Born in Schwerin as the son of an employee of the Fokker company he studied airplane engineering in Berlin. During World War II he was the lead engineer at the Messerschmitt AG building the first jet plane, the Me 262. After the war he created the Bölkow GmbH in Ottobrunn, which with time grew to the biggest aeronautics and spaceflight company, MBB (Messerschmitt-Bölkow-Blohm). In the early 1990s it was bought by DASA.