It’s been more than seven decades after World War II ended and over the years that followed numerous valuable artifacts from the war have been discovered all over the world.
Many of these precious artifacts that include fighter planes, tanks, underground bunker complexes, submarines, bombs, aircraft carriers or battleships have been discovered by non-professionals, entirely by chance – sometimes when just out walking the dog.
That is how exactly a 14-year-old Danish boy found the wreckage of a German World War II plane with the remains of the pilot in the cockpit. Which they believe to be a Messerschmitt Bf 109
Lead image is a Hispano Aviación HA-1112 (c/n 156 C.4K-87 (D-FMBB), “FM+BB”), a license-built Messerschmitt Bf 109 G-2. Rebuilt by the EADS/Messerschmitt Foundation, Germany with a Daimler-Benz DB 605 engine as a G-6. The paint scheme is missing the Swastika, due to current German laws.
Daniel Rom Kristiansen, 14, was doing research for a history class when he and his father accidentally found the remains of a German warbird which crashed onto the family’s farm in Birkelse, Denmark, over 70 years ago during World War II.
It all started as a joke when his father told him the family legend about a plane that crashed onto the family’s farm back in November 1944. “When Daniel was recently given homework about World War II, I jokingly told him to go out and find the plane that is supposed to have crashed out in the field,” he told the Danish news station DR P4 Nordjylland.
They took a metal detector and began scouring the fields, but they didn’t expect to find anything. They were quite surprised when the metal detector started beeping. The couple immediately started digging, but they soon realized that they need to go deeper. So they decided to borrow an excavator from a neighbor and dug down seven or eight meters.
“Soon they had to get an excavator to discover four to six meters below the earth was the plane, an ME 109 Messerschmitt with Luftwaffe munitions and the pilot’s remains, “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.” Kristiansen told CNN. “It was like opening a book from yesterday.”
Kristiansen said that his grandfather, who lived on the farm back in 1944, told him about the German plane that crashed there. However, he also remembers that his grandfather told him that the Germans removed the plane, so he never actually believed that the plane would still be there.
Bomb disposal experts were brought in as it crashed with ammunition on board. Forensics are hoping that they will be able to identify the pilot who will be buried now in Germany,” Mr Kristiansen says. “I would hope so.”
Check out another warbird story from us: Some of the largest warbirds to take to the skies
The discovery of this 14-year-old boy and his father, Klaus, is believed to be a Messerschmitt fighter plane. It was the most widely produced and the most respected Luftwaffe fighter. It is said that the Germans built nearly 34,000 of these aircraft and that it was the first fighter plane in the Battle of Britain.