Locomotives first

Henschel had been building things in Kassel since 1810, when Georg Christian Carl Henschel founded a foundry there. It made its first locomotive in 1848 and by the 20th century was Germany’s largest locomotive builder; it would later be the sole maker of the Tiger I tank. In the early 1930s it tried to buy its way into aviation through talks with Junkers, Arado, BFW and Rohrbach, all of which failed. Then Erhard Milch, state secretary at the new Air Ministry, backed a fresh start, and on 30 March 1933 the Henschel Flugzeug-Werke AG was founded with Oscar Robert Henschel as chairman and Walter Hormel as director.

A factory on a confiscated estate

The company began in rented premises at Johannisthal and in the halls of the body-builder Ambi-Budd at Schönefeld, south of Berlin. Its first designs, the Hs 121 and Hs 125 trainers, stayed prototypes. On 15 October 1934 Henschel took over land at Schönefeld from the estate of Karl Wrede, expropriated in the name of national defence, and by 1936 had built its main works there. Its first production job was 24 Dornier Do 23 bombers under licence, and licence work for Focke-Wulf, Dornier and Junkers went on to provide much of its turnover. A huge training school for metal aircraft workers opened at Schönefeld in 1937.

Stukas, spotters and tank-busters

Henschel’s own aircraft were built for close support of the army. The Hs 123 biplane dive bomber first flew on 1 April 1935, was demonstrated by Ernst Udet that May, served with the Condor Legion in Spain and fought from Poland to Russia; around 265 were built. The parasol-winged Hs 126 reconnaissance aircraft entered production at Johannisthal in 1938 and served until 1943. The twin-engined Hs 129, first flown on 29 May 1939, was a flying tank-buster with an armoured cockpit; it came out overweight and underpowered and was re-engined with captured French Gnome-Rhône radials.

Missiles and Zuse’s computers

From 1940 Henschel’s Department F worked on guided weapons, and it made history. The Hs 293 rocket-boosted glide bomb, radio-guided from its launch aircraft, was the first operational anti-ship missile: on 25 August 1943 one struck the sloop HMS Bideford, the first successful attack by a guided missile, and on 26 November another sank the troopship HMT Rohna, killing more than 1,000. Over 1,000 were built. To speed Hs 293 production, the engineer Konrad Zuse built for Henschel the HS-1, an electromechanical digital computer, and later the HS-2, which included what has been described as the first analogue-to-digital converter.

Forced labour and a new airport

By 1944 Henschel had eight plants in Berlin and Kassel with 17,100 workers, and increasingly they were forced labourers. A concentration-camp sub-camp was built inside the Schönefeld works, first for some 400 women from Ravensbrück; by December 1944 about 1,100 prisoners, many of them Hungarian Jewish women, made more than 93 per cent of the company’s aircraft parts, working 12 to 17 hours a day, and about 30 died daily. The Red Army took the plant on 22 April 1945 and the company was dissolved on 21 October 1945. Its land became Schönefeld Airport, now Berlin Brandenburg Airport, where an exhibition on its Nazi history opened in 2021.

المصانع

• Schönefeld works · Schönefeld, Berlin — Main works from 1934–1936; now Berlin Brandenburg Airport
• Johannisthal Werk 2 · Berlin-Johannisthal — Hs 126 production from 1938
• Henschel Flugmotorenbau, Altenbauna · Baunatal, near Kassel — Aero-engine plant founded 1936; later the Volkswagen Kassel plant

الناس

• Oscar Robert Henschel · chairman — Head of Henschel & Sohn and chairman of the aircraft company
• Walter Hormel · managing director — Handed the Schönefeld works to the Red Army in April 1945
• Konrad Zuse · engineer — Built the HS-1 and HS-2 computers for Hs 293 production

الأرقام القياسية والأولويات

• Hs 293: first operational anti-ship missile and first successful guided-missile attack, 25 August 1943
• HS-2: described as containing the first analogue-to-digital converter