[rof120]

In the matter discussed in this long thread I am just like a new-borne baby: actually I know virtually nothing...

...but I am able to imagine a few things. When Hartmann became a very famous ace the general situation was very bad for Germany, especially on the Eastern front: Stalingrad end of 1942-February '43, the disastrous, giant battle of Kursk July 1943 etc. (Hartmann started scoring in November, 1942, it seems...). Nazi Germany was a terrible dictatorship but at the same time its leaders were very concerned about the people and its reactions and opinions, which they influenced with all possible means like broadcasting, daily and weekly papers, "Signal" and "Der Adler", the weekly reports in cinemas etc. No TV at the time so everybody went to cinemas, in many cases they went there often. The Nazi leaders liked great, popular heroes and they needed them for propaganda purposes to "prove" how immensely superior the "German race" and the German nation were as compared to Russians and other "subhumans".

So I can imagine that Nazi leaders, in particular Göring, who was Luftwaffe's supreme commander and also the regime's N° 2, decided to create some radiant, wonderful heroes or to enhance their reputation if it was there already.

Göring was perfectly able to speak privately to some of these men without any witness and to tell them about this: "You are a very good fighter pilot. I was one myself during WW I and I admire you very much. (Flattering coming from a very famous, very powerful man is often effective with very young persons.) The fatherland needs great men like you so please help me to raise our dear people's morale. Right now we need this. Keep shooting down enemy planes but from now on you should not take any risks for yourself, never ever, for you must stay alive and of course not become a POW. Every victory claim filed by you will be approved (possibly with some exceptions to remain credible) so what you have to do is attacking E/A only when it is perfectly safe for you: hit and run, boom and zoom out of harm's way again. In this way you'll certainly score many hits, and some genuine victories too, but it doesn't matter whether your victims crash or not. I am asking you to do this for the Fatherland's sake. Just stay out of trouble. Of course you should always file victory claims which look credible at first sight."

This trick could have been used with several very good aces, for example Nowotny, Rudorffer, Walter Dahl, Hartmann and a few more. At the end of 1942 Mölders had been dead for over a year, Galland was flying mainly a desk (much to his chagrin) as "General of the Fighter Pilots" and they absolutely wanted him to stay alive because of the public opinion but there were a few others.

Just a theory but knowing the Nazis it could have been true so Hartmann, a very young fellow, would not be the main culprit, the bad guy. No matter how many actual victories he scored, clearly he was a great fighter pilot, "which nobody can deny". As a side-note I can mention that a long time after the war Galland received him, together with other friends including British ones, in his own house at... Oberwinter, now Remagen-Oberwinter, most probably several times. There are some photographs of such meetings. I doubt that Galland would have been so friendly to a phoney.