ScienceDirect - Technol Rep Tohoku Univ ... - Garryck Osborne

Chapter 5
Flugkapitän Rudolf Schriever, one of the four saucer engineers cited in
Lusar's book, began talking to the West German media in 1950 about a
truly fantastic flying machine he had worked on for the Nazis—one that
would have changed the course of the war had it gone into full-scale
production. It stemmed from work that he had allegedly undertaken for the
Heinkel Aircraft Company at Marienehe, near Rostock on the Baltic coast.
Schriever was one of the four "scientists" mentioned in Lusar's book
as having worked on the Nazi flying discs. He was also, I found out
through the massively detailed file that my former journalistic colleague
Cross sent me via email, central to the Legend.
Though he started out as a pilot in the Luftwaffe, Schriever appeared
to have developed some highly advanced ideas about aircraft that could
take off and land vertically and it was in this capacity, after he had been
drafted to Heinkel's design section, that he soon came to the attention
of company chairman Professor Ernst Heinkel, who in early 1940 encouraged
him to construct a small flying prototype.
So far so good. Though best-known for its lumbering He 111, the
Luftwaffe's mainstay bomber during the Blitz against London in 1940
and for much of the rest of the war, Heinkel was one of the most
pioneering and innovative aircraft companies within Germany at the time.
Whatever the Legend said, this much was fact.
In 1936, Ernst Heinkel began funding experiments that three years
later would lead to Germany's successful construction of the world's first
jet-powered aircraft, despite the fact that it was the British designer,
Frank Whittle, who had first invented and patented the concept. The
tiny, one-off Heinkel He 178 first flew on August 27, 1939, five days
before the German Army marched into Poland. Eighteen months later,
Heinkel would again eclipse all other aircraft companies by flying the
world's first jet-powered fighter, the He 280. If anyone was to develop
something as radical as Schriever's idea, therefore, Heinkel was the
company to do it.
The Legend then takes over.
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