[Johannes]

Hi Andrey

You are certainly correct about the quality of the mikrofilms. April 1943 in the East was the worse, but I had them cleaned-up and put on disk, zooming in on dodgy area was a big help.

They match almost exactly flugbücher entries, though often missing one or two, but these can be explained as unconfirmed claims. At the moment I am working on about a thousand abschussmeldung reports, which also match the mikrofilms, and confirm some of those flugbuch entries as lacking witnesses.

Have been amassing claims from these three methods and also abschusstafel.and abschussliste.

The abschusstafel of JG27 has unconfirmed listed, but notes these, and sure enough the unconfirmed ones are missing from the mikrofilms, Werner Schroer is a good example.

Regarding confirmation "viermots" are a nightmare, some e.v seem to have been sonfirmed, even w.b, and most v.n.e-a.s.m were confirmed, h.s.s were usually unconfirmed.

Wilhelm Moritz was a great exponent of the "head on attacks" he would usually start his attack from 800 metres and only break-away at 50 metres, to put this into time just a few seconds, and I believe 50 metres represents a quarter of a second. Can't see how he could see the bomber go down, yet I have seen video footage of head-on attacks, the bomber appears to fly on, but put in extreme slow motion you can count the individual hits, and there are more than enough to be a fatal blow. Actually I cannot see the bomber doing any sort of avoiding turn, or the gunners returning fire.

Regard Prien, I find very few mistake, but his II./JG 2 Afrika file must have been mis-sorted as the details are correct, but pilots names are wrong.

Also some flugbücher have additional information. One JG51 pilots noted his konrades claims, I assume he was witness to them, he even recorded the claim number, one souch konrade was Heinz Marquardt, the inter mikrofilm claims mentioned are numbered exactly as per mikrofilm, those post mikrofilms do not match those previously accepted, therefore I before those from the flugnuch source.

Almost certainly what we have accepted for Gerhard Barkhorn post mikrofilms are "made-up" by Hans Ring as Daniel & Gabor Horvath sent e some official documents found whilst researching there book "Verified Victories " that contradicts these, which also explains why researchers that confirmed so strongly Barkhorn's honest claiming stated until he neared "300" then things changed, they changed because the information was false.

I believe Ring also faked the last pages of Johannes Steinhoff;s flugbuch. We can I think safely assume other fake documents are out there.

I have been using the Bundes mikrofilms on-line to look at the "200" names I could never identify, and have been having some success, it is easy to zoom in and print the name 100 x original size and compare them to other names to work-out the spelling. Funny enough just worked one out with Bernd Barbas an Oblt making only one claim, came back as Klemenz, hear again Hans Ring stated thirty-four claims, real total five, this guy was a former night-fighter pilot who strangely joins JG52, so it had taken twenty-three years to identify this pilots name, which was the last unidentified name I had for JG52.

There is still much work to be done.

Take Care

Johannes