Siegfried Günter

Siegfried Günter (left) with Ernst Heinkel (1941)

Siegfried Günter (born December 8, 1899 in Keula , Thuringia, † June 19, 1969 in Berlin ) was a German aircraft designer.

Life

The twin brothers Walter and Siegfried Günter were born in Keula, Thuringia, in 1899. They took part in the First World War and, after their release from British captivity, began studying mechanical engineering together in Hanover in 1920. During their studies in Hamburg, the brothers developed the motor glider “Roter Vogel” and at Bäumer Aero GmbH the sports monoplane “ Sausewind ”. Siegfried Günter received his diploma in March 1926, while his brother dropped out due to work at Bäumer. In January 1931, Siegfried Günter got a job as a designer at the Heinkel aircraft factory in Warnemünde . In the following July his brother joined them and both of them designed the He 64 sports plane, which was derived from the “boisterous wind”, under the direction of Hans Regelin .

Siegfried Günter and his twin brother Walter, who died in a car accident in 1937, as well as Karl Schwärzler and Ernst Heinkel formed a creative team at Heinkel in Rostock . The group known as the “four-leaf clover” worked in the legendary Hall 3 and in the 1930s formed perhaps the most successful team in German aircraft construction. Among other things, they were responsible for the construction of the Heinkel He 70 and Heinkel He 111 .

Heinkel described the two twin brothers Siegfried and Walter Günter with the words: “They complemented each other in a way that was almost ideal for my purposes. Siegfried was a calculating technician. Walter was more of the artist who had an incredible feeling for the aesthetically beautiful and thus fast form of the airplane. You could create the aerodynamic face I was looking for. "

In 1944, Siegfried Günter developed the Heinkel He 162 with jet propulsion under "burning skies", as he later said, and Karl Schwärzler designed it. Development, construction, pre-series production, testing and production ran almost simultaneously and so the first He 162 was able to complete its maiden flight after just three months.

After the end of the Second World War , Siegfried Günter was brought to the Soviet Union as part of the Ossawakim campaign in October 1946 and was forced to work as department head of OKB-2 within the aircraft factory No. 1 located in Podberesje near Moscow until 1954. He followed Ernst Heinkel on his return to his Swabian homeland, as did many other engineers from the Heinkel design department, including Karl Schwärzler, Ernst Kleinemeyer and Jupp Köhler. After the release of the German airspace both Heinkel engineers Günter and Schwaerzler in Munich were the construction of the first VTOL aircraft 101 C VJ involved.

Siegfried Günter always paid special attention to aerodynamics when designing his aircraft . So it is not surprising that one of his students, Xaver Hafer , who worked with him from 1939 and later held the chair for flight technology at the Technical University of Darmstadt , also focused his research on aerodynamics.

literature

• Volker Koos: Ernst Heinkel Flugzeugwerke 1933-1945, type books German aviation . Heel, 2003, ISBN 3-89880-217-5 .
• Obituary for "Dr.Ing.eh Siegfried Günter" . In: Flight Revue . August 1969, p. 86 .

Individual evidence

1. ^ Volker Koos: Ernst Heinkel . From the biplane to the jet engine. Delius Klasing, Bielefeld 2007, ISBN 978-3-7688-1906-0 , p. 93 ff .
2. ↑ Dimitri Alexejewitsch Sobolew: German traces in Soviet aviation history . The participation of German companies and professionals in aviation development in the Soviet Union. Mittler, Hamburg 2000, ISBN 3-8132-0675-0 , p. 266 .