Have been lucky enough to attend a couple of lectures given by Captain Eric ‘winkle’ Brown ex RN test pilot. As he is a fluent german speaker he was on loan to the Army during the latter stages of WW2 as the advancing troops captured airfields etc.
He recalled an airfield just outside Hamburg where they found a lot of destroyed aircraft but several complete, undamaged Me262’s. He was of the opinion that the retreating forces could not bring themselves to destroy them.
He also recalled a test flight he was doing in an Arado 234 jet bomber – one of the major problems with the coaxial flow engines used by the germans was the short life span (usually around 25 hours before being scrapped or failing) UK jet engines at the time were of the centrifugal type (more reliable) so he had to rely on a) captured techies preparing the aircraft and b) any maintenance records being available. He recalled starting both engines, getting to the end of the runway, opening up the throttles and starting to take off. The aircraft got about 50 yards before 1 of the engines ‘went bang’ taking the wing with it. He estimated that enginer had done 24hours and 50mins running time.
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