Were there German Pseudo Projects ?

[Jemiba]

Trigger for this thread was a post by newsdeskdan here ,
mentioning that there is at least one proven case, that a project by a German aircraft manufacturer was started, or
pursued, not with the intention to produce flyable hardware, but to keep the staff.
Is this otherwise just a myth, or may have been there other cases, but without mention in any document ?
Dan wrote, that those two engineers hardly would have been endangered by being sent to the front, as being
to important for their company. That's probably right, though their ages of 46 and 47 years may not have been
enough protection during the last years of the war. In October 1944, the "Volkssturm" was established, to provide
every man fit to bear arms for the defence of the "Reich". And sending them to the Eastern Front was hardly necessary
during the closing stages of the war, as the front was coming to them.
My Granny once told me a story about one of her brothers, who was a trained paramedic and working in a hospital nearby
Berlin. Due to the shortage of doctors, he more and more had been driven into that field and made treatments, he hadn't
learned by real studies, but simply from the docs, he was assisting. So he become a real important asset to that hospital,
though the legal side may have been doubtful even back then. That worked well, until a transport of wounded SS men
arrived, unfortunately, when he and a colleague were standing in the open, smoking and chatting.
The leader of that transport, regarding them as "not being busy" and additionally pissed, because they weren't wearing a
uniform under their gowns, simply drafted them and a short and hasty note was all, that was seen of him after this .
No, I have no prove for that story, my Granny not, too, beside that note, but being save, even in an "important" job, was
by no means taken for granted.
And even if a designer is left at his drawing board, without the help of draftsmen, or others doing calculations and detail work
and so on, his work may be not very efficient.

Clues and opinions welcome !
And if someone has a better idea for the title ... ?

 

[galgot]

Hi Jemima, Thks for starting this thread, and sorry for drifting the daimler-Benz thread on that subject
First time I heard about that was when working on an illustration for a article on the Me 264 for the Fana de l'Aviation, that was long ago.
Was it when talking with the author, can't remember, but anyway when questioning about the length of the program , it was mentioned to me that every possible ways were used to lengthen the program (Messerschmitt lobbying) , this to keep the peoples working on it in the company. Not only engineers, but draftsmen, specialized workers. It was part because Messerschmitt wanted to keep them at hand, and the program was the justification for that.
But I think it would be very difficult to find a evidence from the time for that anyway, simply cause it was certainly too dangerous to mention it .
Now , I don't know if that is mentioned in the article in question (would have to find it...).

As for the title, I think some started as real projects (like the Me 264) then drifted to things to keep some team "busy" in view of the nazis.
But some are so... crazy concepts , that one can ask itself if the engineers getting these ideas out in 1944, at the time Germany situation was already rapidly degrading, were really serious, or just trying to save their a...ses, and justify their places, still knowing these concepts were unrealizable.
And moreover them knowing the nazis staff love for "wunderwaffen". IMHO...

Note, this kind of over growing the possibilities of a project or concept in the eye of a incompetent "client" to keep a team working or just pumping state $$, also existed (and surely exist nowaday, see the iranian aircraft "industry") in many other fields.

 

[newsdeskdan]

The Me 264 certainly had an incredibly long life as a project. Having been completely cancelled at one point it did come back and kept recurring almost until the end of the war. But exactly how many men were employed on it at any one time is hard to work out. In fact, the Messerschmitt company itself seems to have enjoyed a certain degree of immunity from official scrutiny, with the RLM mistrusting what its official spokesmen said due to incorrect information being given and promises broken. I have a quote somewhere from Goering ordering that no-one from the RLM was to speak to any Messerschmitt representative without a qualified stenographer present. Messerschmitt's own friendship with Hitler - not to mention his, ahem, strong contacts within the banking world - might have gone some way to giving his workers immunity from the SS. As for the other companies, it is incredibly hard to say whether particular projects might have been inventions purely to keep the draft at bay.
As a baseline, I would suggest that only projects conceived or perpetuated beyond August 1944 could possibly quality as 'pseudo projects'. Projects arising and being approved or rejected before Operation Cobra (US breakout from Normandy) were probably 'real'. I think the likelihood of qualified German aircraft designers and engineers being drafted must have been quite slim. Does that seem like an acceptable line to draw in the sand?
Furthermore, we can presumably agree that the Volksjaeger and associated projects were 'real' since every effort was made to actually build the type and get it into frontline service. That leaves things like Lippisch's P 13 (remember those students working on the DM-1?), Arado's E 381 Kleinstjaeger, the revived Ju 287, the Horten XVIII, Messerschmitt's P 1107 (the Grossbombers), and perhaps even the numerous 1-TL-Jaegers, 2-TL-Jaegers and Hochleistungsjaegers. Was there a point at which they went from being genuine prospects for the next-generation Luftwaffe to busywork pseudo projects?

