The boy and the glider

Willy Messerschmitt was born in Frankfurt am Main on 26 June 1898 and grew up in Bamberg, where his parents ran a wine business. At 13 he befriended Friedrich Harth, a pioneer of motorless flight, and the pair built gliders together; among them the S8 of 1921. Messerschmitt studied engineering in Munich, and while still a student set up his own small aircraft company. In 1923 the partnership with Harth ended, the older man judging some of the young designer’s ideas dangerously unstable. Messerschmitt went his own way with light sports aircraft, the M 17 and M 18 among them.

Two crashes and a powerful enemy

In 1927 the Bavarian government encouraged a merger between Messerschmitt’s firm and the Bayerische Flugzeugwerke in Augsburg, and he became its chief designer. Then came the M 20 airliner. On its maiden flight on 26 February 1928 the fabric stripped from part of a wing; the pilot, Hans Hackmack, bailed out too low and was killed. Hackmack was a close friend of Erhard Milch, head of Luft Hansa, and when a second M 20 crashed near Dresden, Milch cancelled every contract with Messerschmitt and forced BFW into bankruptcy in 1931. Rescue came from Lilly Stromeyer, born Baroness von Michel-Raulino of a Bamberg tobacco dynasty, whose guarantees ran into the millions.

The fighter that would not stop

BFW revived in 1933, though Milch blocked Messerschmitt from owning it until 1938, and built the Bf 108 tourer, which the aviator Elly Beinhorn named Taifun. Its clean, all-metal monoplane layout fed straight into a fighter. The Bf 109 first flew on 29 May 1935 at Augsburg-Haunstetten, ironically on a British Rolls-Royce Kestrel engine because the German one was not ready. It went on to serve throughout the war and long after, and with some 34,000 built it is the most-produced fighter aircraft in history. Erich Hartmann, the highest-scoring fighter pilot of all time, scored all 352 of his victories in it. Czechoslovakia built derivatives until 1948 and Spain until 1958.

Faster than anyone

Messerschmitt chased speed as a matter of prestige. On 11 November 1937 a modified Bf 109 set a world speed record for piston-engined landplanes at 610.95 km/h. On 26 April 1939 Fritz Wendel flew the Me 209 V1 to almost 756 km/h, an absolute record for propeller aircraft that stood officially for 30 years, until August 1969. Then, on 2 October 1941, Heini Dittmar took the rocket-powered Me 163A to 1,004.5 km/h, the first piloted aircraft to pass 1,000 km/h in level flight — a feat kept secret by wartime censorship. On 11 July 1938 BFW was renamed Messerschmitt AG, and new designs took the prefix Me.

Jets, rockets and giants

The wartime catalogue ranged from brilliant to disastrous. The twin-engined Bf 110 was mauled as a day escort in 1940 but became the Luftwaffe’s principal night fighter. The Me 210 was so unstable that production was halted in April 1942. The Me 321 glider was so heavy it needed three Bf 110s towing in formation; its powered cousin, the six-engined Me 323 Gigant, could carry 130 men. And the Me 262, which flew on jet power alone on 18 July 1942, became the world’s first operational jet fighter, reaching squadrons in 1944. Only 1,430 were built, too few and too late.

Slave labour

There is no colourful way to tell the next part. Like much of German industry, Messerschmitt relied heavily on slave labour. Concentration-camp prisoners built fuselages and components in tunnel factories in Austria, among them those of the Gusen camps near Mauthausen, where tens of thousands of inmates of more than twenty nationalities died. After the war Willy Messerschmitt was held by the Allies, and in 1948 a denazification tribunal classed him as a Mitläufer, a fellow traveller, a verdict that kept him from aircraft work for a time.

Bubble cars and back to the sky

Germany was barred from building aircraft for a decade, so Messerschmitt built what it could: prefabricated houses, sewing machines, irons, even Vespa scooters under licence from 1955 to 1957. Its most famous postwar product was a bubble car. Fritz Fend, a former aircraft engineer, brought his three-wheeled microcar to Messerschmitt in 1952, and the KR175 and KR200 Kabinenroller, steered with a handlebar and entered through a canopy, looked like fighter cockpits on wheels. Willy himself designed the HA-200 jet trainer in Spain and the HA-300 supersonic fighter for Egypt. From 1956 Messerschmitt could build aircraft again, and on 6 June 1968 it merged with Bölkow; in May 1969 Hamburger Flugzeugbau joined to form MBB.

工厂

• Augsburg-Haunstetten · Augsburg, Bavaria — BFW works from 1926 and Messerschmitt headquarters; Bf 109 first flight
• Regensburg · Regensburg, Bavaria — Wartime production centre; postwar home of the Kabinenroller
• Obertraubling · near Regensburg, Bavaria — Wartime production site
• Oberammergau · Bavaria — Underground development facility
• Gusen tunnel factories · near Mauthausen, Austria — Concentration-camp slave labour used for component production
• Manching · Bavaria — Used from 1961

人们

• 威利·梅塞施密特 · founder, chief designer, chairman — 1898–1978; professor from 1937; chairman of MBB until 1970
• Friedrich Harth · glider pioneer, early partner — Built the S8 and S9 gliders with Messerschmitt
• Lilly von Michel-Raulino (Stromeyer) · financier, later Messerschmitt’s wife — Her guarantees saved the company after the 1931 bankruptcy
• Walter Rethel · designer — Co-designer of the Bf 109
• Fritz Wendel · test pilot — Me 209 world speed record, 1939
• Heini Dittmar · test pilot — First to exceed 1,000 km/h in level flight, Me 163, 1941
• Fritz Fend · engineer — Designed the Kabinenroller bubble car

纪录和第一

• World speed record for piston-engined landplanes, 610.95 km/h, Bf 109 V13, Hermann Wurster, 11 November 1937
• Absolute world airspeed record, almost 756 km/h, Me 209 V1, Fritz Wendel, 26 April 1939; unbeaten by a piston aircraft until 16 August 1969
• First piloted aircraft over 1,000 km/h in level flight, 1,004.5 km/h, Me 163A V4, Heini Dittmar, 2 October 1941
• Most-produced fighter aircraft in history, Bf 109
• First operational jet fighter, Me 262, 1944
• Only operational rocket-powered fighter, Me 163
• Highest-scoring fighter pilot in history, Erich Hartmann, 352 victories, all in the Bf 109