EAST GERMANY: Jet Age

Like so many German scientists, Engineer Manfred Gerlach, 55, came out of the wreckage of Hitler’s Reich better off than ever. When the Russian armies over ran East Germany in 1945. Gerlach was one of a team of Junker jet experts hauled off to Russia to teach tricks of the trade to Russia’s aircraft designers. Returned to Communist East Germany in 1954, he was put in charge of a plant to develop engines for the 66-152, the jet airliner that was to be the crowning glory of East Germany’s new aircraft industry. The job was full of perks and prestige.

It was a project dear to the heart (such as it is) of East Germany’s Communist Boss Walter Ulbricht. Ulbricht poured an estimated $60 million into a vast complex of plants around Dresden, assigned 20,000 workers to the task. East Germany’s Communists tut-tutted at West Germany for buying its airliners abroad, and Neues Deutschland boasted that the BB-152 — a stubby four-engine turbojet designed to travel 500 m.p.h. and land safely on only 3,300 ft. of runway—would put the East Germans “into the forefront of international commercial aviation.”

Unfortunately, Ulbricht & Co. were in too big a hurry to get out front. When Nikita Khrushchev dropped in at the Leipzig Trade Fair in the spring of 1958, a life-sized mock-up of the 68-152 was one of the main attractions. Ulbricht could contain himself no longer. Over the protests of his engineers, who insisted the plane needed significant changes in fuselage and engine design, Ulbricht ordered the first prototype 66-152 into the air. Minutes after it took off, the jetliner crashed into a hillside, killing its four crew members.

Such a failure was no mere disaster: it had to be a crime. Last week, after eleven months in prison, Engineer Manfred Gerlach was brought into a Dresden court and charged with sabotaging development of the 66-152’s engines by issuing “false instructions.” He had been working for the West German intelligence all along, the prosecution said, and to prove the point brought to the stand his wife and 26-year-old daughter, who dutifully testified that Gerlach had repeatedly declared that “one must damage the state wherever possible.” Gerlach was hustled off to life imprisonment. The great 66-152 has yet to get off the ground.