KEY POINTS:
For a cosmetics billionaire, New York socialite and art collector who is also one of the world's most influential Jewish philanthropists, rescuing Adolf Hitler's favourite Berlin airport for posterity might seem an unlikely goal.
But this week Ronald Lauder, the second son of the beauty legend Estee Lauder,
who died in 2004, was heading a last-ditch attempt to prevent the closing of Berlin's Nazi-built Tempelhof Airport with proposals for a €350 million ($652 million) plan to turn the vast relic of Fascist architecture into a luxury fly-in beauty clinic for Europe's super-rich.
With its towering vault-like ceilings and giant 900m curved stone terminal building, Tempelhof was once Europe's largest airport and a mammoth, if not awe-inspiring, status symbol for Hitler's Third Reich.
Its place in history was assured when it served as the crucial link to West Berlin in the Western Allies' Berlin Airlift of 1948. Its almost inhuman scale prompted Norman Foster, the British architect, to dub it "the mother of all airports".
"You cannot simply abandon something like this," Lord Foster, who designed terminals at Stansted Airport and the new Hong King airport, noted in a recent interview with the Suddeutscher Zeitung newspaper.
"It would be a loss not only for Berlin and Germany but for the entire world."
However, Berlin's cash-strapped city government has announced plans to close the historic yet loss-making complex located near the centre of the German capital next year. It wants to move all flights to a new international airport in the southeast of the city when it is completed in 2011.
Lauder, whose fortune was estimated by Forbes magazine last year at US$2.7 billion ($3.8 billion), is leading a team of US investors in what appeared to be a final bid to save Tempelhof.
In an appeal published in two of Germany's mass circulation newspapers he accused the country's politicians and decision-makers of allowing "short-sighted and one-sided interests to prevail over vision", because of their refusal to keep the airport open.
"It is becoming increasingly frustrating to have to fight for a project which anywhere else, particularly outside Germany, would meet with enthusiastic approval," he added.
In lobbying Berlin, Lauder has pointed to the success of secondary and tertiary airports in other capitals.
"Examples like London show that such airports have a great future," he argued in reference to the British capital's City Airport, which opened in 1987.
It is a dispute that is pitting the city of Berlin against a man who is known not just for his great wealth, but also for his success in wielding formidable civic influence.
He is a collector of paintings for sure. Most famously he recently spent US$135 million - a record at the time - on a portrait by Gustav Klimt, which is now on display in his own art museum, the Neue Galerie, in Manhattan.
He is also a collector of political and intellectual causes.
Once the US Ambassador to Austria, who boycotted the inauguration of Kurt Waldheim as the Austrian President because of the taint of Nazism in his past, and a former candidate for Mayor of New York City, Lauder has never shied from a fight.
If he has set his sights on the airport, he will not rest until he gets it.
Under Lauder's proposals, Tempelhof would be allowed to keep its runways and principle buildings while being transformed into a fly-in health spa and beauty clinic, complete with a research centre and hotel for patients from abroad.
The US investment group, which is behind the project, estimates that the complex would provide some 1000 new jobs for Berlin. That would be good news for a city with a 17 per cent jobless rate. The project has the backing also of some German corporate heavyweights.
- INDEPENDENT
