The Irony of Neuhardenberg: A Walk from the Castle to the Hangar

Neuhardenberg, 22 August 2026

This is not a report on day three of the European Defense Tech Festival eurodefense.tech. That will follow. This is an intermezzo, written on the walk between my hotel and the hangar, because the ground under this festival carries more of the story than any of the pitch decks on stage. We covered the money and the politics on day one swissaerospace.ventures, and the lawyers, studios and drones on day two swissaerospace.ventures. Today, a detour into why this particular airfield, of all the airfields in Europe, is the right place to be uncomfortable about what we are doing.

The hotel: a castle that has been renamed four times

I am staying at Schloss Neuhardenberg schlossneuhardenberg.de. The village was called Quilitz until King Friedrich Wilhelm III gave the estate to his State Chancellor, Karl August Fürst von Hardenberg, and decreed on 5 April 1815 that the place would henceforth be called Neu-Hardenberg berlingeschichte.de. Hardenberg is the reformer who pushed through freedom of trade, the emancipation of the peasantry and a modern administration in Prussia nzz.ch. He had the baroque manor rebuilt by Karl Friedrich Schinkel between 1820 and 1823, and the park laid out by Peter Joseph Lenné and Hardenberg's son-in-law Hermann von Pückler-Muskau bad-freienwalde.de. So the first irony is already on the letterhead: a reformer's house, built by the architects of Prussian classicism, on an estate granted as a reward for the wars against Napoleon.

The second irony is harder. The last aristocratic owner, Carl-Hans Graf von Hardenberg, came back from the Russian front in 1942 and became one of the key liaison men of the conspirators around Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg. His castle, seventy kilometres from Berlin and remote enough to be considered safe from the Gestapo, was a recurring meeting place where the resistance around Tresckow and Stauffenberg discussed both the assassination and the political order that should follow it 2 sources. His daughter Reinhild was engaged to Stauffenberg's adjutant Werner von Haeften. After the bomb failed on 20 July 1944, Hardenberg was arrested by the Gestapo on 24 July, survived a suicide attempt, and was sent to Sachsenhausen, where the Gestapo demanded the death penalty. The Red Army reached the camp before the trial did zdfheute.de.

He was expropriated twice. First by the Nazis in 1944 as a traitor. Then in 1945 by the Soviet-zone land reform as a large landowner de.wikipedia.org. The family withdrew to Nörten-Hardenberg near Göttingen. In 1949 the village was renamed Marxwalde, in honour of Karl Marx, and designated a socialist model village. The castle became a field hospital, then a school, a youth club and a weightlifting training centre, before a lavish restoration from 1978 to 1988 turned it into the cultural academy of the Frankfurt (Oder) district, with prefab apartment blocks put up in front of it schlossneuhardenberg.de. In 1990, before reunification, the municipal council voted to restore the name Neuhardenberg. The urns of the count and his wife were reburied in the family plot behind the Schinkel church in October 1991. The family got the property back in 1996 and sold it in 1997 to the German Savings Banks Association, whose foundation runs it today as a hotel and cultural venue.

A man who risked everything to end a war sleeps a few hundred metres from a hangar where Europe is now, with considerable enthusiasm, preparing for the next one. Hold that thought.

The walk: war graves on the castle forecourt

Leaving the hotel, you cross Schinkelplatz. On the forecourt between the castle and the church, easy to miss because of its low profile, is a Soviet war memorial: a large red star and four gravestones over a lawn maintained with millimetre precision. It commemorates 156 Red Army soldiers xflow.eu.

They died here because Neuhardenberg sits on the edge of the Oderbruch, a few kilometres from the Seelow Heights, where the last German defensive line before Berlin met Zhukov's 1st Belorussian Front on 16 April 1945. Roughly a million men, 14,000 guns, 5,000 armoured vehicles and as many aircraft faced each other; more than 100,000 soldiers of several nations died in the fighting for the Oder bridgeheads and the heights in the winter and spring of 1945 seelowerhoehen.de. The Soviet cemetery and Lev Kerbel's bronze soldier at Seelow were commissioned by Zhukov within days of the fall of Berlin and inaugurated in November 1945 memorialmuseums.org.

The German dead are not here. There was a German soldiers' cemetery in Marxwalde, mostly men who died in the castle's field hospital. In 1977, by a politically motivated decision of the GDR district administration, it was dissolved and the remains moved to the castle park at Wulkow, where doubts about whether the reburial was complete persist to this day kriegsgraeberstaetten.volksbund.de. Even the graves were a matter of ideology.

