Horten Ho XIV

This was a sports sailplane designed to conform to the 1939 Olympic Games specification. It was designed for simplicity and ease of production. The first aircraft was built from sketches and proper drawings for the production type were made later with slight modifications. Construction was carried out at Hersfeld.

Performance was stated to be:

Alfons Putzer remembers:

As Goettingen fell to the advancing American troops, the Horten brothers, myself and a couple of staff members drove to Brandis near Leipzig with a trailer, containing the almost finished Ho XIV. The staff at the Me 163 base there, under the command of Wolfgang Spate, was cooperative, and gave us access to a workshop. As soon as our work got underway, both the Americans and the Russians were practically on our doorstep. The Hortens hurried off to Berlin, while I was asked to try to save the H XIV.

The three of us remaining put the sailplane back in the trailer again, then managed to commandeer a Mercedes diesel truck, loaded it up with extra fuel cans, hooked up the trailer and headed West.

Near the front was a large forest with a small village in the middle. Only one road let to it from the East. We decided to hide there, and let the Americans overrun us.

We hid the sailplane in an attic above a small foundry, where old wooded forms and other junk camouflaged it nicely. Drawings and other documents were put in an metal cylinder, and buried in the ground. Then, there was little to do but settle down in he village inn, which we shared with a refugee lady from Cologne.

Our first encounter with the Americans did not come out the way we had hoped. One of us, Ing. Warmund, was unfortunately shot, I do not know why! The remaining two of us reached Bonn eight weeks later.

The lady from Cologne has since informed me that a group of foreign workers were ordered to remove the sailplane from the attic, and destroy it, which they reluctantly did.