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What does the evidence say?
Has anyone ever found evidence (even a hint) in Luftwaffe correspondence (records of the Luftwaffe) that shoot-down claims had become a propaganda tool of Goebbels, and the RMVP? After all, the Luftwaffe had propaganda officers that fed the Wehrmachtbericht on a daily basis.
Simple question: Is there evidence that the Luftwaffe claim system was systematically corrupted by a propaganda campaign?
Conversely, has anyone found evidence in the Soviet correspondence that reporting German shoot-downs as some other form of loss (or denying them outright) had become a propaganda tool of the Russian propaganda machine? (Not to mention the systematic misrepresentation of combat losses for other, more important reasons, that is, avoiding the internal wrath and purges that so often occurred?)
Quite frankly, I suspect the Soviet's record keeping in this regard. I think there is a mountain of circumstantial evidence supporting the above paragraph. Everybody was lying in the Soviet system, e-v-e-r-y-b-o-d-y. There was no incentive to tell the truth, and every reason to lie.
It's a significant and well known limitation in the study of the Eastern Front: The Soviet correspondence, all of their records and reports, contain omissions, misrepresentations, distortions and outright lies.
Bronc
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