[Kristen Alexander]

Thank you Johannes, Matti and Doug. Putting it all together, and taking into account my lousy German, I have come up with the following re what happened to Shafer after he was shot down in France on 19 May 1940. I appreciate your assistance and if I have misstranslated something or missed something significant please let me know!

Post war research indicates that in his last combat on 19 May, Flying Officer Dick Glyde of 87 Squadron had engaged with Oberleutnant Hans-Christian Schäfer, the Staffelkapitän of 5/JG27. Schäfer had probably accounted for a damaged but repairable Blenheim of 57 Squadron based at Rosières-en-Santerre on 10 May (one crew member injured and hospitalised but the other two uninjured) and a damaged and abandoned Hurricane of 17 Squadron based at Hawkinge which had been on a patrol of Den Haag-Delft-Rotterdam on 11 May (pilot uninjured after force-landing). Dick wounded Schäfer but he baled out safely and was taken prisoner by French troops.
Schäfer did not languish as a POW for the duration. After France capitulated, despite promises to hand over captured Luftwaffe airmen to the British, all German prisoners were released, including 400 pilots. In June 1941 Schäfer was with JG77, in January 1942 he was with JG5 and sometime in 1943 he was transferred to JG3. In addition to his victories during the Battle of France, the Kracker archives indicate that in Norway he claimed a Beaufort south west of Stavanger on 2 September 1941 and a Blenheim at Egersund on 14 October 1941. There is an (uncomfirmed) possibility that he might also have claimed a Hurricane in Murmansk’s Tuloma area on 17 February 1942 and another in near the Luostari airstrip in Murmansk, near the Norwegian border, on 4th March 1942. Sometime after he transferred to JG3, he was seriously wounded in a mine explosion south of Anapa (on the northern coast of the Black Sea in the Crimea) and may have died soon afterwards.