Although the contest would eventually be won by the Junkers Ju 87, the Ha 137 demonstrated that B&V's Hamburger Flugzeugbau, not even two years old at this point, had a truly capable design team of its own.

In his place, Hamburger hired Richard Vogt, who had been working for a decade with Kawasaki Aircraft and was looking to return to Germany.

Nevertheless, Vogt was convinced that his new construction method would deliver an aeroplane of the required strength with better performance than traditional designs, so he started work on Projekt 6 and submitted it anyway.

Built entirely of metal and using a semi-monocoque fuselage, the design looked more like a fighter - specifically like the Heinkel He 112 - than a dive bomber.

By this point the definitive requirements for the dive bomber program had been drawn up, taken directly from Junkers' description of its own entry which had already been selected to win, calling for a two-seater arrangement.

However, when Ernst Udet took over the T-Amt later that year, he considered the close support role unnecessary, and informed Hamburger Flugzeugbau that it should stop work on the design.

V1 was destroyed in testing during 1935 when the ammunition for its guns exploded, and V6, D-IDTE, crashed in July 1937,[1] but the remaining four were used for years until a lack of spare parts for their engines eventually grounded them.