Every German WW2 Experimental Aircraft Ever Built (Full Catalog)

Added: 2026-04-29

[00:00:00]On August 27th, 1939, the Heinkel He 178 became the first jet-powered aircraft to fly, departing from Rostock just days before Germany ignited World War II.

[00:00:11]Despite this breakthrough, the Luftwaffe ignored the project, sparking a chaotic six-year arms race that yielded numerous radical prototypes, from the first jet bomber and rocket fighter to coal-powered ramjets. This is the full catalog of Germany's most unhinged experimental aviation history. Heinkel He 178, the aircraft that started everything.

[00:00:36]>> [music] >> First turbojet-powered flight in history, August 27th, 1939. Piloted by Erich Warsitz, and the Luftwaffe literally ignored it. The jet age was born in a country that didn't even want it yet. Heinkel He 176, weeks before the He 178 flew, this thing became the world's first dedicated rocket-powered aircraft. Liquid-fueled Walter engine, tiny airframe, insane speed potential.

[00:01:03]The RLM watched the demo, called it unimpressive, and moved on. Absolute tragedy. Heinkel He 100, set a world air speed record of 463 mph in 1939. Faster than anything the Allies had on the drawing board. Heinkel built it as a Bf 109 killer. The Luftwaffe refused to order it, and then used fake photos of it to convince Allied intelligence an entire phantom squadron existed. Propaganda prop disguised as a masterpiece. Heinkel He 112, the fighter that lost to the Bf 109 in the Luftwaffe's 1936 competition, but still saw combat in the Spanish Civil War with the Condor Legion, and was exported to Romania and Japan. Proof that second place in 1936 was still world-class anywhere else. Heinkel He 119, a speed record reconnaissance bomber with a coupled engine buried inside the fuselage, driving a single propeller through an extension shaft.

[00:02:04]The [music] crew literally sat behind the engine. Set a 1,000 km closed-circuit record in 1937, over 500 km/h. Too radical for its own procurement cycle, and that's just what one company built before the war even started. The next section is where the Luftwaffe finally let the leash off, and the results were certifiably unhinged.

[00:02:26]Arado Ar 234 Blitz, the world's first operational jet bomber. Flew reconnaissance over Normandy in August 1944, completely untouchable at 540 mph.

[00:02:39]KG 76 used it to bomb the Remagen Bridge in March 1945, in the only jet bombing raids in history at that point. Nothing the Allies had could catch it. Heinkel He 280, the world's first turbojet-powered fighter aircraft. Flew before the Me 262, and carried the first operational ejection seat ever used, saving pilot Helmut Schenk's life in January 1942. The Luftwaffe picked the 262 instead, and the He 280 became history's most qualified reject. Heinkel He 169, the people's fighter. A jet interceptor designed, built, and flown in under 90 days using forced labor and plywood. Went from first sketch to first flight in December 1944. Entered combat with JG 1 in the final weeks of the war.

[00:03:29]Desperation engineering at a pace that still hasn't [music] been matched.

[00:03:33]Heinkel He 343, a four-engine jet bomber concept designed to replace the Ar 234.

[00:03:40]Swept wings, four turbojets, projected to carry a heavier bomb load at jet speed across deeper range. Never left the drawing board, but the configuration directly influenced post-war bomber design on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Focke-Wulf Ta 183, Kurt Tank's swept-wing single-engine jet fighter.

[00:03:59]Designed as the Me 262 successor under the emergency fighter program. Captured blueprints ended up in Soviet and Argentine hands after the war. The MiG-15 and the FMA Pulqui II both carry its DNA. One of the most influential aircraft that never flew under its own flag. Those were the jets Germany actually built, or nearly built. But the programs that went even further off the deep end, the ones chasing Mach numbers with rocket fuel, are next, >> [music] >> and the body count starts climbing.

[00:04:29]Messerschmitt Me 163 Komet, the only rocket-powered fighter aircraft to ever see operational combat anywhere, ever.

[00:04:38]JG 400 flew it against Allied bomber formations in 1944. Top speed over 700 mph, faster than anything else in the sky by a massive margin.

[00:04:49]>> [music] >> The Walter HWK 509 engine ran on fuel so volatile, they dissolved pilots on contact if the tank cracked. Nine confirmed kills, dozens of dead test pilots. Absolutely demonic. Bachem Ba 349 Natter, [music] a vertically launched expendable rocket-powered interceptor made of wood.

[00:05:10]The pilot was supposed to fire a nose cone full of rockets into a bomber formation, eject, and parachute down while the airframe self-destructed.

[00:05:19]First manned vertical launch happened on March 1st, 1945. Test pilot Lothar Sieber died when the canopy blew off seconds after lift-off. The program never recovered. Fieseler Fi 103 R Reichenberg, a manned V1 flying bomb.

