Aviation Exhibition

With hot air balloons man was able to overcome gravity and take off from the ground. But "to fly like a bird" still remained for more than a 100 years an unattainable dream of mankind. It was not before 1891 that the inventor Otto Lilienthal succeeded in realizing the first documented flight of a human being through the development of a glider, “an aerial vehicle heavier than air.”

Otto Lilienthal was the first of several other daring pioneers from Mecklenburg-Western Pommerania whose visions and inventiveness made human flight history and are part of the new airport exhibition. On 15 big-sized panels and through many veridically reproduced exhibits, visitors are able to learn interesting details about the technical progress of the past 100 years. In cooperation with the technical museum from the state of Mecklenburg-Western Pommerania, a unique exhibition has been put up that may even encourage those people not interested in aviation to have a closer look into German aviation history.

Otto Lilienthal – his name is known all over the world. The native from Western Pommerania was the first human being who took off into the sky with a flying machine "heavier than air".

Biography - Otto Lilienthal was born on 23 May 1848 in Anklam, in Western Pommerania. After school, he went to Berlin where he became a mechanical engineer at the Royal Technical Academy. In 1883 he founded his own factory for steam boilers and steam engines.

Lilienthal was a multi-talented inventor. Together with his brother Gustav, he manufactured the first stone building blocks for children. An enterprise from Rudolstadt found great commercial success with it afterwards.

In 1891, Lilienthal achieved a distance of 15 meters with his glider through the air. It was the first step of mankind towards flying!

In the following years, he undertook about 2.000 gliding flights with different flying machines. In addition, he wrote his first theories concerning aerodynamics, published the results of his studies, which were invaluable for the construction of airplanes, and developed a training method on how to fly. On 9 August 1896, he suffered a crash with his glider which he did not survive at the Gollenberg near Berlin.

Bioncs
23 years of aerial experiments and studies were necessary before the first human flight took place.

Lilienthal observed the movements of storks and took notes: "One almost gets the impression that the stork seems to have been created for the purpose of serving as a model for human flight."

The aviation pioneer maintained that flying might be possible by modeling his aircraft after birds. He published a summary of his studies in 1889 which he called Bird Flight as a Basis of Aviation. It was the most important aeronautical publication of the 19th century. The movements of birds serve as an example in the search of technical solutions even today.

The Visionary
Lilienthal was also a dreamer with a sense of realism. He was not content to be the first man to fly with a glider but already began to dream that „worldwide air traffic“might be possible. A dream that has become everyday life today.

However, Lilienthal was convinced that the airplane would be the „cultural element which would allow mankind to achieve eternal peace“. Unfortunately he was wrong. Already during World War I (1914-1918), the militant nations used airplanes to launch bombs

Biography
August von Parseval’s airships are the predecessors of the still popular blimps for advertisement of the present.

Parseval was born on 5 February 1861 in Frankenthal. Around 1890, he manufactured kite balloons (so-called Drachenballons) together with Hans Bartsch von Sigsfeld, and which were used for military observation.
After 1901, he was planning a dirigible airship. His work resulted in the construction of a non-rigid airship which made its first flight near Berlin in 1906. It became the prototype of numerous technically sophisticated and powerful airships and layed the foundation for Parseval’s renown reputation as an aeronautical engineer.

Experiments with flying machines
Before World War I, Parseval went to Mecklenburg where he focused on the development of airplanes and seaplanes from 1908 onwards. He wanted to test his flying boat on the lake Plauer See which he thought the ideal site due to its surface of 16 kilometers in length and 5 kilometers in width.
In 1909, Parseval had built an airbase and a flying machine. The tests started in spring of 1910. After the kick-offs from the water surface failed, a starting rail was laid out from the shore into the lake. On the 7th of October the kick-off succeeded thanks to the rail and a take-off wagon.
Nevertheless, Parseval considered the machine a failure and abandoned experiments in February of 1911.
He returned to Berlin where he organized lectures on airships during the Twenties which were unique tkhroughout the world. At university, he was working together with Hans Seehase from Warnemünde, among others. Their project was the „Charlotte without tail“, a glider. Parseval died in Berlin in 1942.

The experimental Site
Parseval said in "Das Aeroplan" in 1908: "In the first year of the tests, they should be conducted above a large surface of water. For this purpose, the machine is equipped with adequate floats. … The pilot will appreciate the fact that he is not in direct danger of his life. …. A large and calm lake where there is enough space for high speed and not such high risk of a disturbing crowd would be most appropriate for the experiments.”

Flight Observations
The Malchower Tageblatt from the 15th of October 1910: "At the beginning, the flying machine glided about 20 meters above the surface of the lake and then rose steadily up to a height of 75 meters. Quickly like an arrow the machine went on its way and thus gave evidence of its reliability and usefulness."

