Germany · 1895–
Junkers
Junkers was one of Germany's major aircraft and aero-engine manufacturers. The firm began in Dessau in 1895 under the engineer and inventor Hugo Junkers, and it did not start with aeroplanes but with boilers and radiators: aviation came later, and with it the contribution the company is remembered for, the all-metal aeroplane. Its works produced the J 1, the first aircraft with a fully metal structure, and the F 13 of 1919, the world's first all-metal airliner, as well as the corrugated duralumin skin that engineers in the United States and the Soviet Union copied for their own metal aircraft. In the thirties and forties the name became attached to machines of war: the Ju 52/3m trimotor, the Ju 87 Stuka dive bomber, the multi-role Ju 88 and a broad family of Jumo diesels and turbojets. Hugo Junkers, an opponent of Nazi rearmament policy, was barred from his own factories in 1933 and died in 1935 under house arrest; the state merged his two companies in 1936 and turned the result into one of the Reich's largest armament groups, which during the war relied heavily on forced labour and concentration camp prisoners. The company survived the conflict, was absorbed by Messerschmitt and ended up dissolved into the MBB consortium; the name left aviation in 1969, though it lives on as a heating brand.
History
A boiler maker who invented the metal aeroplane
Hugo Junkers founded his firm in Dessau in 1895 to exploit his patents for calorimeters and gas water heaters, an industrial business that later funded his aeronautical adventures and would outlive them all. Aircraft arrived during the First World War, with one fixed idea: replace wood and fabric with metal. The J 1 of 1915 was the world's first aircraft with a fully metal structure, and the J 4 — known to the military as the J.I — took that idea to the front in 1917 as an armoured close-support sesquiplane. The aviation company was formally constituted as Junkers-Flugzeugwerk AG in 1919, and the engine company, Junkers Motorenbau, in 1923.
The F 13 and the years of industrial smuggling
The F 13, first flown on 25 June 1919 and certified airworthy that same July, was the first all-metal airliner: a four-passenger monoplane sold across Europe, with more than twenty examples crossing the Atlantic to fly the mail in North America under the Junkers-Larsen name. The Treaty of Versailles, signed days after that first flight, banned all aircraft construction in Germany for months and then limited it to civil designs, so Junkers moved part of its work to the Moscow suburb of Fili and restarted manufacturing there in 1922. From those years came the commercially disappointing G.24 and G.31 civil transports, and also the J.1000 study, a colossal eighty-passenger transatlantic project drawn up in 1924. When the treaty restrictions expired in 1926 real success arrived with the W 33 and W 34 series, which also set records for endurance, distance, altitude, rocket-assisted take-off and inflight refuelling between 1926 and 1930. The firm's technique was copied abroad: the American William Bushnell Stout in 1922 and the Soviet Andrei Tupolev in 1924 adapted Junkers corrugated duralumin for their own first metal aircraft.
Dispossession and the Reich's company
Around 1931 the group sank into financial trouble and its shareholders pressed Hugo Junkers to leave, a move complicated by the fact that the essential patents were his; a company was devised to buy them out, the Junkers Motoren-Patentstelle, formed in November 1932, but the hole was plugged first by selling the water-heater division to Robert Bosch, which still uses the brand. Politics finished what the accounts could not: judged inconvenient for opposing rearmament, Junkers was forced in 1933 to transfer his private patents to the company and to hand 51 % of his shares to the air ministry without compensation, was barred from his own factories and placed under house arrest at his summer home in Bayrischzell. He died in 1935, and his widow Therese Junkers gave up the remaining shares for a derisory payment. On 5 July 1936, with Heinrich Koppenberg in charge, the two companies merged into Junkers Flugzeug- und Motorenwerke AG.
