The Hubschraubermuseum Bückeburg, a German helicopter museum, keeps a short German-language biography of the designer behind the Focke Rochen in its archive of notable people. The page ends by crediting its text to Wikipedia, so it is a reused encyclopedia entry rather than original museum research. It is useful to this dossier because it sets the Rochen within a career running from 1908, when Focke began his engineering studies, to the mid-1960s. It gives a start date and a patent date for the project, and it describes a private wind tunnel Focke built in Bremen late in life. It cites no documents, so its Rochen dates are unverified, and it says almost nothing about the Rochen's design.
One small point of naming: the museum spells the first name "Henrich", while other pages in this dossier use "Heinrich". Both refer to the same person, born in Bremen on 8 October 1890 and died there on 25 February 1979 (see Heinrich Focke).
What the biography says about the Rochen
The Rochen gets a single sentence. The page says Focke received a patent in 1957 for the Focke "Rochen", which it describes as a ring-shaped flying wing with a central rotor (in German, "ringförmigen Nurflügler mit zentralem Rotor"). It adds that development had already begun in 1944.
Those two dates partly match and partly conflict with the source archive page summarised in Heinrich Focke and the Focke Rochen: A WWII VTOL Project in the source Archive. That page also gives 1957 as the year of the patent filing, so the two sources agree on the late patent. However, the source page credits Focke with a 1939 patent on the circular-aircraft idea, and the museum biography does not mention it. The museum's 1944 start date fits the source archive wording that design work began in the last years of the Third Reich. Neither source gives a patent number for the 1939 claim, so this dossier cannot settle the question.
The biography also does not say whether the Rochen was ever built, model-tested or flown. It also does not describe the louvers, auxiliary combustion chambers or propeller arrangement covered in this dossier's concept pages. Calling the design a central "rotor" rather than twin contra-rotating propellers is the museum text's wording, and it does not explain the choice.
Was Focke working for Focke-Wulf when the Rochen began?
Probably not, if the museum's account is right. That matters because Focke-Wulf repeats a description of the Rochen as a project by Focke "of the Focke-Wulf company" late in the war.
The biography treats Focke-Wulf as Focke's fixed-wing chapter. He co-founded the firm in 1924 with Georg Wulf and Werner Naumann, and the page credits it with 29 aircraft types and about 140 machines by 1933. That same year, it says, outside pressure removed him from the management. He was allowed to continue his rotorcraft work, but later left altogether because, the page says, the company's leaders did not see the concept's potential and made difficulties for him.
His rotorcraft career, on this account, began inside Focke-Wulf but moved out of it. It started with licensed Cierva C.19 and C.30 autogyros after the 1931 merger with Albatros, a principle the page says never convinced him. It produced the Fw 61, which the biography dates to 1934 in Bremen and calls the first truly capable helicopter. From 1937 the work moved to Focke-Achgelis at Hoykenkamp, a firm Focke founded with the aerobatics world champion Gerd Achgelis, where the Fa 223 Drache transport helicopter was built and a civil Fa 266 was planned. In 1944, the year the biography gives for the start of the Rochen, Focke-Achgelis was merged with Weser-Flugzeugbau. The biography does not say which organisation, if any, the Rochen work was done for.
What was Focke doing when the Rochen patent was granted?
By 1957 Focke was back in Bremen, having returned in 1956 from four years in Brazil. The biography places his next helicopter, the Kolibri, at the Borgward car works in Bremen in these years. It first flew in 1958. He was also still advising the British aviation ministry on helicopter construction, a role the page dates from 1948 to 1958. The Rochen patent therefore came while he was busy with conventional rotorcraft. The biography gives no patent number and does not name the country that granted it.
Which of his postwar projects were conventional rotorcraft?
Most of them, on the biography's account. Ordinary helicopters run through his postwar work:
- In France (1945–1948), held as a prisoner of war and obliged to work, he advised the state firm SNCASE on the S.E. 3000, a copy of the Fa 223, and built the single-rotor S.E. 3101, which the page calls the forerunner of the Alouette.
- In Brazil (1952–1956) he developed the two-seat Beija-Flôr light helicopter. The page claims this work eventually led to the founding of Embraer.
- At Borgward, the Kolibri drew on the Brazilian experience. The page says development stopped when Borgward went bankrupt in 1961.
Two projects in the biography stand apart from that pattern. One is the 1951 "Convertiplan", a four-rotor vertical take-off design developed in Amsterdam. The other is the Rochen itself. The biography calls the Rochen a ring-shaped flying wing with a central rotor and does not say it was meant for vertical take-off. The VTOL label comes from other pages in this dossier, such as Focke Rochen and VTOL Aircraft.
The rest of his postwar work was engineering and advice rather than design of his own aircraft. Because the Allies did not permit aircraft construction in Germany, the page says, he opened an engineering office in Bremen around 1948 and applied his aircraft-building experience to ships, boats and buildings. It also lists a 1950 post as designer at Nordwestdeutsche Fahrzeugwerke in Wilhelmshaven. His final consulting roles were with VFW in Bremen and the German aerospace research establishment, which the page says lasted until 1965.
The Bremen wind tunnel
The page says that around 1960, when Focke was about seventy, he paid for and built a wind tunnel in a shed behind a building in central Bremen. According to the page, he used it to improve helicopter flight characteristics and to study other aerodynamic problems, including flow phenomena at low speed and wake propulsion ("Nachstrompropulsion"). The page says the tunnel was rediscovered in 1997 and now forms the core of a small museum. It does not say what happened to the tunnel before then.
The page does not connect this tunnel to the Rochen. The source archive account mentions postwar wind-tunnel tests of a wooden 1/10 scale Rochen model in Bremen, but it gives no date or facility. It would be tempting to assume those tests took place in Focke's own tunnel, but neither source says so. On this biography's dating, the tunnel was built several years after the 1957 patent.
What this source does and does not establish
The biography is a secondary, reused encyclopedia text. It cites no patents, archives or test reports. It gives a career chronology and two dates for the Rochen, 1944 and 1957, but because nothing is cited, both dates are unverified. It gives no patent number or granting country that would let a reader check the 1957 patent. It does not support any claim about the Rochen's performance, testing or construction, and it says nothing to show that the design worked. Its main value to the dossier is context: it shows that the Rochen was an unusual project among the many rotorcraft Focke pursued, and it raises questions about the Focke-Wulf attribution and the reported 1939 patent.
References
- Hubschraubermuseum Bückeburg, "Henrich Focke" (personalities archive; text credited to Wikipedia), https://www.hubschraubermuseum.de/index.php/de/archiv-de/persoenlichkeiten?view=article&id=126&catid=15 (retrieved 2026-10-03).
Source notes & attribution
- https://www.hubschraubermuseum.de/index.php/de/archiv-de/persoenlichkeiten?view=article&id=126&catid=15