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Re: Hellmut Nodinger collection
Thanx Ed and Dean,
Ed, my comment related to the fact that the collection is so over-priced that only someone who is a rich and very serious memorabilia collector (as opposed to us poor historians) would ever consider buying this at that price. If it does sell, I wouldn't expect that they would be very eager to share for free what they've paid so dearly for.
There is some question about the validity of some of the info on claims made in the cover story about Nodinger. The "either 18 or 21 December 1939" incident doesn't pan out very well. There were no Wellington losses on the 21st, so almost certainly this info relates to the 18th (the Battle of the Heligoland Bight), when 15 Wellingtons were SD or Crashed out of 22. That air battle has been pretty well documented by Prien and Chris Shores, as well as in our Heinrich Weiss manuscript and other sources. There were only two claims by 3./JGr101 pilots confirmed from that action, Oblt Dietrich Robitsch, the StaKap, and Oblt. Rolf Kaldrack. Now this doesn't mean that Nodlinger didn't participate in attacks, or even the shooting down some of the Wellingtons, it just appears that he wan't among the potential claimants whose results were subseqently verified. Shooting down a large bomber often took the combined attacks of several aircraft to achieve results.
There are so many holes and missing info in the 1940 II./ZG1 and III./ZG76 victory claims info that survived the war that judging any of the other claims during that period is almost impossible, although some of them may well be accurate. Then there is the problem of the notes in blue added after the original writing. Still some serious questions about what we might learn from the FB, even if we can eventually get access to it. However, I'd much rather have it available for evaluation than not. The fact that Nodinger isn't even mentioned by Ring/Bock on their loss lists for 1940, still bothers me.
Regards,
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