Specialists from the airborne brigade, commandos, paramedics and military machines from Air Transport Wing 62 had been ready for weeks.
They were planned as a reserve for the last days of the German Afghanistan mission in Mazar-i-Sharif in case there were still attacks on leaving Camp Marmal in the north of the country.
Peter Carstens
Political correspondent in Berlin
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This situation is called “in extremis” in the military. But what then came was more extreme than anything that had been required of the soldiers up until then. Because all of a sudden the Taliban fighters seized power in mid-August. The Afghan army did not fight, the government fled abroad, and Kabul fell within hours. Not only hundreds of thousands of Afghans were frightened, but also tens of thousands of foreigners, diplomats, secret agents, contractors and development workers. There was no stopping it, everyone wanted out.
All of them, with the exception of a few hundred men and women, including around two hundred German soldiers.
They flew to Kabul on August 16 instead of back to Germany.
In a situation where it was unclear whether the Taliban would immediately start killing numerous people in the Afghan capital, or whether they were not planning to do so, as they have been asserting so far.
The insurgents tortured and killed the president in the last case in Kabul in 1996 and hung his blood-covered body at a crossroads.
In the last few days before they came to power, the Taliban had also deliberately murdered their opponents in Kabul.
Videos were circulating on the Internet that apparently showed how a special unit of the Afghan army had surrendered to them, how they laid down their arms, took off their protective vests - and then was slaughtered by the Islamists. And since it had just turned out to be illusory in Afghanistan not to expect the worst, the Bundeswehr Operations Command now reckoned with it.
When the paratroopers and the following forces arrived via Kabul on Monday a week and a half ago, dramatic scenes had taken place on the airport tarmac shortly beforehand. The Americans, the NATO supremacy, had lost control of the last square kilometer they were still defending in Afghanistan. Those wishing to leave the city stormed the civil airport building and the airfield was occupied. Afghans clung to a US transport machine "Globemaster" that was taking off. Pictures later showed how they fell to their death from a great height.
When the first A400M circled over Kabul on the evening of August 16 with the commander of the expeditionary force, Brigadier General Jens Arlt, and about 100 paratroopers on board, he was refused permission to land and had to turn back. A second military transport arrived and stayed until an opportunity arose to half-risk, half-force the landing. With no runway lighting and on a very short, halfway cleared section, the machine came down.
The stay of the first German aircraft in Kabul lasted less than an hour. The soldiers quickly disembarked, boxes with weapons, ammunition and other material were unloaded, and then it was back on the tarmac. At 11.41 p.m. German time, shortly after two in Tashkent, the operational command reported the return of the aircraft to the public. “Those to be protected” had been flown out, it was said tightly.