WWII German underground aircraft factory - photo

[Altair]

WWII German underground aircraft factory.

Fullsize image: https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/h...y_fullsize.jpg



Previously:

WWII Boeing factory disguised as neighborhood - photo
WW2 U-boat pens - photos
WWII Vultee BT-13 Valiant assembly line - photo
C-87 Liberator being assembled in 1942 - photo
Rosie the Riveter working on an aircraft engine - photo
B-25 bomber engine assembly line - photo

[Frank S]

I wonder if that might not have been a salt mine prior to the war.

[mklotz]

Is that the Walpersberg facility?

The fuselages look like Me262's. The nose doesn't look like a place to mount a piston engine but the canopy looks too far forward to my eye for a 262.

[DIYSwede]

Is that the Walpersberg facility?

The fuselages look like Me262's.

Hinterbrühl, Austria factory in April 1945. Heinkel 162s, nicknamed "Der Volksjäger" .
1st flite test less than 6 months before VE day.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinkel_He_162

Where its workers came from:https://www.mauthausen-guides.at/en/...mp-hinterbruhl

[mklotz]

Ah yes, the people's hunter; thanks for that DS. Such a concept...Hitler youth in wooden planes with no armor and poor armament to take on P51s.

I've often thought that the best thing that could have happened would have been for Hitler to die in WWI or succumb to one of the early assassination attempts, but, lacking that, we were, in a sick way, lucky that he was in charge in Germany during the war. Opening the Eastern front was probably the masterstroke that led to his defeat but his refusal to have anything to do with "Jewish physics" was a stroke of luck for us. Just imagine what would have happened if some intelligent strategist, Dönitz perhaps, had been in charge of the war; early R&D of jet aircraft, the trans-Atlantic bomber, the V2, effective guided air-to-air and air-to-surface missiles and who knows what else. Thank goodness a bumbling, mind clouded by hate, Austrian yokel was selected to lead Germany.

[Duke_of_URL]

These underground facilities were usually built by slave labor from concentration camps. Specific to the V1/V2 underground rocket assembly plant at Peenemünde, it's a morbid irony that more died in that facility than in the intended target of London, by nearly 10 to 1.

[Toolmaker51]

As Marv stated "Just imagine..."

Too bad; generations exist ignorant of this history, both the first hand and anecdotal accounts. Ideal example of phrase "details matter".