A 14-year-old Danish student was assigned a school history project about World War Two. His great-grandfather had talked about seeing a Nazi plane crash on their farm in 1944 – so he went to find it.
Armed with metal detector and a shovel Daniel Kristiansen and his father Klaus, went off into the field to see what they could find. According to the BBC, the metal detector went off but after some digging, the pair didn’t find anything.
So, Klaus brought in an excavator.
That’s when the pair discovered the remains of a pilot and a German Messerschmitt plane buried in a field on the family’s property in Birkelse, Denmark.
Speaking with Danish media Tuesday, Klaus said he jokingly told his son to go find a plane that allegedly crashed on the farm after he told him about the assignment.
“When Daniel was recently given homework about World War Two, I jokingly told him to go out and find the plane that is supposed to have crashed out in the field,” the father told Danish Broadcasting Corporation.
“And then we found some personal things – books, a wallet with money… Either it was a little Bible or it was Mein Kampf – a book in his pocket. We didn’t touch it, we just put it in some bags. A museum is now taking care of it. I think there’s a lot of information in those papers,” Klaus explained to the BBC.
Police and historians were called to the farm to handle the munitions and the pilot’s remains. The Historical Museum of Northern Jutland said its curators are examining the remains found on the farm.
Klaus told the BBC that for the 40 years he has lived on the farm, there was no indication that there was something in the field, waiting to be found.
“He was telling a lot of stories, my grandfather. Some of them were not true, and some of them were true – but this one was true. Maybe I should have listened to him a bit more when he was alive,” he said.
Speaking with CNN, curator and head of archaeology of the Historical Museum believes the pilot came from a German training base that was in the nearby city of Aalborg.
“We found the pilot’s papers, and I think we have a name,” Torben Sarauw told CNN. “It’s quite a special find.”
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