[Andreas Brekken]

Hi, Nikita

I think you might be on to something, even if I do not believe the reason is that it was not reported by the units 'on purpose'.

I have found several documents lately regarding the regime used for reporting losses in the Luftwaffe, and will put together an article on this issue during this winter.

The thing is that there were to channels for reporting, and one was it seems better with regards to consistency (or maybe I should say stricter), namely the losses were personnel losses occured.

I will come back to it later.

With regards to the specific case on 3.(H)/12, is is of interest to note that the loss record for said pilot WAS registered, and in fact as the last loss record for this unit. I do however also believe this interrogation report to be incorrect with regards to the fact, maybe a translation problem? as the strength report of said unit would leave it with no more than 9 aircraft in total at any time during August 1942, of which 4 seems to have been lost/damaged during this month. The natural conclusion to me is that there must have been more units at the airfield mentioned, and that Holzer reported that a TOTAL of more than 15 aircraft were lost/damaged during this attack, and probably some of the 3 aircraft lost aside his own during this month where one of them. Another possibility is that some of these aircraft mentioned were (at least som of them) MENT for his unit, but still officially not taken over from for example the depot organisation which were transferring them. Another distinct possibility is that the losses were reported under some dubious makeshift unit designation and that we yet have not 'found' them. (The unit did exist for some time after this, but invariantly known for example as Aufklärungsgruppe Fleischmann)

Interesting topics, we will have to discuss them more.

Please do not hesitate to send more specific data my way if you want me to look at it from the German side.

Regards,
Andreas B