High School project leads to German fighter wreckage
Danish 14-year-old Daniel Rom Kristiansen was looking for high school homework project when his father, Klaus, jokingly suggested that he search for the plane that his grandfather had told him crashed in a field near the family farm. From the Daily Mail;
When the machine started beeping over a patch of boggy ground the pair started digging – but realised they would need to go deeper.
They borrowed an excavator from a neighbour, and around four to six metres down, they discovered the remains of the plane.
Further excavation yielded the remains of the Messerschmitt pilot and some of his clothing which contained paperwork;
‘In the first moment it was not a plane,’ Mr Kristiansen told the BBC. ‘It was maybe 2,000 – 5,000 pieces of a plane. And we found a motor… then suddenly we found parts of bones, and parts from [the pilot’s] clothes.
‘And then we found some personal things – books, a wallet with money… Either it was a little Bible or it was Mein Kampf – a book in his pocket. We didn’t touch it, we just put it in some bags. A museum is now taking care of it. I think there’s a lot of information in those papers.’
[…]
[Klaus] added that he has lived there for 40 years, oblivious as to what was hidden just beneath the surface.
‘We had never seen anything on the surface,’ he said.
‘Not a single bit of metal. He was telling a lot of stories, my grandfather. Some of them were not true, and some of them were true – but this one was true. Maybe I should have listened to him a bit more when he was alive!’
Category: Historical
Always listen to your grandparents. They may get it a bit garbled, but they know stuff that gets lost.
Shack!
You forgot to mention to a critical piece that CNN didn’t miss.
http://www.cnn.com/2017/03/08/europe/denmark-wwii-plane-trnd/
Sarauw believes the pilot came from the training base for German pilots in Aalborg, a nearby city. Along with the pilot’s suit, hat andthree unused condoms, they also have his wallet, which contained two Danish coins and some food stamps for the canteen at the Aalborg base.
That’s probably good for a night in Berlin, Major Kong’s kit was good for a weekend in Vegas. 😉
Learned a bit of trivia – that was dubbed. The original line was “a pretty good weekend in Dallas” but between filming and final editing, November 22 1963 passed and it was felt the joke would be inappropriate as is.
Another piece of history found!
And another family that will have a missing loved one returned to them.
BZ to young Daniel on his find!
This story is too cool. A kid studying WW II discovers the wreckage of a German plane on family property, along with the remains of its pilot. Dahell does he do for an encore? He may have just peaked at 14.
Hard to top that, but he has a story to tell his grandchildren!
I’m also glad they had the sense to not mess with the artifacts, but hand them over to a museum for curation.
If you like messing with unknown and unused cannon shells and unexploded bombs it’s fine. Not to be recommended. What of the rest of the corpse (SOT. Somewhere Over There)?
Impressive how former enemies, and including Germans who died on the Eastern Front get such due reverence (from Russians). Total respect for soldiers doing a horrible job, whoever they are.