[00:05:35]The cockpit was bolted onto a pulse jet cruise missile, and the pilot was expected to aim it at a target and bail out at the last second, theoretically.

[00:05:44]Hanna Reitsch was test flew it and survived. Operational authorization was authorized, but never performed.

[00:05:50]Germany's kamikaze program, built and shelved. DFS 228, a rocket-powered high-altitude reconnaissance glider designed to cruise at 80,000 ft, higher than anything the Allies could intercept or even detect. Launched from a parent aircraft, it would ignite its Walter rotor, climb to the ceiling of the stratosphere, and then glide home unpowered. The pressurized cockpit doubled as an escape capsule. Tested, but never operational. DFS 346, a swept-wing rocket plane with a prone pilot position designed to break the sound barrier. The war ended before it flew under power, so the Soviets captured the prototype, shipped east, and kept testing it as the Samolyot 346.

[00:06:34]Germany built the airframe, Russia tried to finish the job. Neither got what they wanted. From rockets to rotors, the next section covers the machines that didn't need runways at all, and one of them changed aviation permanently. Focke-Wulf Fw 61, the first fully controllable practical helicopter in history. First flown in 1936. Hanna Reitsch was flew it inside the Deutschlandhalle in Berlin in 1938 as a public demonstration. Set altitude, distance, and endurance records that stood for years. The machine that proved rotary-wing flight wasn't a novelty, it was the future.

[00:07:11]Flettner Fl 265, the world's first successful helicopter with intermeshing rotors. Tested aboard the German cruiser Köln in 1941 for shipboard operations.

[00:07:22]Anton Flettner's synchropter design eliminated the need for a tail rotor entirely, and the Kriegsmarine saw it and immediately wanted more. Flettner Fl 282 Kolibri, what they got. The Kolibri became the first helicopter in history to enter series production for military use. The Kriegsmarine deployed it for convoy escorts and submarine spotting in the Mediterranean and Baltic Seas. Over a thousand were ordered. Allied bombing destroyed the factories before most could be delivered. A production helicopter in 1942, while the Allies were still sketching prototypes. Focke-Wulf Fw 223, the first true military transport helicopter. Twin rotors, a thousand horsepower Bramo radial, capable of carrying troops and cargo at operationally relevant loads. After the war, a captured Fw 223 became the first helicopter to cross the English Channel. It validated every concept that Sikorsky and Bell would later mass-produce. Fw 269, a tilt-rotor VTOL fighter concept. Pusher propellers that rotated downward for vertical takeoff, then tilted back for horizontal flight at 600 km/h. Designed decades before the V-22 Osprey made tilt-rotor real. Never built beyond the model stage, but the engineering logic was frighteningly ahead of schedule. Five helicopters, four of them flew, of them set world first, and the Allies had nothing comparable until after the war. But the next section goes [music] in a completely different direction.

[00:08:57]Airframes so strange, they barely qualify as conventional aircraft. Horten Ho 3, a single-seat flying wing glider.

[00:09:05]The stepping stone that proved the Horten [music] brothers' aerodynamic theories actually worked in practice.

[00:09:10]Multiple variants flew throughout the late 1930s and into the war, racking up data that fed directly into every design that followed. Horten Ho 4, a high-performance all-wing sailplane with a semi-prone pilot position. Built for soaring competitions, but serving as a testbed for laminar flow and boundary layer research on tailless configurations. Sleek, functional, and way ahead of its time. Horten Ho 7, a twin-engine powered flying wing originally intended as a fighter trainer. The bridge between the Horten's glider [music] experiments and their jet-powered ambitions. Fitted with two Argus As 10 engines, it validated powered flying wing handling before the big bet came. Horten Ho 229, the big bet. The world's first jet-powered flying wing.

[00:09:57]Jumo 004 capable of carrying 1,000 kg of ordnance at over 600 mph. Hermann Göring personally backed it. The V2 prototype flew in 1945 and was genuinely revolutionary. The V3 was captured 80% by American forces at the end of the war and now sits in the Smithsonian. 60 years later, Northrop Grumman acknowledged its influence on stealth aerodynamics, certified ahead of the entire planet. Messerschmitt Me 264, the most famous Amerika bomber candidate, a four-engine long-range strategic bomber with a projected range of over 15,000 km, capable of reaching the US East Coast from bases in France and returning without refueling. One prototype flew.

[00:10:41]Allied bombing destroyed the second before completion. Junkers Ju 390, a six-engine monster derived from the Ju 290, built for ultra-long-range maritime patrol and strategic bombing. Contested reports claim the V2 prototype flew a test mission to within 20 km of the US coast in 1944 and returned.

[00:11:02]>> [music] >> If true, it was the closest any Axis aircraft ever came to North America. Two built, both destroyed before capture.