The airfield: built in secret, twice

Now the venue. The Treaty of Versailles, Article 198, forbade Germany any military air force. In late 1934, a few months before Hitler openly announced the Luftwaffe in March 1935, Count Hardenberg leased the estate's central field to the state for 99 years at 25 Reichsmark per Morgen. Through the winter of 1934/35 around 400 local labourers levelled the ground and 100 Morgen of forest were felled. Unemployment in the village vanished overnight flugplatzmuseumneuhardenberg.de. The site was designated an Einsatzhafen, an operational airfield for wartime only, and in peacetime it was to be left empty and unremarkable (de.wikipedia.org; standard reference: Lang and Materna, Der Flugplatz Neuhardenberg-Marxwalde-Neuhardenberg. Vom geheimen Einsatzhafen des Dritten Reichs zum Regierungsflugplatz der DDR, Berlin 1998, ISBN 3-922912-44-3).

So the grass I am standing on was laid out as a treaty violation, financed with rearmament money that doubled as a jobs programme, on land leased by the same man who would later conspire to kill the head of the regime that paid him. That is three ironies in one lease.

Where flight without a propeller was first proven

The emptiness is precisely why Neuhardenberg mattered. Ernst Heinkel recounts in his memoir Stürmisches Leben that in November 1935 he met a then unknown young man named Wernher von Braun, who was testing a primitive rocket engine burning alcohol and liquid oxygen and wanted an airframe to put it in, under strict secrecy. Heinkel gave him a He 112 fuselage, a team under engineer Walter Künzel, and a test pilot from Rechlin named Erich Warsitz. The first ground runs were at Kummersdorf. Then, because the work needed a remote airfield that nobody was watching, the team moved in March 1937 to Neuhardenberg, "intended only as an operational airfield in case of war and completely deserted in peacetime" flugplatzmuseumneuhardenberg.de.

The first aircraft exploded on the ground during a static run; Warsitz was thrown clear and survived. Heinkel supplied a second He 112. About four weeks later Warsitz took off on piston power, lit the rocket in a glide at roughly 300 km/h and watched the airspeed indicator jump to 400 within seconds, then belly-landed a smoke-filled, burning aircraft from 300 metres because he no longer had the height to bail out. In the summer of 1937 he made the first take-off on rocket power alone, a half circuit with a tail of flame, and landed when the fuel ran out. Heinkel's conclusion: from that day it was finally proven that flight without a propeller would become reality. The field was too small to go further, so von Braun and Warsitz scoured the Baltic coast and settled on a deserted spit of Usedom called Peenemünde flugplatzmuseumneuhardenberg.de.

Heinkel's memoir is, like all memoirs, written by the winner of its own story. But the chain is not in dispute: the He 112 experiments here led to the He 176, the first aircraft designed to fly on liquid-fuel rocket power, which Warsitz flew in June 1939, and Warsitz was also the man in the cockpit of the He 178, the first turbojet aircraft, in August 1939. Peenemünde gave the world the A4/V2. The line from this grass to the ballistic missile and to the Saturn V runs in a straight line.

The festival's day-one and day-two programmes were full of people promising to compress the time from demo to deployment. The historical benchmark for that, set on this field, is brutal: from an explosion on the apron to the first rocket-only take-off in four months, with one pilot, under secrecy, and without any approval from an official body.

Then the war it was built for

On the first day of the war, 1 September 1939, II./KG 27 "Boelcke" moved in from Hannover with thirty He 111 and took off shortly after 17:30 to bomb the Polish army headquarters at Warsaw-Mokotów; thirty PZL P.11 fighters harassed them so hard that some crews dropped outside the target area flugplatzmuseumneuhardenberg.de. From January 1940 the field was a satellite of the multi-engine pilot school at Fürstenwalde, flying Ju 52, Ju 86 and He 111; one He 111 crashed into the castle park on 30 May 1942. In September 1944, I./KG 53 "Legion Condor" arrived from eastern France with obsolete He 111 modified to air-launch V1 flying bombs against England, the last launch in January 1945, at heavy cost. The officers were billeted in Schloss Neuhardenberg. By February 1945 fifty Focke-Wulf and fifty Messerschmitt fighters flew from here against the Soviet Oder crossings, alongside Ju 88D reconnaissance aircraft of 1.(F)/122 de.wikipedia.org. Then the field was abandoned to infantry and paratroopers, and the 5th Shock Army took it in the third week of April 1945. The Red Army immediately used it as a forward airfield for the Berlin operation de.wikipedia.org.

Cruise missiles launched from aircraft against a capital city. Counter-air over a river crossing. Reconnaissance against an advancing army. Replace the He 111 with a Shahed carrier and the Ju 88 with a Shark UAV, and the 1945 order of battle at Neuhardenberg reads like the 2026 exhibitor list.

The Soviets, the GDR, and the first German in space

After the war the Soviet administration had the buildings, including a hangar, demolished, and handed the site to the German authorities. The Nazis had built a secret airfield here; the East German state would do it again. In 1957 Marxwalde became an NVA garrison and the field was extended, the whole project under the strictest secrecy. In March 1959 the GDR government flight squadron, Transportfliegergeschwader 44, moved in; its aircraft were guarded around the clock by armed crews and Stasi units 2 sources. This was Honecker's "Air Force One", flying the Politburo out of a village named after Marx, a few hundred metres from the house of a man who was erased from local memory because a count who resisted Hitler did not fit the narrative zdfheute.de.

