Karl Hans Janke, a dental student at the University of Greifswald, left university likely due to illness. Drafted into the Wehrmacht in 1940, he was hospitalized for depression and discharged in 1943. On his family’s property, he invented flying machines and received patents for a “flapping-wing airplane” and a “location indicator for aircraft.”
Interned in 1949 at the Hubertusburg psychiatric hospital for chronic paranoid schizophrenia, he created 300 to 400 inventions, 3,000 drawings, and wrote the Family Book of Humanity. He also developed energy and political theories, including “space electricity” and the “German atom.” His work was only rediscovered in 2000.