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Quote:
Originally Posted by Larry deZeng
Nothing after 1940?
Larry, most of the KTBs in the f.500 are about the Polish campaign 1939. It seems the sole "Polish" collection was captured. Almost nothing like this for 1941-45, unfortunately. Few sporadic pieces only.
Luftwaffe reports in the Heeres documents are far more numerous.
Best regards,
Andrey
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Thanks, Andrey. Ever since
Glasnost and Boris Yeltsin, news of this collection (
Sonderarchiv) of German documents captured by the Red Army dribbled out in bits and pieces - some factual, some delusional - in
Prologue, the magazine of the U.S. National Archives, and in the bi-monthly newsletter of the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington. I kept close watch on both from around 1993 to 2010 or so. These claimed there were "thousands" of boxes of Luftwaffe documents found and seized in East Germany in 1945-47 and many more containing Lw. documents captured in the field, especially during
Bagration in summer 1944. It was also said that a "huge" amount of this material was for the 1942-45 period.
So now it appears that a lot of this information about the holdings of the
Sonderarchiv Moskau is incorrect? That's an enormous disappointment.
The Luftwaffe reports that appear in the Germany Army (Heer) records are identical in style to those that appear in the microfilmed German Army records in NARA RG 242 Microcopies T-311, T-312 and T-313. They were so generalized and redacted by the Luftwaffe before being distributed to the Army that they are today of little value or interest to air war researchers and historians. As you know, the Luftwaffe and the German Army did not get along all that well, to say the least. This rivalry and petty jealousy kept the Luftwaffe from sharing much with their comrades in
Feldgrau other than the bare essentials.
L.