The flying Machine

Frame: welded tubular steel frame
Length: about 14 m
Height: about 5.6 m
Wing: two halves, each consisting of a plain fixed part and a spring main wing
Wingspan: 14 m
Unladen Weight: 1300 kg
Engine: Daimler-Benz, J 4 F, about 300 kg

Speed: 80 – 90 km/h.

At the beginning of the 20th century, “magnificent men in their flying machines” were the amazement of a whole generation. Crowds of young and older admirers hurried to watch air shows of all kinds. One of these spectacular events took place in Heiligendamm in 1912, a spa on the Baltic Sea. It was the first German seaplane competition.

The Era of powered Airplanes
In December 1903 the Wright brothers succeeded in making the first controlled, powered and sustained heavier-than-air human flight in Kitty Hawk (USA). They thus preceded the Frenchman Ferdinand Ferber who finished his powered airplane only in 1906. Contrary to the Americans and the French, the Germans completely missed the beginning of the era of powered airplanes. Around 1910, only about 100 airplanes were built in Germany, whereas there were 1.300 in France. The reason is that up to around 1909, the German efforts focused on the airships of Count Zeppelin.

The Competition
It was not before 1910 that the German military forces began to build a naval aircraft squadron. In order to obtain the necessary number of aero planes the Deutsche Fliegerbund (German Pilots’ Association) with the support of the German army organized a seaplane competition in Heiligendamm from the 29th of August to the 5th of September 1912. The oldest German spa (founded 1793) was at that time the “high society’s favorite spa”, had an appropriate airfield and was considered to be a worthy place for this sort of event. The terms of the competition and the performances required were in accordance with those of the navy. Thus, the airplanes had to be able to take off and to land on the ground as well as on the water. The pilots who wanted to participate in the major competition had to undergo a severe selection process. Thousands of people, among them even some nobles and princes, made their way to the beach of Heiligendamm at the end of August 1912. The steam-driven train called “Molli” almost failed to manage these huge crowds of visitors. At the end of the day, they had lived a spectacular contest but with few winners. Among the 8 aero planes which had registered only 6, 3 monoplanes and 3 biplanes, finally ended up at the start. Only Bruno Büchner was able to achieve the permission to take part in the major competition with his biplane and was awarded a special prize. The Deutsche Luftfahrerzeitschrift (The German Aviation Magazine) described the mistakes which had been made and came to the conclusion: "that a good airplane did not make a good seaplane just because of its floats, and that good seaplanes presented completely different problems."

Successive Contests on the Baltic Sea in 1914 and 1926
Ernst Heinkel, a young aircraft designer who worked for the Albatros factory in Berlin-Johannisthal in 1914, was one of those charged with finding solutions for these new problems. He wanted to participate with his "Hansa-Brandenburg W 1914" at the "Ostseeflug Warnemünde 1914" (Flight over the Baltic See contest in Warnemünde), as wanted some 25 other aircraft pilots. But due to the beginning of World War I. the competition did not take place. The third and eventually successful. "Deutsche Seeflug-Wettbewerb" (German Seaplane Contest) did not take place before 1926, again in Warnemünde. Among Heinkel’s aircraft, there were airplanes by the Luft-Fahrzeug-Gesellschaft (Aircraft Society) Stralsund, by the Rohrbach and the Junkers enterprise. The big winners were the aircrafts of the Ernst Heinkel Flugzeugwerke in Warnemünde.

Fokker and his airplanes
Anthony Fokker, the Dutch aircraft manufacturer and businessman, worked in Schwerin during World War I. He was born in Kediri, Java, on the 6th of April 1890. When he was 20, he came to Germany and built his first aircraft in 1910, the so-called “Fokker Spin“. Two years later, in 1912, he founded his own company in Berlin-Johannisthal, the Fokker Aeroplanbau GmbH. In 1913, he moved it to Schwerin. War brought him great success. The number of his employees rose from 60 at the beginning of World War I. to about 1.800 in 1918. They built about 3.400 airplanes. At the end of the war, Fokker relocated his factory to the Netherlands und afterwards established a branch in the USA. He died on the 23th of December 1939 in New York City. His autobiography has the title "The Flying Dutchman" (1931).


