The German Corporate World - A Brief History

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Hartmut merdon was called in by german chancellor angeler merkle, who had finally weighed in on the country's most embarrassing public project. He reorganized project management into so called sprints - a term that should be familiar to anyone who's ever worked in a start up. After less than one year sitting in his red chair and under pressure from the politicians on the supervisory board, hart mc merdon quit a ceo. Merdon sued the b e r airport company for forty eight million uros of lost revenue caused by the multiple delays. In the end, eir berlin got just two million uros and later went bankrupt. The airport's third

BER has been built twice - the first time incorrectly, the second time incompletely. We hear from Marco, an engineer who worked on site. Employees were busy stealing copper instead of fixing the fire system. Some managers got rich taking bribes. Informers had their coffee poisoned.

Joel and Jöran drive out to the unfinished BER terminal to inspect the too-short escalators that end with stairs. They were just one of 150,000 mistakes discovered in an audit after the 2012 cancellation. Cables were stuffed together in overloaded enclosures - a fire risk. The sprinkler pipes too small to carry the required water. More than 600 fire walls had to be reconstructed. And the builders forgot to install lightning rods.

Even when it's fixed, BER will need another overhaul: "As soon as they open it they have to modernize it," Marco says. "The technology is old standards. New airports are already building in a different way. This is going to be from the beginning an old airport."

But finally, heads are starting to roll... the wrong heads. The BER supervisory board fires the only people who know what's going on, creating new chaos. Then they fire the CEO Rainer Schwarz, but bungle the paperwork. Will any politician ever take responsibility?

How To F#€k Up An Airport is presented by Radio Spaetkauf and RadioEins. Producer: Joel Dullroy Presenters: Joel Dullroy, Maisie Hitchcock, Jöran Mandik and Daniel Stern Music: Ducks! Artwork: Jim Avignon