Staaken - History

History

First mentioned in a 1273 deed as Stakene the former village became a part of Berlin by the Greater Berlin Act of 1920. The development of the area started with the construction of the Staaken garden city by architect Paul Schmitthenner in 1914.

At the beginning of World War I the Luftschiffbau Zeppelin company acquired large estates in Staaken, where from 1915 on it manufactured zeppelin airships and the series of one-off Riesenflugzeug "giant" multi-engined bombers, among the largest of their day anywhere, culminating in the small series of R.VI biplane strategic bombers built by the firm. In 1919 the regulations of the Treaty of Versailles finished the production and the area was transformed into an airfield. There had been regular Zeppelin flights to Friedrichshafen and even to London from 1919 on, though in the following years most of the aviation moved to Tempelhof Airport. The former zeppelin manufacturing halls were turned into the Staaken Studios and used as the location for various film productions, e.g. parts of Fritz Lang's Metropolis. In 1929 the estate was sold to the City of Berlin, while parts of the airport were still used by the Deutsche Luft Hansa for flight training and maintenance purposes. In Albrechtshof the Demag (Deutsche Maschinenfabrik AG) built Panther tanks during World War II using forced labour of over 2,500 prisoners held in the nearby Falkenhagen labour camp, a subcamp of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp.