[HGabor]

Agree, but soviet unit diaries are preserved (at least for the later years of WWII), mechanical reports have cross-references in regular AC inventory reports and there are German pilots, whose claims can be verified from the very same Russian diaries for over 90%! Not just for 29%, like Hartmann's, but over 90%! And that's a big difference. This tells me that those diaries are OK, as the soviets had no clue who sat in those German planes in order to manipulate their records accordingly. Don't forget, that these diaries were still written for themselves as top secret records (and if they did not report the losses, they did not receive new planes and pilots!!!), and not in the '50s, (cold war era) when everybody tried to lie to the 'other side'... We cannot paint both WWII and the cold war era with the same brush...