There have been commercial passenger flights to Antarctica before, so all this stuff about "The First" in Bild is a bit inaccurate, but they have normally operated out of Punta Arenas in Chile to Patriot Hills in Antarctica. In the 1990s a Canadian operator ran a DC-6 on this route which features in Michael Palin's TV series "Pole to Pole". In more recent times a Ukrainian (I believe) operated Il-76 has done the route, so it's not even the first jet service. The DC-6 was shown to use substantial reverse pitch on the props on landing to get round the friction problem.
I believed that such depreciated equipment was used because they were unable to get sensibly-priced hull insurance for the Antarctic landings, which are presumably on an unlicenced runway, same as freight operations in Northern Alaska which also continue to use the DC-6. Wonder how the Australian operation differs in this respect