The boiler man of Dessau

Hugo Junkers did not set out to fly. Born in Rheydt in 1859, the son of a cotton-weaving industrialist, he made his first fortune measuring heat. His calorimeter won a gold medal at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, and in 1895 he founded Junkers & Co. in Dessau to build gas water heaters — the boxy wall boilers that still carry the Junkers name in German kitchens today. He became a professor of thermodynamics at Aachen, invented an opposed-piston engine, and was past fifty before aircraft took hold of him. When they did, he brought a boilermaker’s conviction to them: aeroplanes should be made of metal.

The tin donkey

In 1910 Junkers patented the thick, unbraced cantilever wing — an idea that would eventually reshape every aircraft in the sky. In December 1915 his firm flew the J 1, the world’s first practical all-metal aeroplane, built of heavy sheet iron and promptly nicknamed the Blechesel, the tin donkey. It was slow to climb and nobody ordered it, but it worked. Its successors switched to corrugated duralumin, and in 1917 the armoured J.I ground-attack biplane gave front-line infantry crews an aircraft that could shrug off rifle fire. The war ministry, wanting production rather than invention, forced Junkers into an uneasy partnership with Anthony Fokker that lasted until 1919.

The first all-metal airliner

Days before the Treaty of Versailles was signed, on 25 June 1919, the F 13 made its first flight: a four-passenger cabin monoplane, all metal, with a heated cabin and seat belts. It was the world’s first all-metal airliner, and 322 were built. Junkers did not just sell aircraft; he founded and backed airlines to fly them, from Junkers Luftverkehr to Lloyd Aéreo Boliviano. When the Allies banned aircraft production in Germany, he set up a factory at Fili outside Moscow. The corrugated-skin method spread around the world — Andrei Tupolev and William Stout, father of the Ford Trimotor, both built on it. The price was personal: his son Werner died in an F 13 crash in Brazil in 1923.

Bremen and the Bauhaus

The late 1920s were Junkers at full stretch. In April 1928 a W 33 named Bremen made the first successful east-to-west aeroplane crossing of the Atlantic, flown by Hermann Köhl, Baron von Hünefeld and the Irish navigator James Fitzmaurice. In May 1929 a W 34 took the world altitude record to 12,739 metres. That November the four-engined G 38 flew, the largest landplane in the world, with passengers seated inside its enormous wing. On the ground, Junkers helped bring the Bauhaus school of design from Weimar to Dessau in 1925, and his workshops and its architects fed each other ideas.

Expropriated

The Depression broke the empire. In March 1932 the group filed for insolvency, and the boiler business was sold to Robert Bosch to keep the aircraft works alive. Then came 1933. Hermann Göring, whom Junkers had once declined to employ, wanted the Dessau works for rearmament, and an official assessment branded Junkers a pacifist and a democrat. He was forced to hand over his patents and a majority of his shares, banned from his own factories and from Dessau itself, and placed under house arrest in Bavaria. He died on 3 February 1935 — his 76th birthday. His widow sold the remaining shares to the air ministry.

The Stuka and the Ju 88

Under state control the company merged its airframe and engine arms in July 1936 as Junkers Flugzeug- und Motorenwerke, and became one of the pillars of the Luftwaffe. The Ju 87 Stuka, with its gull wings and propeller-driven sirens, became the emblem of Blitzkrieg; around 6,000 were built. The Ju 88 was even more important: 15,183 were produced as bomber, night fighter and reconnaissance aircraft. Junkers also built the Jumo 004, the first jet engine to enter series production, which powered the Messerschmitt Me 262. The home plant at Dessau employed up to about 40,000 people at its peak, and the group’s war output relied heavily on forced labourers and concentration-camp prisoners.

After the fall

Defeat scattered what was left. Dessau fell into the Soviet zone, and Junkers engineers and unfinished jet bomber designs were taken east. In the West a rump company survived, did space research — employing the Austrian rocket theorist Eugen Sänger — and was drawn into Messerschmitt, which took control in 1965. By 1969 the Junkers name had disappeared inside Messerschmitt-Bölkow-Blohm. Yet Tante Ju refused to die: Ju 52s still fly pleasure flights in Switzerland, and in 2015 a new Junkers Flugzeugwerke was founded in Dübendorf, with the founder’s heirs’ blessing, to build new F 13s and A 50s.

Factories

• Dessau main works · Dessau, Saxony-Anhalt — Home plant from 1895; up to about 40,000 employees in the Second World War
• Fili plant · Fili, Moscow, Soviet Union — Opened in the early 1920s to build aircraft beyond the reach of Versailles restrictions
• Bernburg works · Bernburg-Strenzfeld — Opened October 1937; one of many JFM branch plants
• Engine plants · Magdeburg, Köthen, Kassel — Jumo engine branch works opened 1935–1940
• Underground sites · Heimkehle cave and Mittelbau-Dora — Wartime dispersal sites worked by concentration-camp prisoners

People

• Hugo Junkers · founder, engineer — Patented the cantilever thick wing in 1910; expropriated 1933, died 1935
• Hans Reissner · engineer — Collaborated with Junkers at Aachen from 1908; his metal-winged aircraft first drew Junkers into aviation
• Otto Reuter · designer — Designer of the F 13
• Hermann Pohlmann · designer — Designed the W 33, A 50 and Ju 87
• Ernst Zindel · designer — Led design of the Ju 52 and Ju 86 and co-designed the Ju 88
• Heinrich Koppenberg · general director — State-installed head who merged the firms into JFM in 1936
• Hermann Köhl · pilot — Flew the W 33 Bremen across the Atlantic east to west in 1928

Records and firsts

• World’s first practical all-metal aircraft, the J 1, 1915 (j11)
• World’s first all-metal airliner, the F 13, 1919 (j4)
• First east-to-west transatlantic aeroplane crossing, W 33 Bremen, 12–13 April 1928 (j26)
• World altitude record of 12,739 m in a W 34, 26 May 1929 (j6)
• G 38: the largest landplane in the world when it flew in 1929 (j1)
• Jumo 004: the first jet engine in series production, powering the Me 262 (j3)