Boy finds WWII plane with pilot's remains in cockpit

A 14-year-old Danish boy doing research for a history class found the wreckage of a German World War II plane with the remains of the pilot in the cockpit. Daniel Kristiansen and his father, Klaus, discovered what's believed to be a Messerschmitt fighter plane buried in a field on their farm near Birkelse in northern Denmark.

I can't even begin to imagine finding something like this. I go nuts when I find a arrow head.
Apparently Daniel was out in a field with his metal detector just looking for old plates or anythiny else metallic to show in his school class.

"We went out to the field with a metal detector," Klaus Kristiansen told CNN. "I hoped we might find some old plates or something for Daniel to show in school." Instead, they found bits of plane debris. So they borrowed an excavator from a neighbor and dug down seven or eight meters.

"At first we were digging up a lot of dirt with metal fragments in it. Then we suddenly came across bones and pieces of clothes," Kristiansen said. "It was like opening a book from yesterday." Kristiansen remembered being told by his grandfather, who lived on the farm during World War II, that a German plane had crashed there. "We think it was around November or December 1944," Kristiansen said. He recalled his grandfather once telling him that when the plane crashed, he was making Christmas cookies with Kristiansen's grandmother and his uncle, who was a young boy at the time.

Kristiansen hopes that the pilot's relatives can be found and the remains returned to Germany. "Maybe he can have a proper funeral," he said. The German Embassy has been informed of the discovery, the police superintendent said.

Source

a reply to: slapjacks

That's really cool. I hope they can identify the plane and the pilot. It would bring some closure and be interesting to find out the story of that particular sortie.

There's still much history to be uncovered in Europe....and elsewhere in the world.

a reply to: slapjacks

It always fascinates me that any planes which went down with the awareness of local populations, were not immediately scavenged, rendered down to their parts, once the flames had died down.

At that period in history, I would definitely have gone out to see if there was anything useful left. Scrap during war time is worth an absolute fortune, never mind being useful to the authorities!

a reply to: slapjacks

That is a pretty flat field. I speculate the occupying germans thaought it more prudent to bury the plane than to haul it out. I would have thought they would have at least pulled the body out though. That is a hell of a mystery but it is from cnn so it's prob fake news.

What a story. Entombed in his war machine for decades. If only those bones could talk, what tales they could tell.
Wars are started by ideas, but the mortar of war is blood and bone, mixed with will and courage. Here perhaps a personal history we will never know.

(Salute)

VF

a reply to: Woodcarver

That is a hell of a mystery but it is from cnn so it's prob fake news.

I thought CNN was the most trusted news source?

"Yeah, well we found some metal so I just borrowed the neighbors excavator ......"

That was lucky.

The story here in Denmark is a little different, they actually went looking for the plane knowing the area it crashed in.

Not sure why the story changed to stumbling upon it looking for plates, the body though, was a surprise.

The plane was most likely training plane for new young pilots, Germans were using the near by airport for the training of pilot.

The crashed plane is theorized to be a new pilot with out skill, it isn't the first plane found in the area and probably not the last.

Still a nice find.

a reply to: Mianeye

The story here in Denmark is a little different, they actually went looking for the plane knowing the area it crashed in.

Not sure why the story changed to stumbling upon it looking for plates, the body though, was a surprise.

cnn fake news, lol . Probably the body of a Clinton whistle blower and cnn is trying to cover it up.

When I was in the scouts we used to do hikes all over the place and generally if there was a high point there would be a crash site due to pilots not having enough training at least.

Normally in the UK the crew would of been buried with due dignity no matter what side they was on but remember in ww2 the effort of collecting such scrap would probably of been a right royal PITA and wasted more resources than it would of returned, i've walked past ww2 crashed planes and really all they did was drag the corpses out and that was it.

hmm - denmark seems to have a " odd " record of " loosing " things from its nazi occupation era

in 2008 - a part of the atlantic wall re-emerged

appologies for the daily fail link - but its " reasonably " accurate for this story

but - in shortn - the garrison of the remote defences were simply abandoned by everone once the oder to surrender and cease hostilities was given - they awaited the expected danish response - but no one came for 3 day - so they disarmed and marched to the nearest police station to surrender themselves - and after that no one bothered with thier former base

my hypothesis is that the danes just wanted to " move on " from thier wartime experiences - so just ignored everything that was a relic of nazi occupation