An almost entirely intact WWII German fighter plane was found in a Russian forest in 1989 – but what had brought it down?

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It’s 1989 and some hikers are out for a ramble through the Russian backwoods, picking their way through forest and marshland near the city of Saint Petersburg. Through a dense stand of trees one of them spots what looks like a Nazi swastika. As the hikers draw closer, it’s apparent that the insignia is painted on the tail fin of an almost entirely intact – although decaying – German WWII fighter plane. But how on Earth did this craft end up here?

The plane’s fuselage and the wings are both in good order. This aircraft clearly must have crash landed in the marsh and it seems likely that the pilot would have survived. The propeller is damaged but the cockpit glass is unbroken. Inside, a leather flying helmet lies on the seat, while the instrument dials are damaged but plain to see. The lack of obvious combat damage also deepens the mystery; it really doesn’t look like the plane was shot down.

In fact, it’s not so much of a surprise to find a crashed German plane in this forest wilderness. Some of the fiercest fighting during WWII was outside nearby Leningrad, now reverted to its original name of Saint Petersburg. The Germans besieged the city for 872 days from September 1941 before the Red Army finally forced them to retreat in early 1944.

What was surprising for those hikers who stumbled across that plane in 1989 was how well-preserved it was after decades lying in the woods. Enthusiasts soon identified the German aircraft as a Focke-Wulf 190, largely regarded as one of the most formidable fighter planes in service during WWII.

A helicopter later removed the Fw 190 from the forest and in the ensuing years a painstaking restoration project eventually saw the plane return to the air. The restorers were also able to identify the plane and its pilot, Paul Ratz. Furthermore, they even managed to piece together the story of the aircraft and its final moments before crash-landing.

We’ll get back to Ratz’s story shortly, but first let’s learn about the fighter plane he piloted, the Fw 190. It was nicknamed by those who flew her the “Würger,” which is the German word for shrike, a bird also known as the butcherbird. This aircraft was one of two main fighter planes of Nazi Germany’s air force, the Luftwaffe. The other main German fighter was the Messerschmitt Bf 109.

The origin of the Fw 190 lay in a competition held by Germany’s Aviation Ministry in 1934 and 1935. This was at a time when the country was keen to show its military strength, diminished after defeat in WWI. One element of this rearmament was a determination to strengthen the German air force. And one of the entrants to this design competition was Kurt Tank.

A graduate of Berlin’s Technical University, Tank worked for Focke-Wulf from 1931 until WWII ended in 1945 as both a test pilot and aeronautical engineer. Eventually, he headed the company’s design section. Focke-Wulf was one of Germany’s leading aircraft designers and manufacturers and was the maker of the Fw 190.

However, the design Tank entered into the Aviation Ministry’s competition was the Fw 159. This was an early version of the Fw 190 and it fell to the wayside against the superior Messerschmitt 109. But the Luftwaffe authorities were keen to have something even more advanced than the 109 in their arsenal, so in 1937 they issued new tender documents.

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This latest tender was prompted by fears that foreign powers might soon design fighters superior to the Messerschmitt 109. So Tank set to work again, and came up with a number of new designs. The one that caught the Air Ministry’s attention was powered by a 14-cylinder BMW engine. And so was born the Fw 190, the butcherbird. Its first flight was in June 1939 and it entered active service a couple of years later.

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In essence, the Fw 190 was a single-piloted, single-engined fighter plane capable of high speeds thanks to its powerful BMW engine. Another important factor in the ministry’s choice of the Fw 190 was the fact that the Messerschmitt 109 was powered by a Daimler-Benz engine, while the former used a BMW. That meant that the two fighter planes would not be competing with one another for spare parts or entire engines.

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Although speed was obviously important in the design of any fighter plane, Tank’s design philosophy was that speed was just one key factor. In his Focke Wulf Fw 190 in Combat, published in 2000, Alfred Price quoted Tank’s views on design. He said, “During World War I, I served in the cavalry and in the infantry. I had seen the harsh conditions under which military equipment had to work in wartime.”

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Tank continued, “I felt sure that a quite different breed of fighter would also have a place in any future conflict. [It would be] one that could operate from ill-prepared front-line airfields; one that could be flown and maintained by men who had received only short training; and one that could absorb a reasonable amount of battle damage and still get back.”

