I heard y'all were talking about me over here, LOL.
Re, Mimetall stuff... here's the thing.
Mimetall was the
final assembly point for airframes in the 500xxx series and they show as such on the Bauaufsichtluft acceptance reports... but despite protestations to the contrary, the aircraft were not regarded as PRODUCED by Mimetall. The actual components were produced by Weserflug Nordenham and sent to Erfurt where they were put together and went through the Einflug/BAL process. And I want to be super clear here, that sounds absolutely stupid on the face of it... it's over 400km between Nordenham and Erfurt. It honestly makes no sense to me either, but I am simply relating precisely what is in the documentation held at BA-MA.
Let's start here - this is the Fertigungstand (completion status) for each manufacturer in Sonderausschuß F4 (Focke Wulf's production ring) as of 30 Jan 1945. The report is laid out very clearly - which is not always the case, as anyone who's spent any time deciphering wartime documents will tell you! - and the various firms building different variants of the 190 are seen on the left, with individual columns for the various Baureihen going from left to right.
Notice Mimetall is blank.
That means - in very clear terms - that no airframes were considered
PRODUCED by Mimetall in January 1945. Note I said PRODUCED, not ACCEPTED.
The same applies to December 1944:
Once again all of the fields for Mimetall are blank, entirely bereft of any information whatsoever. But oddly, look at Arb Gem (Arbeits Gemeinschaft) - those totals are much higher than expected. So what gives?
I have yet to find the "Rosetta Stone" doc which lays out the exact responsibilities of each supplier - I have such Zentralfertigung docs for Messerschmitt but haven't found ones for Focke Wulf yet. What I can do is show you documents from Direktor Kalkert at Mimetall noting that airframes delivered from Weserflug were found to have problems and thus deliveries were halted as of 11 Dec 1944:
The real "smoking gun" was this communication from the director at Weserflug Nordenham on 24 Jan 1945 who says "
I have just been informed by my final assembly plant, Mimetall, the local BAL is refusing acceptance of aircraft without the MW 50 system"
But don't take my word for it, here's the document itself - there's plenty of German speakers on this forum, tell me if I'm wrong, but I don't think I am.
I mean... if both Weserflug and Mimetall regarded Mimetall as the final assembly point for airframes actually BUILT by Weserflug, who am I to contradict them?
Again, I must emphasize this sounds borderline insane, particularly given the distances involved, so I do not blame anyone for their incredulous reaction - I had a similar reaction when going through these files. And bluntly, Mimetall did not show up on any of the PRODUCTION reports because they were too busy trying to get their tooling in order to build the Ta 152.
Anyways, there's the info, there's the actual data from both Weserflug Nordenham/Roland Arbeits Gemeinschaft and Mimetall themselves, I'm not "inventing" this or pulling it out of thin air.
It would be interesting to know where those airframe components were painted... I haven't found a single hint in the files yet.
Cheers,
Lynn