The ace from the Macedonian front

Gerhard Fieseler was a printer from near Cologne who joined the army air service in 1915, crashed in training, and ended up as a fighter pilot on the Macedonian front. He scored 19 confirmed victories and was the highest-scoring German ace on the Eastern Front to survive the war. Peacetime sent him back to his print shop until 1926, when he became a flying instructor at Raab-Katzenstein in Kassel and one of the best-paid stunt pilots in Europe. The aerobatic manoeuvre called the Fieseler is named after him.

Stunt money buys a glider factory

When Raab-Katzenstein went bankrupt in 1930, Fieseler used the money he had saved from aerobatics to buy a sailplane factory in Kassel. From 1932 it built sports aircraft of his own design, and in 1934 he won the World Aerobatics Championship in one of them, the F2 Tiger. The Fi 5 sports trainer followed. Fieseler joined the Nazi party, and from 1935 his firm licence-built military aircraft for the new Luftwaffe.

The Storch

The breakthrough came in 1936, when Fieseler’s design beat Messerschmitt and Siebel for a short take-off observation and liaison aircraft. The Fi 156 Storch, first flown on 24 May 1936, needed only very short strips and could fly remarkably slowly. More than 2,900 were built, and production carried on after the war in France and Czechoslovakia; Morane-Saulnier built it as the MS 500 until 1965. In September 1943 a Storch flew Benito Mussolini off the Gran Sasso after German commandos freed him.

The flying bomb

On 5 June 1942 the air ministry ordered a flying bomb, and Fieseler’s designer Robert Lusser created the Fi 103, better known as the V-1. Mass production began in March 1944 at more than 50 plants. Of roughly 35,000 built, 9,251 were fired at England, most at London, and 6,551 at Antwerp. A piloted version, the Fi 103R Reichenberg, was built in about 175 examples but never used operationally. The Kassel works employed more than 10,000 people at times, including thousands of Dutch and French forced labourers.

Bombed, dismantled, remembered in street names

Allied bombers hit the Fieseler works repeatedly, notably in the raids of July and October 1943, and Gerhard Fieseler was removed as works manager on 29 March 1944 after failing to meet production targets. After the war he spent time in US custody, then made car parts in part of the old factory. On 15 October 1947 the Allied military governors announced that the works would be dismantled. Fieseler died in Kassel in 1987, aged 91. Kassel Airport, opened in 2013, sits on Fieseler-Storch-Straße.

Továrny

• Werk I · Kassel-Bettenhausen — Former Prussian munitions factory, from autumn 1933
• Werk II · Lohfelden — Remembered in the street name Am Fieseler Werk
• Werk III · Kassel-Waldau airfield

Lidé

• Gerhard Fieseler · founder (1896–1987) — 19-victory WWI ace and 1934 world aerobatic champion
• Robert Lusser · designer — Developed the Fi 103 flying bomb
• Erich Bachem · engineer — Later built the Ba 349 Natter rocket interceptor

Rekordy a prvenství

• World Aerobatics Championship 1934, won by Gerhard Fieseler in the F2 Tiger