In 1960 Jagdfliegergeschwader 8 arrived, and from 1962 it flew the MiG-21. Among its pilots was Sigmund Jähn, who lived and worked in Marxwalde for eighteen years before becoming the first German in space in 1978 reiseland-brandenburg.de. The combination of government jets and interceptors gave this base an unusually dense set of Soviet RSBN and PRMG navigation beacons plus an ICAO-standard ILS, surveillance and precision-approach radar. The military callsign was BERGBAU, mining de.wikipedia.org. From von Braun's rocket plane to a cosmonaut's fighter squadron: the same grass, two regimes, one trajectory.

Then nothing, then solar panels, then this

After 1990 the Bundeswehr's Lufttransportgeschwader 65 used the field until 1993, and again as a helicopter base during the 1997 Oder flood. The village got its name back in 1991. The airfield was privatised in 2001, passed in 2007 to a Danish investor group, tried and failed to become a Ryanair base when Brandenburg refused the licence in favour of Schönefeld, and in 2012 two hundred hectares of the former runway area became what was then Germany's largest solar park, 145 megawatts, 600,000 modules erected in five weeks. A 5 MW grid-balancing battery followed in 2015, in a 350 square metre former hangar de.wikipedia.org. Today the apron doubles as a buffer lot for Tesla, hundreds of new Model Y and Model 3 cars parked among the solar rows, waiting for delivery.

That is the peace dividend in its most literal form: a secret Nazi airfield, a Stasi-guarded Cold War base, turned into a photovoltaic plant, a battery and a car park for electric vehicles. For a decade this place was the cleanest possible symbol of Europe's belief that the military chapter was closed.

And now, in the hangar next to the battery, the European Defense Tech Hub and STIC have gathered founders, investors, public funders, trade lawyers and prime integrators for four days to field the newest military technology as fast as possible. Counter-drone turrets firing compressed air at 3,000 rounds per minute. Wing-in-ground-effect drones descended from Soviet ekranoplans. Export-control seminars explaining which licence you need to demonstrate a UAV in Ukraine. On the apron where Warsitz belly-landed a burning rocket plane in 1937.

The irony, stated plainly

It would be easy to stop at the aesthetic observation: look, defence is back at the airfield that was built for it. The sharper point is about the two ways Europe has failed at this field.

The first failure was 1934. An airfield built in secret to evade a treaty, because the regime that built it intended to use it. The technology developed here was world-changing, and it was developed precisely because it was hidden, unaccountable and unconstrained. The people who did it were brilliant, brave and, by 1945, responsible for the V1 launched from this field and the V2 developed from it.

The second failure was 1990 to 2022. An airfield turned into a solar farm, not because anyone had decided Europe no longer needed to defend itself, but because nobody had decided anything. The peace dividend was not a strategy; it was an absence of one. The count who died in 1958 in the West, expropriated by both dictatorships for resisting one of them, would have recognised the pattern: democracies that do not decide get decided for.

The festival is Europe trying to find the third way, between secrecy without accountability and accountability without capability. Day one was about the budget lines and the political readiness levels. Day two was about the lawyers who make sure a demo abroad is not a crime. Both are, in their dull way, the answer to 1934: you can build fast and still be allowed to. Whether it is also the answer to 1990, whether the money and the urgency survive the next election cycle, is the question this field has seen answered badly twice.

What it means for Swiss aerospace

Three thoughts, for a country that sat out both wars and now exports components into every European programme.

First, the speed the festival keeps invoking has a historical reference point, and it was achieved here under conditions no democracy should want. The honest version of "as fast as possible" is "as fast as the legal and political readiness allows", which is exactly why the sessions on export control and Political Readiness Levels were not side events.

Second, dual-use is not a new idea. The rocket engine tested on this field produced both the V2 and the Saturn V. The question Swiss founders face under neutrality law, whether a capability is defensive, dual or offensive, was already unanswerable in 1937.

Third, memory is itself a strategic asset. A village that was renamed four times, that dissolved one side's war graves and polished the other's, that hid a count who resisted Hitler because he was a count, is a warning about how fast a society can decide to forget. The solar panels on the runway were a form of forgetting too. The drones on the apron should not be.

Day three's flight tests and demonstrations follow in the next report.

Swiss Aerospace Ventures attended the European Defense Tech Festival as an observer. Historical material is drawn from the sources linked in the text, principally the Flugplatzmuseum Neuhardenberg (after local historian Ernst Tietze and Ernst Heinkel's memoir Stürmisches Leben), the Stiftung Schloss Neuhardenberg, the Gedenkstätte Seelower Höhen and the Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge. The standard monograph on the airfield is Dietbert Lang and Horst Materna, Der Flugplatz Neuhardenberg-Marxwalde-Neuhardenberg (Berlin 1998).