German Aircraft Design during the Third Reich

Abstract

German military victories in 1940 and 1941 and the curious glamour that the Hitler regime holds for many people has led to the belief that German aircraft design was the best in the world in the Nazi period. In reality many pre-war German designs were mediocre and the most successful, the Messerschmitt Bf 109, owed its success to having its engine replaced by one heavier, and almost twice as powerful, as the one it was designed for which led to a variety of performance problems that were exacerbated in later wartime versions with even more powerful engines. The contemporary British Spitfire, already marginally superior in its earlier versions, turned out to have much greater development potential. Later the Messerschmitt Me 262 jet fighter was pressed into service ahead of comparable British and American types before the problems with its engines had been properly dealt with: its much-vaunted swept-wing configuration was the result not of theoretical work by German academics on the issue of compressibility at high speeds (which was at that stage unknown to aircraft manufacturers) but of the need to compensate for the effect of the unexpectedly heavy jet engines on the centre of gravity. The Messerschmitt Me 163 rocket fighter was also brought into service prematurely: a wonderful aircraft to fly when the propulsion unit did not blow up, it represented a conceptual dead-end as it turned out that the flying wing format, or variations on the tail-less aeroplane principle, was incompatible with near-sonic or supersonic speeds.