All hell breaks loose at Kabul Airport. And in the middle of it all, a German officer stood for almost two weeks, fighting against chaos and despair. The fight is hard to win, time is running out. But as long as it goes in Kabul, every life counts. Tens of thousands are trying to flee from the Taliban terrorist militias, who had fallen into the hands of the Afghan capital, defenseless and defenseless. The Taliban defeated the West. NATO suffers the worst defeat in its history, America experiences its second Vietnam. While the world was seeing the pictures of people seeking protection clinging desperately to a US plane taking off, a small group of men and women from Germany had set out to save those who could still be saved in Kabul: employees of the German embassy and People,who had worked as local helpers for the Bundeswehr, German police and development aid organizations, some politicians, human rights activists and journalists.

Peter Carstens

Political correspondent in Berlin

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Commander of the operation: Jens Arlt, general of the paratroopers.

With a few he held out in Afghanistan in order to pave a way out for as many as possible.

It succeeded - at the last minute.

While the last military transporters were being loaded, the suicide bombers' bombs exploded in front of the airport on Thursday.

Operation Kabul was the largest rescue mission in the history of the Bundeswehr.

And the most dangerous.

Long-term consequence of the decline of the world power America and the western alliance

When Arlt learned a good two weeks ago that he and a small force of German paratroopers were actually supposed to take off, the 52-year-old officer was as well prepared as can be. As a young commando soldier, he had participated in difficult missions for years and later led them. During this time, at the end of the 1990s, he was in the Balkans several times and for months. Around Sarajevo, later in Kosovo. Its tasks: capture war criminals, protect the German contingent from attacks, secure the shaky peace. From 2002 the Bundeswehr went to Afghanistan, Arlt was there. The fact that he received an American award for his missions in the Hindu Kush speaks against all the secrecy of sensitive operations.that he was sitting at his desk in Kunduz.

When the high school graduate Arlt joined the armed forces as a conscript in the spring of 1989, he could not have foreseen how fundamentally the world and with it the armed forces would change. With the end of the Cold War, an order that made a distinction between East and West collapsed. What Arlt and his people experienced at Kabul Airport these days is a long-term consequence of the decline of the world power America and the Western alliance. Few expected that in the early 1990s. Many believed that Western values, freedom, democracy and capitalism, had prevailed; some scientists even thought the story had reached a peaceful end.

To sign up for an army at this time, as Arlt did, was out of date. A few years later, compulsory military service was suspended, and the Bundeswehr lost the chance to interest young people in the soldier profession out of duty. In the navy, air force and army there are still many whose interest was aroused in military service and who also felt a kind of obligation to the community, a love of their homeland, a calm patriotism. It is as good for the country as it is for the armed forces.