The Fokker Flugzeugwerke (Fokker Aircraft Factory) in Schwerin
Since 1913 both factories of the "Fokker Aeroplanbau mbH" had settled in Schwerin. The pilots’ school was located in Schwerin-Görries and the seaplane factory was situated at the Schweriner See (Lake of Schwerin). The first Fokker aircrafts did not spring from the imagination of the designer but were copies of French models. It was Reinhold Platz who brought in new and original ideas. He designed a cantilever system for aircrafts. The all-metal fuselage made of tubular steel and the wings were carried by one single wooden beam which resulted in an extremely maneuverable aircraft. Both the triplane Dr I and the biplane D VII were built according to this model; And what is more, the designers in Schwerin invented a so-called synchronization gear that allowed the machine gun to be fired through the propeller, which was the reason for the nowadays very doubtful glory of the German pilots “hunting” the so-called “Fokker-fodder”. This was the term the British Parliament used to describe an English aircraft shot down by the Germans.
The “Red Baron” and the Tri-plane Dr I
The Dr I surely was the best known German fighter aircraft of World War I (1914-1918). The aircraft which had been designed by Reinhold Platz entered into service in August of 1917. Its maneuverability was legendary. Up to Mai 1918, the factory in Schwerin built more than 300 airplanes to be used at the war front. Not one original airplane has survived into the present. The reputation of the aircraft was mainly due to its pilot, whose plane was painted red, Manfred von Richthofen, the “Red Baron”. Both aircraft and pilot were so popular that the Dr I can still be seen as a copy, for example in the exposition of the Technische Landesmuseum e. V. (Technical Museum) in Wismar.
Ancient Fokker Factory in Schwerin
The Fokker factory built at Lake Schwerin is still standing at its old site in the Bornhövedstraße 95 and 101. The factory buildings were erected in 1913 in only 8 weeks by the company R. Thiede from Berlin. During the war, they housed the carpenter’s workshop, the boat builder department, the decorators and the stock material. Today, the old wooden buildings are the home of the local fishing association and a ship workshop.

The versatile Inventor
Secure, simple and easy to dismantle – these were the successful principles of the inventor Hans Seehaus who was born in Warnemünde in 1887. His parents were the patrons of the station restaurant. His first inventions were a “splitting device for matches“and a „shaver with a rotating disk”. Vehicles and calculators were his most important inventions. However, aircrafts were his real passion. He designed commercial aircrafts, muscle assisted planes and hang-gliders. He worked in Berlin and Warnemünde and applied for a lot of patents.

The flying Machines
After World War I, Seehase designed the commercial aircraft SAB P III. The plane operated between Berlin, Warnemünde and Kopenhagen for the airlines "Luftverkehr Sablatnig" and "Lloyd Luftverkehr Sablatnig" afterwards. Its characteristics were a comfortable boarding facility and low fuel consumption. A lot of other interesting technical features originated from Seehase’s design office: wings and tail unit could be folded up. The pilot was in full control of some vital technical units. A very important aspect was the fact that the plane could easily be transported by train. In the Twenties, Seehase was the first man to kick off with a parachute from the plain field. On the 23rd of April 1923, he tested his design for the first time on the airfield Tempelhof in Berlin. The patent No. 398388 certified Seehase to be the very first paraglider. Although he was imagining a new sport, he sold his license to the navy for copying. The navy used the interesting new flying vehicle on submarines for observation of the sea. After 1924, the Deutsche Museum (German Museum) in Munich put up a permanent exhibition showing several types of these reliable paragliders capable of carrying a man. Unfortunately, the exhibition and all paragliders were destroyed during World War II. In 1936, Seehase tried a muscle assisted aircraft on a Berlin factory site. His jumps into the air achieved a respectable length of 90 meters. However, he had not much success in developing his design. He was refused permission to take-off on sites with hard surfaces because authorities thought his attempts lacking military interest at the eve of World War II. His odd design, however, is made up of some sophisticated technical solutions. For example, the transmission of the propeller was a crankshaft at right angles to the lay shaft. The propeller transmission was supposed to have an efficiency of 0.975, a remarkable performance. The take-off, according to Seehase himself, should take place on a plane or slightly sloping ground.

A fire at the Origin of Aircraft Manufacturing in Stralsund
An accident was the beginning of aircraft manufacturing in Stralsund. In 1916, the factory of the airline Luftfahrtgesellschaft (LFG) in Berlin Charlottenburg was destroyed by fire. As a consequence, they were looking for a new site and found it in Stralsund where they could use the facilities of a naval basis. The member of the town council welcomed them with pleasure, as such honorable figures as Walter Rathenau (AEG), August von Parvseval and representatives of the Krupp AG from Essen were members of the supervisory board. In October 1917, permission to manufacture aircraft was awarded and production began.