During the course of WWII, dozens of variants of the Focke-Wulf 190 were built. But the basic specifications of the around 40 or so different models were either the same or similar. The Fw 190 planes were just over 29 feet long with a wingspan of a little less than 35 feet. They had a range of about 500 miles and their top sped was around 400 miles per hour. And by the war’s conclusion, Focke-Wulf had manufactured some 20,000 of these planes.

Tank’s grasp of what was needed in a fighter plane was certainly accurate when it came to the chaos that prevailed on World War II’s Eastern Front. And that was where our Luftwaffe pilot, Paul Ratz, was flying on combat missions in 1943. As already mentioned, the larger battle Ratz’s squadron was fighting in was the Siege of Leningrad.

The restorers of that plane found in the forest were able to identify it as an Fw 190 A5, with the serial number 1227 and the call sign White A. And by cross-referencing that with Luftwaffe records, they were able to say that the pilot was Paul Ratz. The plane had been part of a fighter wing called Jagdgeschwader 54.

The unit’s nickname was “Green Hearts” because it had originally been raised in the German region of Thuringia – known as the “Green Heart of Germany.” Jagdgeschwader 54 first saw action in the invasion of Poland in 1939 and then took part in the Battle of Britain in 1940. The Luftwaffe then sent the fighter wing to the Eastern Front in 1941 just months after Axis forces had invaded the Soviet Union.

Jagdgeschwader 54 started out flying Messerschmitt 109s but switched to the Focke-Wulf 190s in early 1943. And that flight which Ratz made that ended mysteriously in a crash-landing took place that year on July 19, a Monday. His Fw 190-A5 variant aircraft was a modification of the basic Fw 190 – which allowed it to carry a heavier payload.

In fact, when Katz took off on that summer’s day, he was carrying a Sprengbombe Cylindrisch 250 (SC 250) slung beneath his plane’s fuselage. This was a 550-pound bomb packed with high explosive, a formidable weapon indeed and one widely used by the Luftwaffe on the Eastern Front. It had also been used to pummel London when the city was heavily bombed during the Blitz.

Katz took off from an airfield at a place called Siwerskaja, not far from Leningrad and just a 15-minute flight from the front line positions. He was accompanied by one other Fw 190 and the planes flew across the Dvina River and the front line. It seems their mission was to intercept trains carrying supplies to the besieged city of Leningrad.

The two pilots flew eastwards to the Voibakala district, where they found a train to attack. However, the train was armored and responded with heavy anti-aircraft fire. Katz and his fellow pilot may have sustained damage in that encounter. Shortly afterwards, he radioed his buddy to say that engine trouble meant he’d have to crash-land.

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And that was the last that the Luftwaffe heard of Ratz for the time being. But who was this man who’d disappeared from the skies near Leningrad on that summer day in 1943? We don’t know a great deal about the man other than his military record. That tells us he started out as ground crew with the Luftwaffe.

After his spell on the ground, Ratz graduated to flying with the rank of feldwebel, equivalent to staff sergeant, in 1942. He mostly flew on assignments that meant attacking targets on the ground like the train he was chasing on the day he disappeared. But he’s also reported to have shot down several enemy planes as well.

Ratz was certainly battle-hardened since he had somehow survived no fewer than three crash landings. He’d started out as a pilot with Jagdgeschwader 54’s Squadron 1 but in July 1943 he transferred to Squadron 4. That was just ten days before than final fateful flight when he disappeared and the Luftwaffe marked him down as missing in action.

It’s probable that his comrades in Jagdgeschwader 54 though that Ratz was dead. That was hardly an unusual fate for those who had flown with the outfit. During the course of the war, 491 of Jagdgeschwader 54’s pilots were killed in combat and 322 were wounded. The squadron lost a total of more than 1,800 aircraft. Balancing those heavy losses, it claimed to have brought down in excess of 9,600 enemy planes on the Eastern Front.

But Ratz wasn’t dead. His plane had suffered catastrophic engine failure, but he’d managed to accomplish an almost perfect crash-landing. As we’ve seen, when those Russian hikers stumbled across his aircraft in 1989, 46 years after the pilot crashed, it was almost entirely intact. And Ratz had walked away apparently unscathed, or certainly not seriously hurt.

