Luftwaffe and Allied Air Forces Discussion Forum

A short caveat on the subject of duplicate names. In going through the 40,000 pages of Luftwaffen-Personalveranderungen issued by the Luftwaffenpersonalamt, I noticed that even LPA was perplexed by this problem. Until early 1942, they solved it by affixing a Roman numeral after the name of individuals with the same name in an attempt to keep them straight in the personnel documents and orders - for example, Hans Schmidt I, Hans Schmidt II, Hans Schmidt III, Hans Schmidt IV, etc. After the beginning of 1942, they began using the date of birth after the name whenever there was more than one individual with that name.

I also noticed that even the clerks at LPA made frequent mistakes with these names. It was not unusual to see a Gerhard Schon, Gerhard Schön and Gerhard Schoen in 3 different Personalveranderungen over a span of a year or two.

The only way to resolve this problem definitively would be to obtain copies of the individual Personalkarte from the LPA Karteikarten at BA-MA Freiburg.

Until someone has the time and money to do that, there will continue to be some unavoidable errors in our:

Luftwaffe Officer Career Summaries
by Henry L. deZeng IV and Douglas G. Stankey