"Max" and "Moritz" – Stralsund’s most popular Aeroplanes
The aircraft designers from Stralsund were very innovative. Between 1919 and 1925, they applied for 13 patents. Up to the middle of the Twenties, they developed more than 30 different types of aircraft. During World War I, they built a fighter single-seater with floats called LG W1, 10 scout seaplanes “Sablatnig SF 5" and 20 scout seaplanes “Friedrichshafen FF 49 C”. After the war, the company had difficulties to survive due to the allied ban on aircraft manufacturing. They switched their production to metal floats and fishing boats. After the ban had been lifted, they started designing aircraft again. The head designer was the retired naval engineer Gotthold Baatz. As early as 1919, they presented two new aircrafts which had been modeled after scout planes, the LFG V 1 “Max” and the LVG V 2 “Moritz”. Both were used to transport visitors to the spas. Shortly after that the „Fromme Helene“followed. All three of them were named after figures from the picture stories of the famous satirical poet Wilhelm Busch. In 1920, they built their first own concept, the commercial flying boat LFG V 3, a wood-frame high-wing monoplane. After several other designs, they presented “Bärbel“, a small biplane flying boat with a wood-frame construction. A particular successful product of the company was the “Strela-See” which turned out to be extremely solid. It served the spa line of the airline Pommern Flugverkehr GmbH for many years. Quite unusual was the construction of a submarine aircraft which could be dismantled in 15 minutes, reassembled in 30 minutes and stored in a small box on the deck of the submarine.

The Decline
In 1926, the aircraft from Stralsund participated in the "Deutschen Seeflug-Wettbewerb" (German seaplane competition) in Warnemünde. However, they were quite unsuccessful. Two of them were even lost. And what is more, both pilots died tragically.
It was the beginning of the decline. They began to have a lack of orders. But necessity is the mother of invention and had already led to the hazardous establishment of an own airline the year before, the „Luftverkehr Pommern GmbH“. The airplanes from Stralsund were supposed to develop air traffic around the Baltic Sea. However in 1926, some planes were declared unsafe and had to be removed from the fleet. Aircraft manufacturing in Stralsund officially ended by the 18th of February 1927,.

The Team
The twins Walter and Siegfried Günter, together with the head designer of the Ernst Heinkel aircraft company in Rostock, Karl Schwärzler, were the most successful team of the German aircraft industry in the 1930s. They were born in 1899 in Keula (Thüringen). In 1920 they began their studies of mechanical engineering in Hanover. In the Twenties, the brothers developed the motor glider „Roter Vogel“ and the monoplane sporting aircraft „Sausewind“ in Hamburg. In 1931, Ernst Heinkel who had founded the Ernst Heinkel aircraft company here in 1922 asked them to come to Warnemünde. From 1933 onwards, they were in charge of the project department of the company. In 1937, Walter died in a car accident. Siegfried kept on working for Ernst Heinkel until his boss’ death. The cooperation was interrupted only once when Siegfried worked as an “expert” in the Soviet Union (1946–1954). He died in Berlin in June of 1969. Their employer described the brothers with the following words: „They complemented each other in a way that was perfect for my business. Siegfried was a calculating technician. Walter tended to be an artist who was more interested in the aesthetics and rapidity of an aircraft. Together hey were able to create the aesthetic aircraft design I had been looking for." They had built the He 64 among others, a two-seater sporting aircraft which won the trip around Europe in 1932, as well as the He 70 which went down as “Heinkel-Blitz” (Heinkel flash) into the history of aviation.

The quickest commercial Aircraft of its Time: the He 70
In the early 1930s, Lufthansa ordered a commercial airliner from Heinkel which was to be quicker than the American passenger and freight aircraft "Orion" (260 km/h). The designer team around the Günter brothers built the He 70 from a mixture of materials, the drop-like fuselage being made of an aluminum alloy called Duralumin, whereas the wings were made of wood. The major aim of the designers was to give it the best possible aerodynamic form. They provided the aircraft with a retractable undercarriage and elliptical wings. Thanks to a revolutionary new progress in metal processing which allowed incorporating the rivets, the surface became extremely smooth. In February 1933, the aircraft manufacturing company Rostocker Flugzeugwerke in Berlin-Tempelhof was ready to present the new airliner, the He 70, to her customer. Ernst Heinkel had built an aircraft that would set a new standard for the future of aircraft manufacturing. It was one of the very first aerodynamically styled airplanes and surpassed the speed of fighter planes of the time. Even before its presentation in Berlin, Heinkel’s head pilot Werner Junck reached a speed of 348,2 km/h above 100 km with a payload of 500 kg.

Summary
The so-called "Heinkel-Blitz" – a technically brilliant performance of the Günter brothers – was above all considered to be the success of the businessman Ernst Heinkel and a proof of the efficiency of its company. “If Heinkel had not made new and higher demands of us one day”, Siegfried Günter said many years later, “we would never have known this big success with the HE 70.

