A yard on the Warnow

Arado grew out of a hangar on the Warnow river at Warnemünde, where Flugzeugbau Friedrichshafen built seaplanes in the First World War. Versailles shut the yard; the industrialist Hugo Stinnes bought it and built aircraft for export only, hiring Walter Rethel, formerly of Kondor and Fokker, as chief designer. After Stinnes died in 1924 his empire was broken up, and in 1925 the yard passed to the new Arado Handelsgesellschaft, registered on 18 June. The English record describes it as a front for illegal trade in military equipment. In its early years Arado sold only ten or twelve aircraft a year, mostly trainers for the German commercial flying school.

The man who would not join the party

The man who made Arado was Heinrich Lübbe, who took over Walter Hormel’s share at the end of 1925 and is said to have helped Anthony Fokker develop his machine-gun synchroniser in 1914–1915. When the Nazis took power in 1933 his factory became a Luftwaffe supplier, and a vast new works rose at Brandenburg an der Havel from 1934. But the Air Ministry insisted that Lübbe join the Nazi Party. He refused, and in spring 1936 he was forced to sell his shares to the Reich. The company became Arado Flugzeugwerke GmbH, run by Erich Serno and Felix Wagenführ, with Walter Blume, a former Albatros man, as technical chief.

Trainers, fighters and floatplanes

Arado’s bread and butter was training and naval aircraft. The Ar 66 biplane, first flown in 1932, became a standard Luftwaffe trainer and later a night harassment bomber. The Ar 68, one of the first fighters of open rearmament, outflew the Heinkel He 51 in 1934 with Ernst Udet at the controls. The Ar 96 became the Luftwaffe’s standard advanced trainer, with about 2,900 built, and on 28 April 1945 carried Hanna Reitsch and Robert Ritter von Greim out of besieged Berlin. The Ar 196 floatplane equipped every capital ship of the Kriegsmarine and was the only German seaplane to serve throughout the war.

Blitz: the first jet bomber

The aircraft that guaranteed Arado’s place in history was the Ar 234 Blitz. Designed to a 1940 call for a jet reconnaissance aircraft, it waited years for Jumo 004 engines and first flew from Rheine on 30 July 1943. On 2 August 1944 an Ar 234 flew the first reconnaissance mission ever made by a jet. As a bomber it was the world’s first operational jet bomber, attacking the Ludendorff Bridge at Remagen repeatedly in March 1945, and in April 1945 it became the last Luftwaffe aircraft to overfly Britain. Only 210 were built, against plans for 500 a month.

Thirty thousand workers, and the camps

Arado expanded fast and darkly. Branch works opened at Rathenow, Anklam, Babelsberg, Wittenberg and elsewhere, building Heinkel He 177 bombers and Focke-Wulf Fw 190 fighters as well as Arado types. Staff grew from 3,749 in 1935 to a peak of 30,670 on 30 June 1944, more and more of them forced labourers and prisoners; 1,012 women from the Freiberg sub-camp of Flossenbürg, mostly Polish Jews sent from Auschwitz, worked for Arado from August 1944. Production stopped when the Red Army reached Brandenburg in May 1945. The plant was dismantled for reparations and the company was dissolved in 1945, deleted from the commercial register only in 1961.

المصانع

• Warnemünde works · Rostock-Warnemünde — Original yard, ex-Flugzeugbau Friedrichshafen
• Brandenburg-Briest and Neuendorf · Brandenburg an der Havel — Main works from 1934; about 10,000 workers in 1944
• Wittenberg works · Wittenberg — Built Ar 95, Ar 96, Ar 234 and parts for He 111, He 177, Fw 190 and Ju 88
• Rathenow (Heidefeld) · Rathenow — He 177 production until US bombing on 18 April 1944

الناس

• Heinrich Lübbe · owner, 1925–1936 — Forced to sell to the Reich after refusing to join the Nazi Party
• Walter Rethel · chief designer — Ex-Kondor and Fokker; designed the early trainers and Ar 65
• Walter Blume · technical director — Ex-Albatros; replaced Rethel in 1932 and led about 80 projects to 1943
• Émile Dewoitine · research manager — French designer who worked for Arado voluntarily during the war

الأرقام القياسية والأولويات

• Ar 234: world’s first operational turbojet bomber, and first jet reconnaissance mission on 2 August 1944
• Ar 79: class world speed records in 1938 and a 6,303 km non-stop flight Benghazi to Gaya
• Ar 232: described as the world’s first purpose-built combat-zone transport