 

[Rickshaw]

Mmmm, wasn't Willy Messerschmidt relieved from being a director of his own company in IIRC 1941 or 1942? So, after that date, he wouldn't have had any real influence. He wasn't popular with the Nazi Hierarchy having made many promises and failing to deliver on many of them as well.

 

[galgot]

Was Messerscmitt as the company, dunno if Willy itself was involved here.

 

[sienar]

One thing to keep in mind is that the RLM lost most of its power to the Jagerstab, but one of the few things it still exercised some degree of control over was R&D. Part of the explosion in types seen towards the end of the war may have being Goering and Co doing pretty much the only thing they could still do at that point and perhaps justifying their continued existence in the process.

There was also a recognition that man power demands coming out of some companies were exaggerated. The Jagerstab launched investigations into manpower requests, threatening prosecution for those found to be grossly overestimating. Messerschmitt in particular was noted for doing this to the point that Milch supposedly said that the only way to stop these inflated demands was to throw the entirety of Mess AG into prison.

Not that the manufacturers can be entirely blamed for this behavior. They had to deal with virtually every manpower request being only partially fulfilled, so it makes a degree of sense to ask for, say 5000 when you know that you'll probably only get half that number.

 

[galgot]

Yeah, for some we could talk about some "Vaporwaffen" …
As far as I know (not much…) the peoples working on these projects were engineers, i mean people knowing how to "calculate" a plane and doing the math. So they thought maybe it could work at least in theory, even if in their mind they knew it would could never being build given the situation. More like research projects.

 

[lastdingo]

Few of the very late projects seemed to have been started by official tenders (the 1000x1000x1000 bomber being an example of such tenders). Unofficial projects could not have helped much to avoid infantry duty.

A Pseudo project was the He 113, for sure (for propaganda / deception).

 

[newsdeskdan]

Mmmm, wasn't Willy Messerschmidt relieved from being a director of his own company in IIRC 1941 or 1942? So, after that date, he wouldn't have had any real influence. He wasn't popular with the Nazi Hierarchy having made many promises and failing to deliver on many of them as well.

You might well have thought that this would be the case, but Messerschmitt was actually largely untouchable and wasn't out of favour for long. The quite remarkable truth is that the biggest financial stakeholder in Messerschmitt AG during the war was Lilly von Michel-Raulino (aka The Baroness - I'm not kidding), wife of wealthy entrepreneur Otto Stromeyer (until they divorced in 1939) and one of the wealthiest women in Germany in her own right. And openly Willy Messerschmitt's girlfriend from 1928 onwards, despite her marriage to Otto. Thanks to her extensive family connections to banking etc. which the Nazis relied on, with her by his side Messerschmitt could do no wrong, even when he did.

 

[galgot]

Charming peoples...
Btw seems she was really a Baroness as her full name sometime is Lilly Freiin von Michel-Raulino.

 

[Hood]

A Pseudo project was the He 113, for sure (for propaganda / deception).

Not really a project as such, just a repainted He-100. In fact you could argue it was the most effective Luftwaffe deception of the war, a few cans of paint and some blurb for the picture captions and Allied pilots were still reporting tangling with it over the Channel in 1944.

All designers doodle and make studies of the latest technology. Sidney Camm's team was messing around with stuff like the P.1030 to see where the next generation was going. The only difference is, their sketches remained at the back of the cupboard as historical curiosities and not widely known until books like BSP came out in the 2000s. The German companies were raided for all info and any unofficial project was swept up and evaluated by the interrogators and they all got an air of legitimacy that was misplaced.