The Founder Claude Dornier (1884–1969)
The young Claude Dornier began his successful career with Count Zeppelin in Friedrichshafen. After 1914, he was at the head of the "Do"-department where aircraft were manufactured. It was transformed into the "Dornier-Metallbau GmbH" in 1922 of which he became the owner in 1932. Dornier manufactured about 80 different types of airplanes, some of which were milestones in the history of aircraft industry. Among them the flying boat Dornier-Wal or the Do X which was powered by 12 engines. The latter landed in the port of Stralsund in 1932 and in the Rostocker Breitling, among others, on its tour of German coastal towns.
Branch in Wismar
Once Hitler came to power in 1933, production of the Dornier Company increased. When the factory at Lake of Constance had reached the end of its cpacity Dornier went and looked for another site, this time on the coast because the naval authorities were highly interested in his seaplanes and flying boats. In November 1933, take-over negotiations began with the Podeaus Company in Wismar, which was under compulsory direction at that time. Wismar offered Dornier a great number of highly skilled workers and engineers as well as suitable factory buildings and direct assess to the sea. The official foundation date of the „Dornier-Werke Wismar GmbH“ was the 1st of December 1933. It became the “Norddeutsche Dornier-Werke GmbH” in 1938. At this site between Haff and Baumfeld they built runways, administration buildings, workshops, a warehouse and a hangar. Heinrich Schulte-Frohlinde became director of the factory which was composed of several departments. At the end of the 1930s, the company had more than 3.000 employees, a number which increased during the war due to forced labor.
Aircraft from the Hanseatic Town
The first airplane to be built in Wismar was the Do 11 whose spare parts came from the factory in Friedrichshafen in the beginning; after this the Do 23, a fighter plane, followed. More efficient manufacturing methods allowed intensified serial production with the goal of having a large number of spare parts ready to be assembled on demand. Due to belt production with regular phases the factory succeeded in manufacturing about 40 airplanes per month. From 1938 onwards, the company started to build the Ju 86 and the He 111 under license and abandoned the production of own concept designs. Between 1941 and 1943, the Do 217 was manufactured in serial production. The end of the war also put an end to aircraft manufacturing. During the war, especially the night of 14 to 15 April 1945, 80% of the factory buildings and facilities were destroyed. The remaining buildings were dismantled following the conference at Potsdam in the Summer 1945. Today, ancient company flats are the only existing witnesses of aircraft manufacturing in Wismar.
In retrospect
A former apprentice of Dornier remembers: „I was one of the 50 apprentices of the second year at the Dornier-Flugzeugwerke. I appreciated the modern and well equipped workshop as an incredibly “noble” educational centre in comparison to the work in the fields. …In August 1939, I became a skilled worker and like the others, I was expected to enroll in the air force to show my gratitude. Most of us accepted. Only few returned uninjured from World War II.”

From Pilot to Employer
Walther Bachmann was born in Stettin in 1889. During World War II, he was a front-line officer with the naval forces and between 1917 and 1919, test pilot at the seaplane test commando (Seeflugzeug-Versuchskommando) in Warnemünde. In 1923, he founded the Aero-Sport GmbH in Warnemünde for the training of pilots where Thea Rasche was the first German female pilot to take the seaplane pilot exam. After 1926, the company also turned to the maintenance and production of land and seaplanes.

Aircraft Manufacturing in Ribnitz
In 1933/34, the German air force took over the airfield in Warnemünde, and Walther Bachmann had to look for a new location. He chose Ribnitz, a small town at the Saaler Bodden, which was not far from Rostock. Due to its nearby airfield Pütnitz the site offered good conditions for the manufacturing and testing of land and sea planes. In 1934 the „Walther- Bachmann-Flugzeugbau KG“ in Ribnitz was founded. Like the aircraft companies in Rostock (Arado and Heinkel) this factory also received generous subventions from the National Socialists in order to serve their own military interests. 2.350 employees were working at the company in 1942. The town profited from a considerable economic rise in the 1930s thanks to the good labor situation and the high wages.

Headquarters for Reparation
Different types of sea planes could be repaired starting 1935 with the completion of the first factory unit; among them the He 42 and the He 59.

Wings, control units and cockpits were produced for the Heinkel and Arado companies in Rostock. The German aviation ministry declared the factory in Ribnitz to be the general headquarters for the most important fighter of the German air force, the He 111. In 1945, jet powered bombers like the Arado Ar 234 were repaired on the site.

War Time
During World War II, a lack of manpower was compensated by forced labor. Mainly French, Russian and Polish workers were assigned in Ribnitz. Especially for the Russians, their days were marked by long, hard working hours and bad nutrition. There was not only a lack of laborers but also of production sites. For this reason, a branch was opened in the nearby small town of Barth. Further factory units were implemented in Horten in Norway and in Fürth, Franconia. Soviet troops which occupied Ribnitz from the 1st of Mai onwards began to dismantle production facilities which had not been destroyed. All buildings were blown up, except the construction office and the administration building. When in the 1950s the Democratic Republic of Germany planned to restart aircraft manufacturing, they even thought about making Ribnitz a production site again. However, this did not happen.

