COMBAT AND COMPETITION.pdf - Lakes Gliding Club

CHAPTER FIFTEEN
FULL CIRCLE
My job in the '70s took me all over Western Europe, including
Germany, where I was responsible for a subsidiary company in the
Bavarian town of Waldkraiburg, some 60 km to the east of Munich. A
strange place, with its heavily reinforced concrete buildings hidden in
the middle of a pine forest, until you delved into it's history.
Waldkraiburg had been a major source of munitions production in the
days of the Third Reich.
The sales director, Rolf Kliendienst, had been wounded at
Stalingrad and was amongst the last to be evacuated by air. He wore an
artificial right hand and never allowed his disability to interfere with
an active life.
An excellent skier, and a skilled rally driver in his day, Rolf was
the most polished and expert motorist I have ever met. With him speed
was almost synonymous with safety. A decent loyal man and straight
as a die. He must have been a first class NCO in his Wehrmacht days.
One evening, driving to nearby Muhldorf for dinner, while we
were still in the middle of the forest, he turned to me:
"Mr Ince, I must show you something special."
We drove on until, approaching the end of the trees, a canal
appeared running parallel to the road, and a railway bridge obscured
the view ahead. Rolf pulled up just beyond the bridge, alongside a
massive concrete wall, like the entrance to some medieval castle. It was
built into a high bank, so that it seemed to form part of the bridge
approach.
"Here is the door to the flugplatz," he said.
We got out the car and walked amongst the trees. It was an
awesome sight. For several hundred yards, leading straight away from
the road, the ground was torn and cratered like a battlefield. Huge
chunks of concrete lay half buried in the ground, tilted at all angles.
Then some gigantic hoop shaped bits and pieces and one which was
almost complete, and in situ, like an open tunnel mouth. In the silent
depths of that forest, filled with the scent of pines, we were standing
on the remains of an undergound airfield.
It could hardly have been better sited, with road, rail and canal
access literally on the doorstep. And, for munitions and aircraft, there
was Waldkraiburg and the Messerschmidt factory at Weiner Neustadt
not so far away. But that was mere speculation. Nobody seemed to
know about the intended operational role of that strange airfield, the
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