War, forced labour and disappearance
The group grew into one of Germany's largest armament manufacturers: by 1937 it employed some 40,000 people across eleven plants besides the parent works at Dessau, and during the war it opened branches all over the country and underground factories, among them sites tied to the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp, where forced labour and camp prisoners were used on a mass scale in inhuman conditions; from 1944 they included Belarusian youths who had been abducted and deported. The catalogue of those years includes the Ju 52/3m, the Ju 87 Stuka of 1935, the Ju 88 and, at the very end, the forward-swept Ju 287, along with the Jumo engines, from opposed-piston diesels to the turbojet of 1940. Despite the bombing, the company survived defeat: it was reconstituted as Junkers GmbH, spent the fifties researching the future of aerospace transport — it hired the Austrian theorist Eugen Sänger, who completed the design of an advanced orbital spacecraft there in 1961 — and joined the Flugzeug-Union-Süd venture with Heinkel and Messerschmitt in 1958. Messerschmitt ended that arrangement in 1965 by taking control of the company and absorbed it in 1967; the Junkers name vanished inside MBB in 1969, while the heating business went its own way until it was renamed as Bosch's thermotechnology division in 1995.
Catalog — Aircraft
- 1915
Junkers J 1 Sheet pending
Variants (1)
- J 1
- 1916
Junkers J 2 Sheet pending
Variants (1)
- J 2
- 1917
Junkers J.I Sheet pending
Variants (1)
- J.I
- 1917
Junkers D.I Sheet pending
Variants (3)
- J 7
- J 9
- J 9/II
- 1917
Junkers CL.I Sheet pending
Variants (2)
- CL.I
- CLS.I
- 1919
Junkers F 13
The Junkers F 13 was the world's first all-metal passenger transport aircraft: a cantilever low-wing monoplane skinned in corrugated duralumin, with an enclosed, heated cabin for four passengers and an open crew position for two. The prototype, works number 531 and named Herta after Hugo Junkers's eldest daughter, was flown at Dessau by test pilot Emil Monz on 25 June 1919, and passed its type test barely four weeks later, on 18 July 1919. It brought together for the first time in a commercial aeroplane everything Junkers had been proving since 1910: the thick, unbraced wing he had patented after building his own wind tunnel at Aachen, the load-bearing corrugated duralumin skin first used as external covering on the J 7, and a cabin fitted out for fare-paying passengers rather than for a second airman. The design team under Otto Reuter took it from November 1918 concepts to a flying aircraft in six months, in the miserable conditions of the first post-war winter, and Monz reported a machine outstanding aerodynamically, in handling and in operating economy. Allied restrictions on German aviation pushed the type abroad almost immediately: the first production aircraft was sold in the United States in October 1919, and F 13s went on to fly in more than thirty countries, from Colombia and Bolivia to Persia, Sweden, Hungary, the Soviet Union, Canada and Spitsbergen, swapping wheels for duralumin floats or skis wherever there were rivers or snow instead of aerodromes. By the mid-1920s the type accounted for something close to 40 per cent of the world's air-traffic network. It was also the backbone of Junkers Luftverkehr and, through it, of the airline that became Luft Hansa: of the 162 aircraft the predecessor companies brought to the merger of 6 January 1926, 48 were F 13s. Production ran at Dessau, with spells at Danzig, Reval and Fürth and a Soviet line at Fili near Moscow, and the total built is disputed between 314 and 351, with 322 the most quoted figure. The last F 13 in commercial service was retired in Brazil in 1951, and faithful reconstructions have been flying again since 2016.