Remember, the hikers had found Ratz’s flying helmet on the pilot’s seat where he’d left it. He’d even had time to take the first aid kit from its compartment in the plane’s fuselage. Perhaps he had suffered some minor injuries. But now he must have been very nervous; he was stuck in the middle of a forest on the wrong side of enemy lines.

Ratz then began walking in a westerly direction in the hope that he’d come across some of his German comrades before Soviet soldiers found him. And infantrymen are not always particularly sympathetic to pilots that they capture. After all, the fliers had been trying to kill them from the air. And combat on the Eastern Front, particularly around Leningrad, was notoriously brutal.

Unfortunately, it was the Soviets who picked up Ratz. However, at least they didn’t kill him out of hand. He was shipped off to a POW camp; and he would stay there until 1949, four years after the war’s end. Eventually, he returned to West Germany where, as far as we know, he spent the rest of his life.

By a twist of fate, Ratz died in 1989 – the very year that his plane was found in the forest. Reports say he never heard that the last aircraft he’d flown had been found. Two years after it was discovered, the plane was hauled out of its marshy grave by helicopter and a private buyer transported it to England.

Eight years later, the plane was purchased by American billionaire Paul Allen’s Flying Heritage Collection & Combat Armor Museum in Everett, Washington. Allen, of course, was the man who created Microsoft along with Bill Gates. The former died in 2018, but was still alive when the restored Fw 190 White A was revealed to the world.

The body of the plane was restored in England by a company called JME Aviation. Sadly, that firm’s owner, Jeremy Moore, decided to close his restoration business in 2010. At that point, the Fw 190 was transported to the U.S. so that its restoration, which was near completion, could be finished off.

Over in the States, it was a man called Mike Nixon of Tehachapi, California, who took the BMW 801 engine apart and returned it to working order. He has a reputation as a world-leading expert in the restoration of WWII airplane engines. But it surely must have taken all his skills to get that engine – which had lain in a Russian forest for 46 years – back to full working order.

Ratz’s restored Fw 190 took to the air for the first time in 67 years in December 2010 and was piloted by Steve Hinton. This particular restored Fw 190 is completely unique in that it’s the only one flying with its original BMW 801 engine. There are others that have flown, but they have either modern engines or ones adapted from other planes.

Hinton, a renowned aircraft racer, took the fully restored Fw 190 into the air for a 20-minute test flight. He checked that all the plane’s systems were working correctly and was able to give it two thumbs up. Elsewhere, the Luftwaffe Blog quoted his assessment of the newly refurbished craft’s performance.

Hinton said, “The plane is very light, fast, and responsive. This lived up to the history books.” It’s truly amazing to learn that Ratz’s Fw 190 has taken to the air again decades after he was forced to ditch it in a Russian forest. But we still have one unanswered question: what cause the plane’s engine to fail that day in 1943?

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We heard earlier that Ratz himself had reported that his engine had failed. And there was speculation that the armored train he’d attacked had possibly hit his plane with anti-aircraft fire. Yet when the plane was restored, no evidence of such damage was apparent. If the plane had been hit by Soviet fire severe enough to bring it down, that should have been easy to spot.

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And Ratz’s plane had only been delivered from the factory in April, just three months before he had to crash-land it in the Russian forest. So why would such a new engine have failed so drastically? In fact, something sinister was discovered during the refurbishment. And it very likely explains why the Fw 190’s engine stalled.

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Tucked into the engine was a piece of cloth. It seems that dirt, perhaps from the cloth, had got into the lubrication system, blocking a pipe. This likely caused the engine to overheat and malfunction, cutting out altogether. But how did this rag end up in the engine of an almost brand-new Fw 190? Well, the answer may lie with the factory workers that the Nazis used.

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Many of the people working for the Germans, including some in the Focke-Wulf factories, were actually forced labor from countries the Nazis had occupied. It’s not beyond the realms of possibility that one of those workers might have decided to take revenge on his oppressors. So Ratz may have spent six years in a Soviet prison camp because a disgruntled factory worker stuffed a dirty rag into the Fw 190’s engine as an act of deliberate sabotage.