A shipyard learns to fly

Weserflug was born in 1934 because a shipbuilder wanted a second business. Deutsche Schiff- und Maschinenbau AG, the Bremen group behind the AG Weser yard, set up the company and that same year absorbed the struggling Rohrbach Metall-Flugzeugbau of Berlin. Adolf Rohrbach, a pioneer of all-metal aircraft, became technical director of a new factory at Lemwerder that opened in 1936. His own ideas ran ahead of the times: the P.1003 of 1938 was a tilt-wing VTOL design with swivelling four-metre propellers that was never built.

Stukas at Tempelhof

Weserflug’s real job was licence production on a vast scale. At Berlin-Tempelhof, Lemwerder and Liegnitz it built Junkers Ju 86, Ju 87, Ju 188 and Ju 388 aircraft and Focke-Wulf Fw 190 fighters. Between 1940 and 1945 Tempelhof alone turned out 5,215 Ju 87 Stukas. German Wikipedia ranks the firm as the Reich’s fourth-largest aircraft manufacturer by the war’s end, with 22,904 workers in 1944. Much of that labour was forced: on 20 April 1944, 2,103 of Tempelhof’s 4,151 workers were foreign forced labourers, and concentration camp prisoners dug an underground plant at Rabstein in the Sudetenland.

From Noratlas to VFW

After 1945 German aircraft production stopped. Horst Janson, appointed trustee of Weser AG’s assets in 1948, steered Bremen’s post-war reindustrialisation and became chairman of Weser AG in 1960. When it resumed, Weserflug joined Hamburger Flugzeugbau and Siebel in Flugzeugbau Nord to licence-build the Nord Noratlas transport for the new Bundeswehr, and in 1961 joined the ERNO rocket consortium. Its own story ended in a merger with its Bremen neighbour Focke-Wulf, creating Vereinigte Flugtechnische Werke. The Lemwerder site lived on in VFW and its successors.

Fabrieken

• Tempelhof works · Berlin — Ju 87 and Fw 190 production
• Lemwerder works · Lemwerder, near Bremen — Opened 1936; Ju 86 production
• Liegnitz works · Liegnitz, Silesia (now Legnica, Poland) — Wartime factory
• Rabstein underground plant · Rabstein, Sudetenland (now Czech Republic) — Dug by concentration camp prisoners from 1944; Ju 87 parts

Mensen

• Adolf Rohrbach · technical director from 1935 — All-metal aircraft pioneer; VTOL studies
• Horst Janson · trustee, later chairman of Weser AG — Led post-war reindustrialisation in Bremen