- 1921
Junkers K 16 Sheet pending
Variants (8)
- K 16
- K 16a
- K 16b
- K 16ba
- K 16bi
- K 16bo
- K 16c
- K 16ce
- 1922
Junkers T 19 Sheet pending
Variants (1)
- T 19
- 1923
Junkers T.21 Sheet pending
Variants (2)
- J 22
- T 21
- 1923
Junkers T 23 Sheet pending
Variants (4)
- T 23D
- T 23E
- T 26
- T 27
- 1924
Junkers G 24 Sheet pending
Variants (29)
- F 24kae
- F 24kai
- F 24kau
- F 24kay
- F 24ko
- G 24
- G 24a
- G 24b1a
- G 24ba
- G 24bi
- G 24ce
- G 24de
- G 24e
- G 24fe
- G 24g1e
- G 24ge
- G 24gn
- G 24gu
- G 24h1e
- G 24he
- G 24hu
- G 24L
- G 24li
- G 24mai
- G 24nao
- G 24 Prototype
- K 30
- R 42
- W 41
- 1925
Junkers J 29 Sheet pending
Variants (1)
- J 29
- 1926
Junkers W 33 Sheet pending
Variants (7)
- W 33b
- W 33c
- W 33c3e
- W 33dd
- W 33dGao
- W 33f
- W 33he
- 1927
Junkers K 37 Sheet pending
Variants (2)
- K 37
- S 36
- 1929
Junkers A50 Junior Sheet pending
Variants (9)
- A50
- A50ba
- A50be
- A50ce
- A50ci
- A50fe
- A50 Heritage
- A50 Junior
- KXJ1
- 1929
Junkers K 47 Sheet pending
Variants (2)
- A 48
- K 47
- 1929
Junkers G.38 Sheet pending
Variants (1)
- G 38
- 1930
Junkers Ju 52 Sheet pending
Variants (45)
- A.A.C. 1 Toucan
- C-79
- CASA 352
- CASA 352L
- Ju 52
- Ju 52/1mba
- Ju 52/1mbe
- Ju 52/1mbi
- Ju 52/1mca
- Ju 52/1mcai
- Ju 52/1mce
- Ju 52/1mci
- Ju 52/1mdi
- Ju 52/1mdo
- Ju 52/3m
- Ju 52/3m12e
- Ju 52/3mba
- Ju 52/3mce
- Ju 52/3mde
- Ju 52/3mf1e
- Ju 52/3mfe
- Ju 52/3mg10e
- Ju 52/3mg11e
- Ju 52/3mg12e
- Ju 52/3mg13e
- Ju 52/3mg14e
- Ju 52/3mg3e
- Ju 52/3mg4e
- Ju 52/3mg5e
- Ju 52/3mg6e
- Ju 52/3mg7e
- Ju 52/3mg8e
- Ju 52/3mg9e
- Ju 52/3mge
- Ju 52/3mho
- Ju 52/3mkao
- Ju 52/3ml
- Ju 52/3mlu
- Ju 52/3mmao
- Ju 52/3mnai
- Ju 52/3mreo
- Ju 52/3msai
- Ju 52/3mte
- Ju 52/3mZ5
- K 45c
- 1931
Junkers Ju 49 Sheet pending
Variants (1)
- Ju 49
- 1932
Junkers Ju 60 Sheet pending
Variants (1)
- Ju 60
- 1934
Junkers Ju 160 Sheet pending
Variants (1)
- Ju 160
- 1934
Junkers Ju 86 Sheet pending
Variants (26)
- Ju 86A-0
- Ju 86A-1
- Ju 86abl
- Ju 86B-0
- Ju 86bal
- Ju 86C-1
- Ju 86cb
- Ju 86D-1
- Ju 86E-1
- Ju 86E-2
- Ju 86G-1
- Ju 86K-1
- Ju 86K-13
- Ju 86K-2
- Ju 86K-4
- Ju 86K-5
- Ju 86K-6
- Ju 86K-7
- Ju 86P-1
- Ju 86P-2
- Ju 86R-1
- Ju 86R-2
- Ju 86R-3
- Ju 86 V4
- Ju 86 V5
- Ju 86Z
- 1935
Junkers Ju 87 Sheet pending
Variants (22)
- Ju 87 A-0
- Ju 87 A-1
- Ju 87 A-2
- Ju 87 B-0
- Ju 87 B-1
- Ju 87 B-2
- Ju 87 C-0
- Ju 87 C-1
- Ju 87 D-1
- Ju 87 D-2
- Ju 87 D-3
- Ju 87 D-4
- Ju 87 D-5
- Ju 87 D-6
