“Storerooms of History” presents objects preserved as wrecks. These are mainly aircraft from the pioneering and interwar periods, left in the condition in which they survived to modern times. Their example helps us appreciate the difficulties of restoring technical heritage objects, as well as the problems associated with evacuating large-scale monuments during wartime.
Estimated individual visiting time – approximately 20–30 minutes.
In the former garage of the 2nd Aviation Regiment, there are three more exhibitions. Through a replica of a freight wagon, the entrance leads to the “Storerooms of History” exhibition, which consists of aircraft from the pioneering and interwar periods. These aircraft survived from the destroyed German museum Deutsche Luftfahrtsammlung in Berlin, known as the Göring Collection, which the Germans evacuated during the war from Berlin to Czarnków in Greater Poland and abandoned there at the railway station.
They are displayed in the setting and condition in which they were found, without any restoration work. Among them is the oldest aircraft in the Museum’s collection – the Levavasseur Antoinette from 1908, and other aircraft from the pioneering era, such as the AEG Wagner Eule, Geest Möwe IV, and a replica of the Etrich Taube from 1910, built in the 1930s – the first aircraft to appear at the Rakowice airfield in 1912.
One of the most interesting exhibits is the fuselage of the Messerschmitt Me 209V1 record-breaking aircraft, which in 1939 set a flight speed record of 755 km/h for piston-engined aircraft that stood for 30 years. Next to it stands the fuselage of an Albatros L.101 training aircraft from 1930, used at the German Commercial Pilots’ School (Deutsche Verkehrsfliegerschule – DVS), which was in reality a disguised military pilot school, whose existence in the Weimar Republic was forbidden under the Treaty of Versailles. In the left corner of the hall stands a German Heinkel HE-5f floatplane from the 1920s, and beside it the fuselage truss of an American Stinson L-5 Sentinel liaison aircraft, captured by the Germans during fighting in Europe.
