[Stig Jarlevik]

Thanks Guys

Must admit I have never paid much attention to the "responsibillity" of license manufacturing in Germany. Can either Gunther or Seaplanes advise how the production procedure was handled in Germany during the mid 30's and onwards?

My own thought was that if lets say Junkers was awarded a contract for any number of W.34 then they in their turn sub-contraced to other companies if they were unable to complete the job in the stipulated timeframe. That is the way I felt things happened in the 1920's... The sub-contractor then issued their own WNr and that was it! During the early 1930's that process seems to have continued since B&V gave the early license built W.34 their own WNrs.

At some point during the expansion of the Luftwaffe and the radically increased production I suppose the RLM must have stuck its nose in and started to try and run things a bit more efficiently.

The question then is, did RLM issue an instruction to the companies that, when sub-contracting, company XX had to issue WNr for the sub-contractor as well, so all the aeroplanes of the same type ended up in the same blocks? Or did RLM themselves, already at this stage, issue WNr block(s) along with the contract?

I also have a feeling that sub-contracting was a bit of a hot potatoe! The company who owned the design rights must have been eager to protect their rights and various patents and also wanting to cash in on royalties etc. How was that handled by the RLM?

At one point (Was that after WW 2 broke out or before? See above.) the German aeroplane manufacturers must have been forced to abandon their own WNr systems, since we know that these numbers were issued centrally and given to the companies, no doubt at the same time as the manufacturing contract itself. Do we have anything like a fixed date when this happened?

Final question, did RLM at any time during the war abandon the sub-contracting method and issue production orders to others without going via the designing manufacturing company? How did they handle the royalty question? Huge Government manufacturing plants were constructed during the war, and I find it hard to believe that they were begging for license deals from any of the big companies, like Heinkel or Messerschmitt. Of course the icon Junkers was already in Government hands but still...?

Cheers
Stig

PS: One more thing. Why didn't RLM revert to the practice of the Luftstreitkräfte of WW 1 and use a serial number system? The complex and elaborate WNr system would then never have had to be developed...