[Andreas Brekken]

Hi, Nikita

As I have tried to answer you several times earlier - if the government in modern Russia would allow independent researchers access to documents captured by the truckloads and brought to the Soviet Union shortly after the war we might be able to get better figures covering the last part of the war... at least this is a possibility... but I guess we can safely state by now that the culture for sharing information and openness is somewhat limited on that side of the former iron curtain.

With regards to your remark about my willingness to assist with specific questions I will always try to help, but I will also try to underbuild any answers with documents - if none exist I will only be able to speculate. Also - we have seen that especially eyewitness accounts can be inaccurate both with regards to dates, locations and even nationality of the combattants.


1.
As I also stated in my first reply, I will add further information from the archival material that I do not have at hand in digital form later on - covering the losses reported in the timespan January through March 1945.

And also as you may have seen - there were quite a few aircraft left in different states of derelict at airfields all around the former Third Reich after the war ended! The reports from the Generalquartiermeister available - which would in large parts be those archived in more western parts of Germany before the Soviet Union occupied Berlin - stop at April 1st 1945 - thus ALL losses sustained on the ground and in the air where the units did not report these before this date we do not have information on (or what we have is fragmented pieces from other sources).

I cannot see how this is hard to understand?

Also - I did not say that 'great part is counted as duplicated' - I only stated that we cannot count these numbers as one to one - 86600 aircraft listed in the documents is not 86600 individual aircraft totally destroyed.

In addition to this number we would have to add the more than 1000 frontline type aircraft damagend and/or destroyed while operated by training units - giving an approximate total of 97000.

I do not know what production figures you use - but according to estimates I have we could use 33000 Bf 109 and 20000 FW 190 for fighter production - thus a total of 53000 produced. If we state that all these were damaged or lost and add an overhead for some repeated losses for lets say 20% of them we still are at only about 64000 losses - giving room for other aircraft types of frontline types to account for 33000 additional losses up and until about January 10th 1945 (and the war still went on with at least high ground losses for several more months - as a pointer I have about 4500 losses detailed in my database for this period - covering documents filed from end of January through March - the period from April 1st through VE day is not included).

As you do not give any figures with regards to your thoughts it is very difficult to make a real discussion out of this, and I also think that nitpicking about if it was 81000 or 82000 losses is a waste of time.

My only reason to answer Steve Brew was that he obviously would like some information, and I tried to provide what I had from primary sources.


2.
With regards to aircraft written off due to tear and wear these would not be included in the Generalquertiermeister list - these list contain aircraft and personnel damaged or sustaining personal injury due to operations.

My guess is thus that for example a fair percentage of older Bf 109's were scrapped due to structural problems during the later part of the war - and I have no total overview of what documents they left behind - I haven't found that many in the archives yet at least.

I do know that there were general inspections ordered on specific aircraft models (for example He 59 and Ju 52) at given times, where aircraft were assessed and those found to be in a really bad shape taken out of service, broken up for spares or simply scrapped and the relevant raw materials recycled into the industry. This of course happened also to other aircraft - long lists of aircraft in the repair industry which were wrecked exist, and I have a few of them in my archive.


So to conclude this which I suspect will be the start of a longish thread Nikita.... I would rather that we try to dig up as much real info from the ground and different archives and try to piece these together as best as we can - instead of trying to hit each other over the head with numbers. The fact is that neither me nor you can state with any degree of credibility if one or the other number is 'correct'. We can probably hit the ballpark to a certain extent - but nothing more.

As I have understood from earlier dicussions - no central information were compiled by the Soviet forces - thus one have to dig this up and combine it at a low level with regards to unit hierarchy and only hope to be able to find the complete picture.

Regards,
Andreas B