Comment by MarkusWandel

What is just awesome, to a tinkerer, is the great can-do spirit people had then. You couldn't buy it, so you made it yourself. They were going to do a helicopter, but for the lack of a suitable engine. As if the rest was just a solved problem, and may well have been, given the background of one of them.

And then to build a working hot air balloon that even looks pretty cool, entirely in clandestine conditions with improvised materials. In a museum in Germany you can even see a homemade twin-engine airplane that was planned for an escape attempt (that didn't happen, maybe just as well) ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wagner_DOWA_81 ). Just incredible technical competence everywhere, that fades when the need is gone, when absolutely everything you could want is just an Amazon order away.