Blohm & Voss

Blohm & Voss, written Blohm+Voss since 1955, is a German shipbuilding and engineering company founded in Hamburg on 5 April 1877 by Hermann Blohm and Ernst Voss to build steel-hulled ships. It built sailing ships and then steamships, and its best known product was the battleship Bismarck. In 1933, when the firm was in financial trouble, the Blohm family set up the Hamburger Flugzeugbau to build aircraft, mainly long-range flying boats and licence-built types for other makers. In 1937 that division was renamed as the aircraft department of the Blohm & Voss shipyard and its designs took the BV code, including the BV 138 flying boat, the BV 222 Wiking and the BV 238. After the war shipbuilding was forbidden and the company almost ceased to exist, but it revived in the 1950s and later passed through Thyssen, STAR Capital Partners and Lurssen to Rheinmetall in 2025, building warships and refitting megayachts.