A British company in a German garrison town

Germany’s Halberstadt aircraft works began life as a British company. On 9 April 1912 the Deutsche Bristol-Werke was founded in the Saxon garrison town of Halberstadt with a capital of 255,000 marks, of which Bristol put up 200,000. Its first products were licence-built Bristol designs, the Boxkite biplane and the Prier monoplane. In July 1913 the firm took the name Halberstädter Flugzeugwerke, and when war came a year later the British connection was over. The factory still employed only 86 people in August 1913.

The school that taught Boelcke

Alongside the works ran a flying school, opened on 1 July 1912 and spun off that December as the Militärfliegerschule Halberstadt. During the war it trained some 700 to 800 pilots. One of them was Oswald Boelcke, who became the father of German fighter tactics. The designers came and went: Hans Burkhard left for Gotha in October 1914, and Karl Theiss, who arrived from Albatros as chief designer, shaped the types that made the company’s name.

Boelcke’s blue biplane

The first of them was the D.II, which flew in late 1915 and became the first German biplane fighter in combat. When the first Jagdstaffeln formed in the summer of 1916 it was the best fighter they had, and Boelcke used one painted bright blue to show the new units his tactics, one of the first of the gaudy personal colour schemes German pilots made famous. Even Manfred von Richthofen flew a red Halberstadt D.II for a few weeks in March 1917, after his Albatros cracked a wing, and scored six victories in it. A Jasta 5 pilot, Rudolf Nebel, later a rocketry pioneer, fixed improvised rocket tubes to one.

Hedge-hopping at Cambrai

The fighters were soon outclassed, but Halberstadt found its real calling in a new class of light two-seater, the CL. The CL.II passed its type test on 7 May 1917 and reached the front that August. Its observer sat on a raised gun ring, with a rack of stick grenades at his elbow, and on 30 November 1917 the German counter-attack at Cambrai showed what such machines could do at low level. By the spring offensive of March 1918 the Germans had 38 Schlachtstaffeln of CL types. The CL.IV that followed was shorter and nimbler, and flights of four to six flew below a hundred feet just ahead of the advancing infantry.

From warplanes to wagons

By March 1918 Halberstadt employed 1,499 people and was turning out about 125 aircraft a month; across the war it built 1,717 C and CL types and 85 fighters. The Treaty of Versailles ended all that. In 1919 the works became part of the Berlin-Halberstädter Industriewerke and turned to farm machinery and repairs of railway wagons for the Reichsbahn. Insolvency proceedings opened in 1926, the factory was auctioned on 7 July 1927, and from 1935 Junkers used the old site to make wing parts for the Ju 88. A few CL.IVs flew on as two-passenger airliners for Paul Strähle’s airline between Stuttgart and Konstanz until 1923.

Fabrieken

• Halberstadt works · Halberstadt, Saxony-Anhalt — Grew from 960 m² in 1912 to 8,020 m² in 1918; later a Junkers branch plant

Mensen

• Karl Theiss · chief designer — Came from Albatros; designed the D-series and CL types
• Hans Burkhard · designer to October 1914 — Left for Gothaer Waggonfabrik
• Hermann Behrens · managing director
• Oswald Boelcke · fighter pioneer, trained at the Halberstadt school — Flew a blue Halberstadt D.II in 1916
• Manfred von Richthofen · fighter ace — Scored six victories in a red Halberstadt D.II, March 1917

Records en primeurs

• First German biplane fighter to serve in combat, the D.II, 1916
• First known German attempt at air-launched rockets, by Rudolf Nebel in a Jasta 5 Halberstadt D.II, 1916
• D.II used in the first official German trials of radio-directed fighters, late 1916