[Johannes]

Hi

Firstly many thanks for the "Benning" information. It was many years ago I started reading the mikrofilms, so my eyes have not got any better, that's for sure. Probably I recorded this as Karl "Benning" because I couldn't confirm this guy existed within this unit.
With Tony Woods he is more likely to record how it looks without knowledge of who it's likely to be i.e knowledge of who is with a particular unit. The mikrofilms also vary a great deal in quality, April 1943 and October 1944 in the East are the worst, then you have the problem with varying handwriting, some is quite appalling.
I have been friend with Bernd Barbas for many years now, and his lists are largely my work, but nothing else within his books. One other thing about the mikrofilms is that each page is twenty lines long, and if the quality is particularly poor then it's hard to know exactly which line your working, so it's easy to read the name correctly, but put it with the wrong line. With JG52 I was especially diligent, also had an untold wealth of information regarding who was with each unit, I would also have checked against the date/time only mikrofilm for each staffel. I will ask Bernd about a certain Karl Benning, if such a person existed, and flew with Stab./JG52, then we can safely say that Tony Woods is correct. With some pages all you can see are traces of shadows !!! With April 1943 in the East I had them professionally cleaned, and put on disk, but sadly I didn't do the same with the second worst October 1944 East.

Jochen Prien's lists are the most accurate I have seen, perhaps only one name in a thousand being incorrect, with the possible exception of II./JG2 in Africa, I am sure that the guy who read the mikrofilms was 100% correct, but there was a corruption in the excel sort, all the details are correct, except the most important detail......the names !

In my opinion the mikrofilms are almost entirely without mistakes......almost.
You should be able to get them from the Bundesarchiv, or at least they will put you in touch with a company called Seike who do the copying.

So for me in order of annoyance the worst things about the mikrofilms are:-

!. What's missing
2.Quality of imaging(under/over exposure)
3. Quality or handwriting
4. mistakes

Kind Regards

Johannes