Germans, Americans get together to remember post-WWII Operation Kinderlift

BERLIN — Dorit Ziegler saw the world in four weeks.

She was 13 years old and living in poverty-stricken West Berlin after World War II had destroyed and divided her country. Her father was killed in Czechoslovakia while fighting for the German army. And now she, her mother and her three brothers and sisters slept two-to-a-bed in her grandmother’s apartment, living mostly off of mehl, or flour, and water.

That’s when an American military family took Ziegler into its Bitburg home and treated her to the spoils of American life: plentiful food, marshmallows and blue jeans, to name a few.

Bitburg was smaller than Berlin, but to her 13-year-old eyes, it was the world, she said.

Ziegler and six others who took part in Operation Kinderlift as children from 1953 to 1957 gathered at the Allied Museum in Berlin on Wednesday for the opening of an exhibit commemorating the program. A Red Cross nurse and German journalist who dreamed up the program also attended.

In five years, the U.S. Air Force flew more than 12,000 children from West Berlin to homes in West Germany to get nourishment and experience a life outside of the poverty in Berlin, according to the museum.

Most of the children were refugees from East Germany. They spent the summer with American military families, German families and summer camps in West Germany.

At the exhibit opening, Ziegler, now 61, sought out U.S. Air Force Brig. Gen. Jay Lindell to thank the U.S. military for supporting the historic program. Lindell is the U.S. Air Forces in Europe director of logistics.

Ziegler excitedly pointed at a black-and-white photograph hanging on a museum wall. In the photo, a young girl with Ziegler’s puffed checks and button eyes sits between two girls.

“That’s me,” Ziegler said, smiling. “I look so American.”

The girls in the photo with their arms around Ziegler are daughters of the couple who took her in. They all wear white blouses, blue jeans and wide smiles. The picture draws a stark contrast from other photos that hang in the museum, of refugee children with tattered clothes, dirtied faces and sullen expressions.

Ziegler said the program had a lasting effect on her.

“I have a special mind for the American people,” said Ziegler, who worked in a Berlin travel agency before retiring. “I like to help people because they helped me and my family.”

Lindell was greeted with similar excitement by the other men and women who experienced a taste of a better life during Operation Kinderlift, originally called Kinderluftbrücke, or “children’s airlift.”

“You could tell in the way they greeted you just how appreciative they were,” said Lindell.

Harry Heyer holds fond memories of his time with an American family at Ramstein Air Base. The Air Force pilots let him into the cockpit and gave him thick, pink sticks of chewing gum. He learned to blow big bubbles that would explode, leaving his face covered in gum.

Heyer’s father had been taken as a political prisoner in their East Germany town, so he, his mother and his two older brothers fled to West Berlin as refugees. Eight people shared a three-room apartment and got by with very little money, he said.

When Heyer stepped off the plane after his visit with Americans, his mother did not recognize him, he said. She was thrown off by his new clothes, short haircut — and the pink gum that covered his face.

“That was the best journey I ever had,” said Heyer, who now works as a regional manager for GlaxoSmithKline, one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world.

Heyer’s daughter recently received her master’s degree in international law from Golden Gate University in San Francisco — an indirect result of the Air Force program, Heyer said.

“I gave it forward to my kids.”