[00:11:09]Focke-Wulf Ta 400, Kurt Tank's six-engine entry for the Amerika bomber competition, designed with a mix of piston engines and jet boosters for long-range transatlantic range. Planned with French collaboration using BMW and Yumo power plants.

[00:11:24]>> [music] >> Canceled before prototype completion, but the range calculations were sound.

[00:11:28]The tank didn't bluff. Heinkel He 274, a high-altitude derivative of the troubled He 177, designed with a pressurized cabin and four separate engines to eliminate the fire-prone coupled power plant that plagued its predecessor.

[00:11:42]Built in occupied France and when the Allies liberated the factory, France finished the prototypes and flew them for its own post-war research. A German bomber completed by the country it was designed to bomb. Heinkel He 277, another four-engine heavy bomber spin-off of the He 177. This one designed to fix every structural flaw of the Greif while delivering true strategic range. Göring killed the program repeatedly, revived it repeatedly, and then the war ended. The airframe that should have given the Luftwaffe its B-17 equivalent and never got the chance. Heinkel He 111 Z Zwilling, two He 111 fuselages welded together with a shared center wing section and a fifth engine. Built specifically to tow the massive Messerschmitt Me 321 Gigant that no single aircraft could pull. Five engines, twin fuselages, one absurd mission profile. Around 12 were built, saw operational use on the Eastern Front. That's every German strategic range and heavy lift platform on the list, but the next section might be the most chaotic of all. The fighters, interceptors, and multi-role experiments that were too advanced, too broken, or too strange to ever reach a production line. Dornier Do 335 Pfeil, the fastest piston-engine fighter Germany ever built, 474 mph in level flight using a revolutionary tandem push-pull engine layout. Front engine pulled, rear engine pushed. The Allies captured it at the end of the war and couldn't believe the performance numbers were real. Came too late to see meaningful combat, but nothing with a propeller would catch this thing.

[00:13:17]Focke-Wulf Fw 187, Kurt Tank's twin-engine heavy fighter from 1937, faster and more maneuverable than the Bf 110 in every test, and the Luftwaffe still passed on it because they didn't believe a twin-engine fighter role existed. Tank was right, the RLM was wrong. Only nine were ever built and three of them briefly defended the Focke-Wulf factory in Bremen during actual air raids. Arado Ar 240, a pressurized twin-engine multi-role heavy fighter loaded with cutting-edge tech, remote-controlled gun barbettes, a pressurized cockpit for high-altitude ops, dive brakes. On paper, it was the future. In practice, stability problems plagued every variant and the whole program collapsed under its own ambition. A handful flew reconnaissance missions on the Eastern Front. That's it. Blohm & Voss BV 141, the most asymmetric aircraft ever flown. The crew gondola sat entirely offset to the right of the engine nacelle, giving the observer an unobstructed downward view.

[00:14:16]Built [music] for tactical reconnaissance and it actually flew well. The RLM couldn't get past the way it looked. Killed by aesthetics, not aerodynamics. BV 155, a high-altitude interceptor designed specifically to kill B-29 Superfortresses at extreme altitude. Massive wingspan, turbocharged engine, pressurized cockpit. It started as a Messerschmitt project, got transferred to Blohm & Voss, and was still in development when the war ended.

[00:14:42]The B-29 never hit Europe. The interceptor built to stop it never got airborne in anger. And right when you think the Germans peaked on weird, the next one fused two entire fighters into a single airframe. Me 609, two Me 309 fuselages joined at the wing, a twin-fuselage heavy fighter concept in the same vein as the P-82 Twin Mustang, designed for long-range escort and heavy interception. Never left the drawing board, but the configuration influenced post-war twin-boom thinking on multiple continents. 154 Mosquito, Germany's answer to the de Havilland Mosquito, a fast twin-engine wooden night fighter designed by Kurt Tank. Flew well in testing, but the factory producing its special adhesive got bombed and the replacement glue literally dissolved the airframes in flight. Killed by glue, one of the most absurd procurement deaths in aviation history. Focke-Wulf Fw 191, >> [music] >> Focke-Wulf's entry for the Bomber B competition, an advanced medium bomber designed to replace the He 111 and Do 117 with pressurized crew stations and remote-controlled defensive guns. The engines it needed didn't exist yet and the electrically driven systems were so unreliable that the ground crews called it the flying power [music] station.

[00:15:53]Canceled before production. Me 328, a tiny expendable parasite fighter powered by pulse jet engines, designed to launch from a parent bomber, attack enemy fighters, and be essentially disposable.

[00:16:05]The vibration from the Argus pulse jets was so extreme it cracked the wooden airframe during flight testing.

