[Simon Trew]

Chris - on the matter of deliberate misinformation, I entirely agree that one has to be careful (in principle, almost regardless of one's prior level of knowledge - in my case, 'developing') about the content of prisoner interrogations and associated documents. Indeed, an interesting feature of the secretly monitored conversations that I'm currently working my way through is the fact that several prisoners explicitly tell (or assert to) their cell-mates that they have lied to their interrogators. This may or may not be true; if one had spilled the beans, I suspect one might not advertise the fact to one's comrades. I also suspect that claims along these lines speak to what I think is a bigger problem (possibly relevant in the case that interests me here) with the monitored conversations - i.e. the tendency of young men to try to be competitive in their conversations (my plane was 5 mph faster than yours, my boss was harder than yours ...). Whether Engelhardt was 'talking up' Kunze's claims, and putting words in his mouth ('I'm the oldest pilot in the Luftwaffe'), is entirely unclear to me - which I guess is one of the reasons I asked the question here.

On the matter of senior officers flying with their units, that's an interesting one. I'm still working my way through KG 2 ADI(K) reports, and because of the way I've filed them, the information is a bit scattered. ADI(K) 31, 39, 81. 87, 91, 92, 93, 94, 116, 117, 126, 143, 176, 178, 180, 188, 189, 215, 218 and 238 (KG 2 reports from the Steinbock period) don't seem to say anything explicit on the matter. But some of the bigger raid reports, which consolidate information from prisoners from various units (among them KG 2), might do so. I need to look at Balke too.

Relevant here, though, might be the following notes I made based on one of the conversation monitoring (not interrogation) reports:

AIR 40/3092, SRA 4935, information received 6 February: Unteroffizier Stapelfeldt, W/T operator from 5./KG 6 (Ju 88, 3E+ON, plane damaged and two crew baled out over UK on 29 Jan), says that senior officers from KG 6 (Gruppe and Geschwader COs) were not allowed to fly on operations. “Only one Staffelkapitän was allowed to fly on operations with us.”

I don't know if this was the product of policy (as was the case with fighter unit senior officers during the Normandy campaign) or whether different units had different approaches to this particular decision. But it might shed a little light on the issue in more general terms.