Here's something all out of the wild blue yonder!
During summer I was lucky to get my hands on four boxes of old model kits; among them a Pioneer2 Focke Wulf Ta-154 missing parts which didn't appeal to me. Then I decided to use some of the kits to practice building skills upon. Then this happened -
East Germany 1945: in the wake of Nazi defeat colonel Sergej Korolev had been sent from his drawing board in Kazan to Germany to see if anything worthwhile to the advancement of the Soviet State could be scooped up; notably the V-2 programme.
Arriving at an abandoned Luftwaffe base on the way towards Peenemünde he stumbled across the remains of a Focke Wulf Ta-154. It lacked the canopy and most of the interiors. Korolev wanted to know what the aircraft was all about and had his workers and some impressed Germans clean up the wreck.
Looking around the wreckage littering the place he stumbled upon a Messerschmitt Me-163. It being a wreck itself and known by now to the Soviets Korolev decided to borrow parts of it to rebuild the Ta-154.
Within a few days Korolev had his single seater Ta-154 airworthy. It lacked the radar which Korolev now was in the know of and had been ripped of its cannons but at least it could be tested in its new single seat configuration.
Engines had been fixed and tested
and the Ta-154 singleseater was ready for take-off
The aircraft was successfully testflown and then the Soviet Airforce commission had to be notified. The aircraft was flown off to some airbase within the Soviet Union. Korolev would go on his business in Peenemünde and return to the Rodina with the German rocket scientist's and engineers and ultimately head the Soviet Space Program. At times he would tell his Little Eagles - the Soviet Cosmonauts - of his experiences of rebuilding the Ta-154 to airworthy condition. Nobody knew what had become of the aircraft as the Jet-age had set in and nobody gave a damn of old Nazi piston aircraft; except a Soviet rocket engineer.
Years later Yuri Gagarin discovered the Ta-154 single seater in storage on an airbase and he wanted to show the aircraft to Korolev. Unfortunately Korolev died before he could see the aircraft one last time. With the death of Gagarin two years later the single seater Ta-154 once again lapsed into obscurity.