Thread: Bomber Crew
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Old 6th June 2011, 10:57
Brian Bines Brian Bines is offline
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Re: Bomber Crew

The GQM were the Luftwaffe returns issued on a daily bases showing lost/damaged aircraft and crew names. In the UK they are held on micro-film at the Imperial War Museum and copies can be obtained on CD but the cost is likely to be up to £1000. Although issued daily it can take several months for a loss to be reported on them. Most of 1944/45 are missing and they do not include aircraft with minor damage
The NVM are the Namemliches Verlustmeldung issued at unit levels reporting the death/missing/injury status of crewmen. Sometimes they have aircraft details and cause of loss when known. These are held at the WAST Office Berlin and copies were available for a fee. Currently due to data protection laws they are only available to surviving crewmen or their relatives. When first available they contained personnel details of a crewmen but later ones had these blanked out. Obtaining copies of these used to be a way of obtaining loss details for the missing GQM reports of 1944/45. Quite a few researchers have copies of these on their own individual interest and a lot of the available 44/45 loss details come from these.
There is a project to try to rebuild the missing 44/45 records see http://www.the1944project.com/ additinally books of unit histories such as the JG histories by Dr.Prien do contain late war loss details.
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