Hamburg’s attack ties bind it to U.S. grief
Published 9:00 pm Friday, September 14, 2001
By Susanna Ray
Herald Writer
HAMBURG, Germany — The citizens of this large, beautiful port city are grieving along with Americans in the wake of Tuesday’s deadly attacks on the United States, but their sorrow is also particularly personal.
Not only did three of the suspected 18 terrorists who hijacked airplanes and intentionally crashed them live and study in Hamburg, but the city has a strong connection to the aerospace industry. The two largest industrial employers here are Lufthansa Technik, with about 12,000 employees, and Airbus’ single-aisle jet final assembly plant, with about 8,000 employees.
And just as Boeing workers have expressed anguish at the thought that terrorists had turned the work of their hands into makeshift bombs, the company’s chief competition also is devastated.
"All of us who are producing aircraft have even more of a relationship to what happened," Manfred Porath, the vice president of final assembly for the A318, A319 and A321 single-aisle jets, said Friday, adding that he couldn’t find the words in any language to describe his feelings.
The company flag is flying at half-mast, and in Porath’s office, next to a poster of the complete Airbus product lineup, was taped a full page from a Hamburg newspaper with a photo and huge headline: "Americans, We Stand By You," in German and English.
Porath had just come from a meeting with Airbus managers discussing the world situation and security, which was beefed up at the Hamburg plant this week.
"Of course, we have American customers, so we need more security," he said.
In fact, an unfinished jet with the United logo painted on its tail stood third in line in the Airbus plant Friday. Two United Airlines planes were among the four hijacked and crashed Tuesday into the World Trade Center in New York, the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., and an empty field in Pennsylvania.
"They were Boeing airplanes, but they could have been Airbus," said Hamburg spokesman Ludwig Rademacher.
Investigations continued Friday as FBI agents and a task force of 100 officers from the Hamburg police department and the German FBI equivalent were "checking out every trace" of the suspected terrorists’ connections here, Rademacher said.
Those connections are especially difficult to stomach because Hamburg has always had a special relationship with New York, he said.
"There’s a friendship between Hamburg and New York, and if you think of this, you’ll know how deeply this has hurt us," Rademacher said. "Not only that thousands of people have been killed, but that these guys who were guests of Hamburg (allegedly) belong to the inner circle of the terrorists. It’s a feeling that our hospitality has been misused. We’re shocked.
"The shock is so deep that we don’t really know what to do."
But city residents did know what to do to show their sympathy and sorrow.
About 25,000 of them showed up to grieve at town square Thursday night, "which is the biggest spontaneous assembly in the past 20 years," Rademacher said. And Friday evening, hundreds were still lined up to sign a condolence book outside the U.S. consulate.
Hamburg, a city of 1.7 million situated on the Elbe River in northern Germany, is home to about 4,000 Americans and numerous American companies, including AOL’s European headquarters.
Herald reporter Susanna Ray is in Germany on a journalism fellowship. She can be reached at ray@heraldnet.com.
