Danish boy finds remains of German Messerschmitt in a field
Hard to believe that no one would've at least retrieved the pilot's body after the crash for burial. But maybe the bog existed back in '44. I wonder if they'll be able to reconstruct who the guy was and notify his family or descendents...When Klaus Kristiansen tried to bring his son's history homework to life, he probably wasn't expecting the boy to unearth a buried World War Two warplane.
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But that's exactly what happened when 14-year-old Daniel Rom Kristiansen found the remains of a German Messerschmitt plane, and its pilot, in an unremarkable field.
According to Mr Kristiansen, his grandfather once told him that a plane had crashed there in November 1944.
..."When my son Daniel was recently given homework about World War Two, I jokingly told him to go out and find the plane that is supposed to have crashed out in the field."
Father and son joined forces with a metal detector .... Mr Kristiansen, an agricultural worker, believed the wreckage had been removed years before. But then, a telltale beeping on a patch of boggy ground. The pair ...borrowed an excavator from a neighbour, and around four to six metres down, the plane's carcass began to reveal itself.
Their haul included an engine from the ME 109 Messerschmitt ... and the bones of a crew member who died in the crash.
"In the first moment it was not a plane," ... "It was maybe 2,000 - 5,000 pieces of a plane. And we found a motor... then suddenly we found parts of bones, and parts from [the pilot's] clothes. "And then we found some personal things - books, a wallet with money... Either it was a little Bible or it was Mein Kampf - a book in his pocket. We didn't touch it, we just put it in some bags. A museum is now taking care of it. I think there's a lot of information in those papers."