As for the designers working right up until the end of the war, I guess in situations like that you block out the bigger picture and focus on your day-to-day work to earn your Marks and maintain a semblance of normal life as all around you slowly crumbles.

 

[JFC Fuller]

This is a very interesting thread challenging a long held and oft-repeated assumption. I don't pretend to have an answer but a few observations:

The Aircraft R&D apparatus of the third Reich was a vast and sprawling affair, arguably the largest in the world at the time, and it was particularly blessed with high-speed wind tunnels and an attitude which seemed to emphasise continuous product improvement over production efficiency. This enormous edifice was, certainly by late 1944, controlled by a loose and incoherent collection of committees, organisations and individuals. This combination of scale and insufficient command and control seems to be the main reason for the proliferation of so many designs in the late-war period.

As Hood alluded to the sense of design proliferation is enhanced by the entire thing have been opened up to the world in 1945 in a way that has never occurred anywhere else before. We got to see everything at the moment in time that Germany collapsed.

I suspect that some team leaders were attempting to protect their staff and their intellectual property with a view to using it as leverage (or just continuing it post war), this certainly seems to have been the case with von Braun, though I have never seen any genuine evidence to support the idea that there was "make-work" underway. Rather the entire Third Reich from Hitler down seems to have carried on functioning as if the war would last for years (whether anyone believed that or not). There were certainly odd decisions, one in particular has always struck me: the decision to pursue the Ju-287 over the He-343 and then the even more bizarre decision to restart the Ju-287 programme in early 1945. The He-343 offered a low risk solution to a relatively cheap and effective jet bomber whereas the Ju-287 was a much more expensive and risky affair. In hindsight the FSW seems to have been a technological dead-end, at least with pre-composite technology, and the Junkers team themselves seem to have abandoned it fairly quickly (EF-132 and then 150 and 152).

The tale of the Ju-287 also speaks to something else that seems to have been an issue. Much of the advanced aerodynamic and propulsion work performed by the Germans seems to have been making its way to production at a lower level of maturity than was happening outside Germany. Many of those aerodynamic concepts, when first tried, subsequently required significant refinement before making their way into western designs.

 

[galgot]

...
I suspect that some team leaders were attempting to protect their staff and their intellectual property with a view to using it as leverage (or just continuing it post war), this certainly seems to have been the case with von Braun, though I have never seen any genuine evidence to support the idea that there was "make-work" underway. ...

not related to aerospace, but still related in a way of "how to save your skin when you’ve been deep in it", this reminds me also the Gehlen organisation, and how it was said Reinhard Gehlen overgrown the infos and network he had in the east to get large funds and support from the OSS after the war.
Indeed, some well placed peoples where thinking of how to do after the disaster.

“The Agency loved Gehlen because he fed us what we wanted to hear. We used his stuff constantly, and we fed it to everyone else—the Pentagon, the White House, the newspapers. They loved it, too. But it was hyped-up Russian bogeyman junk, and it did a lot of damage to this country.”

from:
https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/daily/military-history/cold-war-spies-general-reinhard-gehlen/

Makes me think, in the same way, German aero industry fed the 3rd reich admins, organisations and bureaucraty with what they wanted, lots of super weapons designs dreams.

 

[airman]

An other is Heinkel 211 " Albatross " that is what if model made in whatifmodellers.com .
In the history i remember https://www.wwiivehicles.com/germany/aircraft/fighters/focke-wulf-fw-198-fighter.asp

 

[Jemiba]

Just to remember: In this thread, we aren't talking about wrong identified , or even
"fake" aircraft, as listed here https://www.secretprojects.co.uk/forum/index.php/topic,26358.0.html

The theme are designs or projects, that were either "planned" just with the intention to
keep the design staff busy, or at least projects, that were stalled and so kept alive beyond
their "natural" death.

 

[fabulousfour]

Jens, would you mind asking the same question at the Flugzeugforum?

Would love to see the answers of the experts there, e.g. AGOScheer and Junkers-Peter.

Greets,
Robert (aka JohnSilver over there )

see PM

 

[GTX]

An other is Heinkel 211 " Albatross " that is what if model made in whatifmodellers.com .

Guilty as chawed for that one - it is pure fiction on my part.