- Ju 87 D-7
- Ju 87 D-8
- Ju 87 G-1
- Ju 87 G-2
- Ju 87 R-1
- Ju 87 R-2
- Ju 87 R-3
- Ju 87 R-4
- 1936
Junkers Ju 88 Sheet pending
Variants (47)
- Ju 88 A-0
- Ju 88 A-1
- Ju 88 A-11
- Ju 88 A-12
- Ju 88 A-13
- Ju 88 A-14
- Ju 88 A-15
- Ju 88 A-16
- Ju 88 A-17
- Ju 88 A-2
- Ju 88 A-3
- Ju 88 A-4
- Ju 88 A-5
- Ju 88 A-6
- Ju 88 A-7
- Ju 88 A-8
- Ju 88 B-0
- Ju 88 C-1
- Ju 88 C-2
- Ju 88 C-3
- Ju 88 C-4
- Ju 88 C-5
- Ju 88 C-6
- Ju 88 D-1
- Ju 88 D-2
- Ju 88 D-3
- Ju 88 D-4
- Ju 88 D-5
- Ju 88 G-1
- Ju 88 G-6
- Ju 88 G-7
- Ju 88 H-1
- Ju 88 H-2
- Ju 88 H-3
- Ju 88 H-4
- Ju 88 P-1
- Ju 88 P-2
- Ju 88 P-3
- Ju 88 P-4
- Ju 88 R-1
- Ju 88 R-2
- Ju 88 S-0
- Ju 88 S-1
- Ju 88 S-2
- Ju 88 S-3
- Ju 88 T-1
- Ju 88 T-3
- 1937
Junkers EF 61 Sheet pending
Variants (2)
- EF 61 V1
- EF 61 V2
- 1937
Junkers Ju 89 Sheet pending
Variants (2)
- Ju 89 V1
- Ju 89 V2
- 1937
Junkers Ju 90 Sheet pending
Variants (1)
- Ju 90
- 1940
Junkers Ju 288 Sheet pending
Variants (3)
- Ju 288A
- Ju 288B
- Ju 288C
- 1942
Junkers Ju 290 Sheet pending
Variants (9)
- Ju 290 A-0
- Ju 290 A-1
- Ju 290 A-2
- Ju 290 A-3
- Ju 290 A-4
- Ju 290 A-5
- Ju 290 A-6
- Ju 290 A-7
- Ju 290 V1
- 1942
Junkers Ju 252 Sheet pending
Variants (1)
- Ju 252
- 1943
Junkers Ju 352 Sheet pending
Variants (1)
- Ju 352 A-1
- 1943
Junkers Ju 390 Sheet pending
Variants (1)
- Ju 390 V1
- 1943
Junkers Ju 388 Sheet pending
Variants (3)
- Ju 388J
- Ju 388K
- Ju 388L
- 1944
Junkers Ju 287 Sheet pending
Variants (1)
- Ju 287 V1
- 1946
Junkers EF 126 Sheet pending
Variants (4)
- EF 126 V1
- EF 126 V3
- EF 126 V4
- EF 126 V5
- —
Junkers J 15 Sheet pending
Variants (1)
- J 15
- —
Junkers W 34 Sheet pending
Variants (19)
- K 43
- W 34 a
- W 34 be
- W 34 be/b3e
- W 34 ci
- W 34 di
- W 34 f
- W 34 fa
- W 34 fä
- W 34 fao
- W 34 fei
- W 34 fg
- W 34 fi
- W 34 fo
- W 34 fue
- W 34 fy
- W 34 gi
- W 34 hau
- W 34 hi
- —
Junkers A 32 Sheet pending
Variants (2)
- A 32
- K 39
- —
Junkers Ju 322 Sheet pending
Variants (2)
- Ju 322 V1
- Ju 322 V2
- —
Junkers A 35 Sheet pending
Variants (6)
- A 20
- A 20L
- A 20W
- A 25
- A 35
- R53
- —
Junkers Ju 46 Sheet pending
Variants (1)
- Ju 46hi
- —
Junkers Ju 188 Sheet pending
Variants (12)
- Ju 188 A-1
- Ju 188 A-2
- Ju 188 A-3
- Ju 188 C
- Ju 188 D-1
- Ju 188 D-2
- Ju 188 E-1
- Ju 188 E-2
- Ju 188 F-1
- Ju 188 F-2
- Ju 188 R-0
- Ju 188 V1
- —
Junkers G 31 Sheet pending
Variants (8)
- G 31.1
- G 31.2
- G 31ba
- G 31de
- G 31fi
- G 31fo
- G 31go
- G 31ho