[00:16:11]Reassigned as a potential suicide attack platform. Never operational in any [clears throat] role. Arado Ar 231, a folding floatplane small enough to be stored inside a submarine's watertight compartment and deployed for ocean reconnaissance. Designed for U-boat operations in the Atlantic. Actually flew, but assembly and disassembly on a pitching submarine deck proved nearly impossible in real conditions. Replaced by the autogyro. That's the conventional stuff. The next section throws the rulebook away entirely. VTOL tailsitters, ramjets burning coal, and a flying saucer built by a farmer. This is where the catalog goes completely off the rails.

[00:16:50]Focke-Wulf Triebflügel, a tail-sitting VTOL interceptor with three rotating wings mounted around a fuselage, each wing tipped [music] with a ramjet engine. The entire wing assembly spun like a rotor for vertical lift-off, then transitioned to forward flight. Designed in 1944, never built, the engineering required to make this work didn't exist until decades later and even then nobody tried it. Heinkel Wespe, the Lerche's smaller, meaner sibling, a single-engine turboprop-powered tail-sitting VTOL interceptor that would launch vertically from any clearing, parking lot, or forest road. Heinkel designed it specifically for a Luftwaffe that had already lost its airfields. Pure point-defense desperation in a single-seat package.

[00:17:36]Lippisch P.13a, a ramjet-powered delta-wing interceptor designed to be fueled by granulated coal. Not a metaphor. Alexander Lippisch concluded that a wire-mesh basket of burning coal inside a ramjet combustion chamber could push this thing past Mach 2. Wind tunnel testing actually supported the theory. A coal-powered supersonic interceptor.

[00:17:58]1944 was built differently.

[00:18:01]Blohm & Voss P.188, a long-range jet bomber with a radical W-shaped wing planform designed to optimize high-speed aerodynamics while maintaining structural integrity. Multiple design variants used four to six jet engines.

[00:18:16]Never left the proposal phase, but the wing geometry research fed directly into post-war swept-wing development.

[00:18:22]Messerschmitt P.1101, the prototype that introduced variable [music] sweep wings to aviation. The wing angle could be adjusted on the ground before flight to [music] test different sweep configurations. Captured 80% complete at Oberammergau by American troops. The US took it home, studied it, and used it as the direct basis for the Bell X-5, which became the ancestor of every swing-wing fighter ever built. The F-14 Tomcat owes its existence to a half-finished German prototype found in a bombed-out hangar. One more concept in this section earns its place through sheer audacity alone. Sack AS.6, a circular-winged aircraft built by a farmer named Arthur Sack. Not a military contractor, not an engineer, a farmer who convinced the Luftwaffe to let him test his flying disc concept at Brandis airfield. It never achieved sustained flight. It barely achieved taxiing, but the fact that it existed at all in the middle of a world war tells you everything about how far Germany was willing to go. Zeppelin Rammer, a rocket-powered, steel-reinforced interceptor designed for one mission: ram Allied bombers out of the sky. 14 R4M rockets in the nose for a first pass [music] and if those missed, the airframe itself was built to survive a direct collision with a B-17. The pilot was supposed to crash through the bomber formation and then glide home. Pure controlled insanity from the Zeppelin company. Never built, possibly never should have been.

[00:19:53]>> [music] >> The catalog's final section covers the composites, the multi-role mutations, and the bombers that bent the rules of what a single airframe could do. This is where it all wraps up. Mistel composite, a fighter aircraft bolted on top of an unmanned explosives packed bomber. The pilot in the upper aircraft would guide the whole stack towards a target, release the bomb plane, and fly home. UA 88s packed with 3,500 lb of shaped charge warheads were the most common lower components, guided by FW 190s or BF 109s riding on top. Operational missions hit bridges, ships, and Soviet power plants. Daddy and Son, that was the actual code name.

[00:20:33]BV 238, the largest aircraft built by any Axis power during the entire war. A six-engine flying boat with a wingspan over 60 m, heavier than anything else in the sky when it first flew in 1944. Only one completed. It was destroyed by P-51 Mustangs while sitting on a lake. The biggest plane in the war was killed by strafing while it couldn't even move.

[00:20:56]Junkers Ju 287, a jet bomber with forward swept wings, the exact opposite of every other high-speed design in 1944. The first prototype was cobbled together from parts of four different aircraft, including He 137 fuselage sections and Ju 388 tail assemblies.

[00:21:14][music] It flew, the forward sweep worked, the Soviets captured the program, and continued development after the war. That covers the German experimental aircraft from World War II.

[00:21:24]In just six years, technology advanced so rapidly that half these machines were nonexistent in 1938 and obsolete by 1946. No other nation matched this volume of innovations, spanning jets, rockets, helicopters, and even coal-powered ramjets. The catalog is now complete. If you enjoyed this deep dive, please like, subscribe, and share the video. See you in the next one.