Biographie
Hans von Ohain was a pioneer in the development of steel power units. Von Ohain who was born in Dessau in 1911 was a graduate from the Georg-August-University in Göttingen. After he got his PhD, he went to Rostock-Marienehe in 1936, where he was developing a steel power unit at the Heinkel aircraft company. In 1947, Ohain moved to the USA due to „Operation Paperclip“. The successful engineer applied for 71 patents, 20 of them in the USA. He died in Florida on the 3rd of March 1998. However, he conceived his most important development in Rostock.
The Idea
During a commercial flight from Cologne to Berlin, Ohain, who had just become 20 years old, noticed the noise and the vibrations caused by the piston engine. He was convinced that there could be an airplane motor without such disagreeable side effects and which would be as elegant as the plane itself. He found his solution by replacing the unsteady piston process by a permanent compression, combustion and expansion. At the base of his idea were theoretical calculations about jet power and first tests with models. During his experiments in Göttingen during which he received support from the car mechanic Max Hahn and the professor Robert Pohl, he realized that he needed industrial equipment.
Industrialist wanted.
Professor Pohl sent a recommendation letter for the young Ohain to the successful aircraft company owner Ernst Heinkel whom he asked to help developing the steel jet power unit. From spring of 1936, Ohain was working in Rostock with the “Gundermann Group” which consisted of Wilhelm Gundermann, Max Hahn and other designers. They conceived a new power unit, the steel power unit called HeS 3 B. At the same time, they were building an own commercial plane, the He 178.
The World’s first Turbojetplane made in Rostock
”On Sunday, the 27th of August 1939”, recalled pilot Erich Warsitz, “we were finally ready for take-off. The engine (He 178) was drawn to the start. As Heinkel had developed the new airplane without informing the German Aviation Ministry, we had to take care not to be detected beforehand. ….I slowly accelerated to the maximum..... After a starting distance of 300 m, the plane rapidly picked up speed ... and then it took off…..Carefully, I carefully went two rounds around the airfield. I flew for 6 minutes and had to land eventually. ... The airplane landed without a hop, taxied to a standstill in the correct direction and stopped exactly in front of Dr. Heinkel and his group.” This was the beginning of the era of jet planes!
Raisons of Success
When Ohain was asked to explain how he had managed to develop a successful jet power unit in only 40 months, he stated the following reasons: a small, but highly skilled team, a simple power unit which bore few risks and the good atmosphere in the Heinkel company. At the end, the team from Rostock was quicker than the Englishman Frank Whittle who had already built a test power unit in 1930 and had applied for a patent for a steel power unit. But Whittle received little support in his country. For this reason, the first English jet plane did not take off before 1941.

The Ernst Heinkel Aviation Company – An Important Component of German Military Industry
In 1943, work in 12-hour-shifts was set up in the Heinkel factory in Barth. Women of different ages worked there. All of them were prisoners of a branch of the concentration camp of Ravensbrück. The year before, the company’s management had decided to transfer production capacity from the main factory in Rostock to Barth after heavy allied bomb attacks which had led to a stop of production and had made it necessary to open new production sites in nearby small towns. The largest branch was established in Barth where hangars of the military airfield which had existed since 1936 were transformed into production sites for airplane parts. After 1933, the main factory in Rostock which had been the design centre of the company changed considerably. The focus was shifted from the development of faster airplanes to the mass production of bombers for murderous World War II. In 1943 the big joint-stock company "Ernst Heinkel AG Rostock" with branches in Oranienburg, Wien, Mielec (Poland), among others was founded. Director of the supervisory board was Ernst Heinkel. Mass production needed a lot of manpower. For this reason, the Heinkel corp. led the way to the employment of prisoners from the concentration camps. As early as in March 1942, prisoners from the concentration camp in Sachsenhausen were working in the factory in Oranienburg. In 1944, among the 54.000 employees of the company there were thousands of forced laborers and among them about 10.000 prisoners of concentration camps.
Living Conditions in Barth
Before production started in 1943, the management and the SS was also “responsible” for the factory. The SS was in charge of nutrition, clothing and accommodation for the “employees”, the Heinkel company of labor organization. There were very few civil employees. On the contrary, about 6.000 prisoners, men and women from more than 20 different countries, had to work hard here between 1943 and 1945. The prisoners came from the concentration camps Ravensbrück and Sachsenhausen, among others. They were Jews, political prisoners, Roma and homosexual people. Although they were suffering from malnutrition and extremely difficult working conditions, they were manufacturing wings for the fighter Me 109 and spare parts for the He 111. About 2.000 of them did not survive starvation and physical exploitation. In April 1945, the guards drove the prisoners to their last march to Rostock. Just before the town the guards fled and left the prisoners to themselves. A witness of the time (Mr. T., born 1931) remembers: „My father…. was at the head of four heating plants on the military airfield. We were living in a company flat. ... From there, I could watch the male camp. I remember that the prisoners sometimes had to stand all night long on the grounds, in autumn and in winter. … The members of the SS were beating them. ... The prisoners worked in hangars where they manufactured spare parts and wings for airplanes. … The prisoners had to load them into wagons which brought them to Rostock for assembling. In the wagons, there were also wooden boxes in which they had put the dead from the camp”. After the end of the war, buildings and plants were blown up. It was not before 1956 that the former military airfield came to life again. The German Lufthansa/Interflug of the GRD transformed it into a commercial airport. From 1975, there has been no passenger traffic anymore. Today, the airport is used by the "Ostseeflughafen Stralsund Barth GmbH".

