Danish teen Daniel Kristiansen and his father dug up the debris of a WWII plane that his great-grandfather had long told the family crashed on their farm in northern Denmark in 1944.
The 14-year-old began to search the area with a metal detector to try to find artifacts for a school project, according to CNN.
His father, Klaus Kristiansen, said, “I hoped we might find some old plates or something for Daniel to show in school.”
Instead, the pair began to find a lot of metal fragments, then bones and pieces of clothing.
Their findings turned out to be the wreckage of a Luftwaffe Messerschmitt Bf 109 along with the pilot’s remains and personal effects, The Washington Post reported. Turns out his great-grandfather’s stories about an airplane crashing into his field in November or December of 1944 were true.
According to the stories, Kristiansen’s great-grandfather had been baking Christmas cookies with his wife and young son when the plane crashed. But Kristiansen’s father said that his grandfather also said the Germans had taken the plane away, so no one expected to find the remains 7 or 8 feet underground on the property, CNN reported.
The family turned everything over to the Historical Museum of Northern Jutland, including the pilot’s wallet, condoms, ration stamps, and a book that might have been a Bible or “Mein Kampf,” Hitler’s manifesto. The Museum told CNN that the pilot’s identification papers were still intact, which means he might be able to be identified.
Museum officials believe the plane and pilot may have come from the nearby German training base in Aalborg during the Nazi occupation of Denmark since the ration stamps are from that base, CNN reported. Kristiansen was hopeful that relatives of the pilot might be found and that he could get a proper funeral and burial.
Danish police said that they informed the German Embassy of the find, CNN reported.
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