to Wunstorf. On 1 October 1978 the flying school at Wunstorf was redesignated Air Transport Wing 62, and the number has been there ever since.

The wing inherited the school’s badge along with its buildings: Hans Huckebein, the raven from Wilhelm Busch’s picture stories, blindfolded — a joke about the instrument flying that was taught at Wunstorf, and one of the odder emblems in NATO.

The Transall is what the Bundeswehr remembers. For nearly half a century it flew everything and everywhere the Germans went: Somalia, the Balkans, Afghanistan, Mali, earthquake relief, evacuations, parachute training. It was slow, noisy, unpressurised for much of its load, and it could get into places nothing else could. Air Transport Wing 62 flew its last Transall sortie on 2 July 2015; the last two German Transalls of any unit landed at Wunstorf on 29 December 2021.

The wing itself has not stopped changing. It has four flying squadrons — logistic transport and air-to-air refuelling, tactical transport and evacuation, a special operations squadron stood up in 2019, and a training squadron detached to Bremen where a civil contractor runs elementary flying training for German transport and maritime aircrew. Administratively it answers to the Luftwaffentruppenkommando; on operations it is tasked by the European Air Transport Command at Eindhoven.

The A400M was Europe’s attempt to build its own military airlifter, and for a decade it was the standing example of what goes wrong when seven governments design an aeroplane together. The requirement settled at 180 aircraft; Germany ordered 60. First flight was forecast for 2008 and happened in December 2009. First delivery was planned for 2009 and happened in August 2013. By 2009 the programme was more than five billion euros over budget, an audit projected an overrun of up to 11.2 billion, and in January 2010 Airbus asked the partner governments for 5.3 billion euros to keep the project alive.

The November 2010 renegotiation cut the total order from 180 to 170 and Germany’s from 60 to 53. It did not end the trouble. The aircraft was reported twelve tonnes overweight in 2009; it could not refuel helicopters; propeller gearboxes were found in 2016 with heat-treatment defects and cracked input pinions, and fuselage cracking was found in 7000-series aluminium parts. Airbus took a further charge of about a billion euros in July 2016. On 9 May 2015 a production aircraft crashed on its first flight at Seville, killing four Airbus crew, after a software error left three engines stuck at idle on take-off.

Wunstorf got the first German aircraft, 54+01, on 19 December 2014, and spent the next decade turning a Transall base into an A400M base: about 450 million euros of work through 2016, a full-flight simulator certified in 2016, a new technical training school, and from 2023 an Airbus-run maintenance centre on the western edge of the field, due to open in 2027. A plan to put a second A400M unit at Lechfeld was dropped in 2022 when no partner nation joined and concentrating the fleet at Wunstorf turned out cheaper.

The 53rd and last German A400M, 54+63, landed at Wunstorf on 17 April 2026. By the type’s tenth anniversary in German service the wing had flown more than 50,000 hours on it. Oberst Markus Knoll, the wing commander, summed up the first decade with a German proverb about apprenticeships: the early years, he said, were real apprentice years — and apprentice years are not gentlemen’s years.

On 16 August 2021 two A400Ms left Wunstorf for Kabul, where the Afghan government had collapsed the day before. The crews circled for a long time before the Americans cleared them in, landed at 21:57, were given thirty minutes on the ground, and lifted off at 22:42 with seven people aboard. That flight became the symbol of everything that had gone wrong with the withdrawal.

What followed was the largest evacuation operation in Bundeswehr history. Seven A400Ms of Air Transport Wing 62 shuttled between Kabul and Tashkent, an hour and twenty minutes each way, while up to 600 German soldiers under Brigadegeneral Jens Arlt held their part of the airport. Capacity limits were suspended: an aircraft certified for 116 soldiers carried up to 230 evacuees. In ten days, 37 flights brought out 5,347 people of at least 45 nationalities — 4,129 Afghans and 469 Germans among them — before the mission ended on 26 August in the aftermath of the airport bombings.

The pattern repeated. After the earthquakes of February 2023 the wing flew 394 tonnes of relief into Turkey. In April 2023, over three days from 23 to 25 April, German A400Ms flew eight sorties out of Wadi Sayyidna north of Khartoum and lifted 740 people out of the Sudanese civil war. In 2024 the wing flew 21 missions dropping more than 220 tonnes of aid over Gaza.

This is the argument the A400M won. A Transall could carry six tonnes to Washington in three days; an A400M took fifteen tonnes there in one. The aircraft that spent a decade as a procurement scandal became the thing the German government reaches for when it has to get people out of somewhere in a hurry — and every one of those flights started at a Lower Saxon airfield that was doing the same job in 1948.