Günter brothers
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Siegfried and Walter Günter were twin brothers and aircraft designers, born 8th December 1899. Both served in the First World war, where they became British POWs. After the war they studied engineering at the technical university of Hannover. Their talents were first recognised by Paul Bäumer who was impressed by the performance of a sailplane they had built with their friends Walter Mertens and Werner Meyer-Cassel and were flying at Wasserkuppe. Bäumer offered all four men a job with his company Bäumer Aero in Berlin. There they began designing motor gliders and then increasingly fast sports planes, including one in which Bäumer himself was killed in a crash in 1928.
In 1931, Ernst Heinkel recruited the Günters to work for his Heinkel company in Rostock. There they were to design some of the most important and famous designs associated with the company, including the Heinkel He 51, He 70 and the He 111.
After the Second World war Siegfried worked in Berlin in the car shop of his father-in-law. He was kidnapped by the Soviets and deported to the USSR, where he was forced to work on Russian aircraft designs. It became a myth of the Cold War that Siegfried Günter was involved in the design of the Soviet MiG-15 fighter aircraft. Siegdfried himself always denied this. In 1952 he returned to the GDR. One year later he went to West Germany, where he again joined the Heinkel works. He was involved in the construction of the EWR VJ 101, the world's first supersonic V/STOL-aircraft and the V/STOL transportation aircraft VC 400. Both designs ended up as prototypes and never saw serial production.
Siegfried died in Berlin on June 19, 1969.
