[Johannes]

Hi

Not all un-popular pilots were fraudsters Friedrich Geisshardt was unpopular because he was arrogant, his claims were good.
Kurt Welter's claims were outragous, and he was hated for it!
With Hartmann, he was known to look after number one, as stated before he took no part in ground attack misions, but if I was to guess I would say that other pilots whether right or wrong suspected false claims.
Regarding false claims his actual claimed (frequency) do suggest fraud, though so do Marseilles and he was honest! Let's say his claims if i had to guess honest or not, I would guess dis-honest. Forget the name but a member has stated 80 actually crashed, if that's 80 from 352 I don't know, in fact the last twenty's dates are not even 100% so how can they be judged?

Hartmann had a said end, after Barkhorn's death he became paronoid, would attend Luftwaffe meetings, or like to leave his house so much, also took to drinking too much and the smoking had aged him, he fell at home and hit his head.
So who actually shot doen the most aircraft is likely to be Rall or Barkhorn, both whose claims look honest, Lipfert is known to have been honest, and list claims suggest so, Nowotny and Rudorffer were frauds, as were Weissenberger and Erhler, Batz and Schuck are thought to be, as is Graf, don't really know about Hafner and Kittel. Schuck's total anyway is based on this statement that Goring had told him that an additional 25 of his claims had just been confirmed! I can find only 176 for him, but it should be 181! and Phillip is a little short of 200! Hackl about 150 but honest, Krupinski honest!

Regards

Johannes