1943 aircraft crash over Swabia

The aircraft crash over Swabia in 1943 was a major aircraft collision during the Second World War. On the afternoon of 28 June, a total of 33 Heinkel He 111 bombers of II Group of Kampfgeschwader 53 took off from Gablingen military airfield for a formation flight over Swabia.

During the flight towards the west, six aircraft ran into a dense, suddenly gathering cloud cover. The pilots lost visual contact, and their aircraft collided in the air. An explosion followed, and burning aircraft plunged down over the Stauden. Two bombers struck the ground in the forest east of Seyfriedsberg Castle near Bauhofen, while three aircraft crashed on Langenneufnach land. One aircraft was able to make an emergency landing at the Lechfeld airfield.

18 soldiers were killed in the accident, among them 20-year-old Reinhold Buttchereit, the youngest of the victims, and Oberleutnant Karl Novy from Vienna, who at 34 was the oldest. Charred bodies were recovered from the wreckage of the burned-out aircraft, and remains of human bodies lay in the fields alongside aircraft parts.

Only two crew members, the gunner Ewald Gruhn and the radio operator Friedrich Brinkmann, survived the crash. It was also reported that one soldier had managed to bail out by parachute and had landed in a pear tree in Siegertshofen. The pieces of wreckage were collected over several days of work by members of the Reich Labour Service from Thannhausen and loaded onto railway wagons at Langenneufnach station for transport to Augsburg, while the crash sites were guarded.

A wooden cross in the forest still commemorates the accident today and serves as a place of remembrance. The exact circumstances and details of the crash are documented and preserved through the research of Werner Bischler of the Lechfeld Military History Collection.