[Simon Trew]

A little more on the age profile of Steinbock air crew, for anybody who might be interested and/or inclined to comment:

From ADI(K) reports, dates of birth (in one or two cases, just ages at time of capture) are known for 126 of the 130 Steinbock prisoners, and also for 64 dead air crew; a total of 190 persons.

Although that is not a massively large sample, my instinct (statisticians can advise otherwise) is that this is a large enough sample for the data to be reasonably illustrative of the Luftwaffe airmen who flew in the Steinbock raids.

Taking the age of the 190 persons on 21 January 1944, the day Steinbock began (and the day on which at least one man had his birthday), these are some of the figures that fall out from a little bit of analysis.

The average (mean) age of air crew was a little over 22.5 years.
The median age was 23 (almost 24).
The modal (most common single) age was 21 (this was 48 of 190 airmen for whom the age is known).

Also:

117 (61.6%) of the 190 men were 21, 22 or 23 years of age.
The youngest for whom the age is known was 19 (7 out of 190 men)
The oldest was 31.
29 men were 25-31 years old when Steinbock began

Slightly to my surprise, pilots tended to be young; mostly 20-22 years old and one of them was 19. Having said that, the oldest man was a pilot (Uffz Boetsch, pilot of 2./KG 66 Ju 188 Z6+HK, lost 24 February).

The highest ranking prisoner was Hauptmann Oben, also a pilot (aged 29; pilot of 6./KG 6 Ju 88 3E+AP, lost 24 March; according to the ADI(K) report, known to be Operations Officer of II./KG 6 in February 1944).