Originally Posted by GSP flyer
Very enlightening.
On another note, I've read that when traveling to East Berlin, it was always referred to as "Berlin, the Capital of the GDR" or "Democratic Berlin", not as East Berlin.
Yes, if you didn't say "GDR" or plain "Berlin" you were finished ! I guess it was a prototype for the Political Correctness now sweeping the west. There was a famous case, 1970s I think, of a truckload of Collins Road Atlases of Europe, printed in Britain and headed for West Berlin, being stopped on the Autobahn corridor to West Berlin and seized because they had printed "East Germany" !
Back to Interflug, they had a lot of trouble with their aircraft registrations. They started off as DDR- in the 1950s, then changed to D- , the same as West Germany, until the ICAO put their foot down about the confusion and they were all changed again to DM- . Finally in the 1980s someone said "Ooooh, looks like the West German DM currency symbol", and so they were all changed again back to DDR-.