Preliminary History – Journey to the Moon
The physician Hermann Oberth aroused great public interest in rocket launching by publishing an essay on space technology in 1923. Film director Fritz Lang also profited from this new passion when he presented his film “Woman in the Moon” in 1929. In the same year, the Heereswaffenamt (Army Weapons Office) was checking the possibility of military use of liquid rockets and supported the “rocket launching site” Berlin-Tegel where such space enthusiasts like Rudolf Nebel, Hermann Oberth and Klaus Riedel were working. They were members of the so-called “Space Travel Association” which the physics student Wernher von Braun joined in 1930. In 1932, von Braun became a colleague of Walter Dornberger in Kummersdorf near Berlin where the German army had installed the „Experimental Site West“ for rockets.
Army Research Centre Peenemünde
In 1936, Dornberger and von Braun managed to convince German army officers of the multiple possibilities of rockets. They were promised huge subventions if “rocket propulsion could be used for military purposes.” In the same year, construction of the most expensive arms factory of the Third Reich began in Peenemünde. The location on the peninsula of Usedom was perfect to keep the rocket test flights along the coast secret. General Dornberger, the head of the rocket development department, and von Braun, technical director, were the main figures of the centre during the following years. They were assisted by a sworn community of hundreds of scientists and thousands of skilled workers. From 1940, forced labor was increasing. From 1943, even concentration camp prisoners were working on the site.
Take-off into Space
The 3rd of October 1942 was a sunny day. The fourth test model of the long-distance rocket A 4 was sitting ready at test stand 7, test site of the Army Research Centre with its thick forest. At 3.58 p.m., the 14-ton missile was rising above the forest. With supersonic speed it reached an altitude of 84.5 km and hit the Baltic Sea after a distance of 192 km. Jubilations spread among the scientists who felt like approaching the stars. The army was celebrating a weapon of a new dimension.
More Casualties during Construction than through the Missile
Allied bomb attacks destroyed Peenemünde in 1943. The serial production of the so-called “Miracle Weapon V2” was transferred to an underground site near Nordhausen in the Harz region. The concentration camp Mittelbau-Dora was also founded here. Prisoners built the production plant in a very short time and under inhuman conditions and began manufacturing the terrible weapon. Among about 60.000 people from 21 countries who were working there between 1943 and 1945, about 20.000 did not survive. From September 1944 to March 1945, about 3.200 long-distance missiles A4/V2 that killed about 5.000 people, mainly English civilians, were launched. Finally, the army had to admit that the missile which had consumed so many financial means and destroyed so many lives was a complete failure from a military point of view. It was not able to change the course of war. Nazi rocket technology helped to accelerate the development of space rockets after the end of World War II, without which satellites could not be sent into space. It also led the way to intercontinental missiles which can be armed with nuclear warheads and which played a major role during the Cold War. Scientists like von Braun have never criticized the inhuman slavery system which was necessary to build their rockets. No words of excuse have been known up to now.

The Testing Ground of Rechlin
The Training Academy of the Aircraft Headquarters which had been founded in Berlin by the Imperial army command was moved to Rechlin in 1917. The village is situated on the River Müritz and became the test site for the biplane Fokker D VII shortly after its opening. The test flights were flown in order to stop the wings from vibrating. In 1929, the research centre was closed and moved again, this time to Lipezk in the Soviet Union. In 1933, the staff returned to Rechlin. From 1935, the former research centre was called „Testing Ground of the Luftwaffe“, of which there were others in Tarnewitz near Wismar and Peenemünde on the isle of Usedom. Almost all types of land planes together with their accessory parts and ground equipment were tested in Rechlin during the Third Reich (more than 200 different airplanes). Another focus of the site was radar and ionosphere research. In 1943, the testing centre employed about 4.100 people, among them numerous forced laborers and prisoners from the concentration camps. Work on the testing ground was quite dangerous, and more than 300 employees were killed in accidents between 1927 and 1945.

