Black Eagles

This is the story of the men and machines of the Nazi and Fascist air forces. Six great German inventions that changed the course of aviation history.

The aircraft was the ultimate machine in the Nazi and Fascist ideologies. Flying represented the purest heroism; machines of steel speeding through the sky symbolised the authoritarian ethos. The regimes spent vast sums to build the best and test the limits, racing forward with advanced aerodynamics and advanced engines that were ahead of their time. This is the story of how the six finest Axis fighters came to life. Great engineers such as Willy Messerschmitt, Ernst Heinkel, Kurt Tank and Mario Castoldi, Giuseppe Gabrielli pushed themselves and their engineering teams to extremes to provide Nazi and Fascist leaders with their dream machines - the fastest high-performance fighters the world had ever seen. They were up against the greatest industrial nations - the United States and the United Kingdom, and yet they managed to provide their evil masters with technology that held the balance. In the latter years of the war, the prototypes they developed powered the United States' and the Soviet Union's race towards even better, faster and higher-flying fighters. They were the geniuses of the war and their planes were the best. The performance of these aircrafts compensated against the overwhelming industrial might of the Allies, right until the end.