Development of the Ejection Seat
A very special He 280 took off in Lärz near Rechlin in January 1943. It was equipped with a particular security system known as the ejection seat. During the test flight of this new jet power plane the pilot, Mr. Schenk, was supposed to eject from the aircraft. The mechanism worked well, and the pilot landed without harm on the ground. The airplane crashed into the forest. Since 1939, engineers of the Heinkel factory in Rostock had been working on rescue equipment for the crew of high-speed aircrafts. The idea was to find out how to enable the pilot to jump with his parachute as quickly as possible out of his plane. At the beginning, there was a catapult launching track built in Rostock and the seat was tested by itself. Jochen Eisermann was the first pilot to agree to make a try in 1942, which was a very courageous step as no one knew how the human body would react to the unusual strain.

Any Volunteers?
Apparently, there were not sufficient people willing to volunteer for the tests because in 1944, prisoners from the concentration camp in Sachsenhausen were forced to do so. One of them, Otto Seebeger, had the following words put on record: “We arrived… in Rostock. We participated in tests during which we had to sit on a sort of chair. This chair was fixed to a rail and then launched into the sky.” In Rechlin too, prisoners participated in the tests. The men who mainly were German and Polish political prisoners from Sachsenhausen were ejected out of the aircraft by ejection seat. Up to then, there were no casualties. This changed when ambitious doctors who belonged to the staff of the research centre wanted to determine the human body’s capacity to survive in high altitude conditions. At least 70 prisoners from the local concentration camp died during the tests when exposed to low atmospheric pressure in Dachau.

The Testing Ground’s Fate after WW II
On the 2nd of May 1945, the Red Army occupied the test site and continued to use the airfield in Lärz until their withdrawal from Germany in 1994. In 1948 a shipyard was built on the site which specialized on the construction of lifeboats.

Contents and Layout: Technical Museum of Mecklenburg-Western Pommerania

Schwerin

Early Passion to Fly
Ludwig Bölkow was one of the most successful aircraft manufacturers in Germany. He was born in Schwerin on the 30th of June 1912. His father was foreman in the Fokker aviation company in Schwerin. It was at the age of 7 that Bölkow saw an airplane at close quarters for the first time when his father took him to the Schwerin-Görries airfield. They were watching the maiden flight of the Fokker commercial plane F II, which later was used by the Lufthansa, when the boy discovered his enthusiasm for aviation. As a schoolboy, he started to build model planes, later he became a glider pilot. Among others, his take-offs took place in Schwerin-Görries and at the "Großvaterberg" in Krakow (near Güstrow).

Practical Training in Rostock
Until 1932, Bölkow was a student at grammar school in Schwerin. He owed his enterin the aviation industry to good connections. In 1932, Reinhold Platz, a former engineer with Fokker and a friend of his fathers, offered him a practical training in the Ernst Heinkel airplane company in Rostock. It was a lucky time for him because he was able to witness the transition from the braced biplane to the low-wing cantilever monoplane and from the wooden to the mixed and metal construction. He followed the record flights of the He 70, the „Heinkel-Blitz“, and met its designers, the brothers Siegfried and Walter Günter.

Student in Berlin
In 1933, Ludwig Bölkow began to study airplane engineering (aeronautics) at the Technical University in Berlin-Charlottenburg. He graduated in 1938. His dissertation was about a 4-engine high-speed mail plane with a range of 6.000 km (equivalent to the distance Berlin-New York).

His first Employer: Messerschmitt
The innovative engineer began his professional career with the Messerschmitt Corp. in Augsburg in 1939 as an office employee. Later, he became head of the department of high-speed aerodynamics and lead project groups for fighter planes. Among his tasks was the conception of an aerodynamic form of the Me 262, the world’s first jet fighter plane manufactured in serial production.
His Way to the Big Company MBB
After the war, he created the “Engineer’s Office Ludwig Bölkow” in Stuttgart which stood at the beginning of a success story. In 1956, he founded the Bölkow-Entwicklung KG (Bölkow Development Ltd.) which he afterwards moved to Ottobrunn near Munich. Several companies merged in 1968 into the "Messerschmitt Bölkow GmbH", and one year later into the "Messerschmitt-Bölkow-Blohm GmbH" (MBB) – a huge company with 40.000 employees at times. Bölkow and his staff developed civil aircraft, missiles for anti-tank defense, multi-purpose fighter planes and helicopters, like the Bo 105. In 1977, Bölkow left the company.

Bölkow-Foundation for Environmental Technologies
Ludwig Bölkow established a foundation in 1983 which aimed at promoting environmental technologies, among others. He commented: „If we want to meet the obligations which we have towards our following generations, we must be aware of the dangers which … might become life-threatening, and have to start now to switch to new technologies.” Bölkow died in Grünwald on the 25th of July 2003. His foundation is still operating.